In our hospitals, the bedOccupancy is 94%, even before Omicron admissions start to rise.
I haven't seen an empty bed in my house in a while. Our bedOccupancy has been around 100% for a few weeks.
There is nothing unusual about this. Our bed provision is too small due to decades of A&E closings and rising healthcare demands from an elderly and growing population. Critical bed crises are a common problem in the winter, with operations often being canceled and patient care compromised as a result. The system has been gutted to the point that there is not enough capacity to deal with fluctuations in demand.
This is not a normal winter. The Omicron variant is spreading quickly and is frightening to me, even after I have seen it and done it over the past months.
The evidence is all around me and I don't need to look at the figures to know it. Friends and family have begun to test positive and have to be isolated. There are many cases in schools. Football matches are being called off. Many colleagues are unable to attend work, leaving gaps in the work schedule.
The worst of it is yet to come.
It looks like we will have tens of thousands of infections within our area by the middle of next week. The biggest unknown is here.
Is this variant less dangerous than its predecessors? Will our vaccines be enough to keep people out of the hospital? Even with a low rate of hospitalisations, it still looks like there will be too many patients for us to look after.
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More than 10,000 Omicron cases have been reported in the UK.
There are more than 10,000 cases reported across the UK.
A small portion of a large number is still a large number. The potential point of maximum pressure comes around Christmas and New Year, when many of us were hoping, finally, to take a few days off, because there is a lag of a week or two between infection rates rising and people becoming unwell enough to present to hospital.
There are other pressures working against us. The routine care that the GP offer is being scaled back. Consultants can join in the jabbing if the hospitals cancel the elective care.
The current heroic effort may not be enough to protect against the new variant's power to evade the vaccine. Even relatively well patients coming into the hospital could overwhelm us.
The reduction in usual care is likely to result in more patients in hospitals.
The new treatments for Covid are designed to stop the disease from progressing and reduce the need for hospitalisations for patients who are vulnerable.
The first centre went live this week, using staff redeployed from other work. The problem is that the numbers were calculated from the Delta variant. Within the first 24 hours of opening, it became clear that the numbers identified for treatment already exceeded capacity fivefold.
How much will these be able to hold back the tide?
I am grudgingly admiring the Covid-19 virus, which is still managing to confound us even 20 months after it was first introduced. It is a fearsome opponent.
We seem to be underestimating it yet again. Why don't we learn from our mistakes?
Even though Omicron is not yet known, the potential threat it poses to a healthcare system already strained beyond capacity is obvious.
It's a good idea to take some precautions to try to hold back the spread, to buy us time to get a vaccine, and to make sure we're prepared to give all the therapies at our disposal.
Plan B won't make a difference to the strain. These measures take time to work.
It will be too late when hospitalisations start to rise. It would be better to make the mistake of introducing early restrictions unnecessarily than it would be to not do so.
Boris Johnson knows the pressures on everyone in the health service. Does he really do that? Is he aware of the exhaustion, burnout and low morale that I see and feel every day? We are talking about what this winter holds in store, and I am afraid that my colleagues and I will be the same person. How does it feel to be facing another wave?
We sit on the fence, pretending we can get out of this and still live a normal life. The talk of shielding the health service is hollow.
While we have been working on keeping people safe, it seems that in Downing Street they had time to have after-hours gatherings. How nice.
It's hard to put into words how hypocritical and shameful this is.
We sign up to a duty of candour that we all owe to our patients, whereby if we make a mistake, we have to apologize and make up for it. The most junior medical student knows about it. It seems too basic for some people to be concerned with.
Over the past year, we have achieved a lot in the health service. We are being asked to make another extraordinary effort by leaders who are too afraid to admit that they are above such things.
Will it be enough without measures to protect us?
A respiratory consultant works in a number of hospitals.
