LONDON — The weekly clapping in support of health workers by Britons during the first part of the pandemic has petered out. The government has mostly stopped asking people to stay home and avoid the virus to keep the National Health Service from being overwhelmed. Campaigns to feed and house exhausted health workers have dwindled.
When the coronavirus first hit Britain in the spring, the National Health Service ordered hospitals to empty beds and stop elective procedures. Heeding government appeals, many people stayed away by choice. The situation is hardly better elsewhere in Europe. Belgian hospitals are so overwhelmed that officials asked doctors infected with the coronavirus to work if they were not showing symptoms. Dutch hospitals have begun airlifting patients to intensive care units in Germany, the first such transfers since spring.
Making matters worse, hospitals are already treating the usual wintertime stream of flus and other illnesses that, even in a normal year, can push bed occupancy rates past 95%. Those difficulties became more pronounced after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party came to power in 2010, and the health service’s annual budget increases were trimmed, leading to longer waiting times in hospitals and more overstretched staff.
“The first time around, it’s almost like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of medical challenge,” said Paul Whitaker, a respiratory doctor in Bradford, in northern England, where the number of coronavirus patients has returned to its early May peak.
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