• Health workers at King’s College hospital fear a surge in admissions as the Omicron wave gathers force.
On the third floor of one of the country’s biggest hospital trusts, a team of intensive care specialists in masks and visors huddle around a screened bay where a critically ill patient lies unconscious surrounded by cables and tubes.
The elderly man’s breathing is supported by a ventilator and he is connected to an arterial line to measure blood pressure. He is fed by a gastric tube, and a nearby stack of six monitors provide updates on his condition, from oxygen levels to heart rate.
He is one of 14 Covid patients on a critical care ward which is at capacity this weekend. He is receiving some of the best medical care in the world, but his concerned medical team know the long-term prognosis for this patient at the unit in King’s College hospital in south London, and many like him, is uncertain.
Staff who spoke to the Observer during a visit to the Covid wards said most of these dangerously ill patients recently admitted to critical beds were unvaccinated.
Medical teams at King’s are now bracing themselves for a new influx of patients infected by the rapidly spreading Omicron variant. They are urging people to get their jabs.
Doctors and nurses say they are deeply concerned at the number of seriously ill patients being transferred to critical care beds who are still unvaccinated.
Michael Bartley, a critical care matron at King’s, estimated that “80 to 90%” in the hospital’s critical care beds were unvaccinated.
He said: “We are not here to judge patients – we are here to look after them – but this can be a scary place. If the patient is too unwell, we will take over their breathing, intubating and ventilating them.
“The disease can affect all the organs of the body, and the long-term effects can be devastating. We have a number of patients who have been with us for more than 100 days. The age of those who are unvaccinated is about 35 to 65. The message is ‘please get your vaccines’.”
Dr Laura-Jane Smith, a respiratory consultant who works on a Covid ward at King’s, said on Friday: “I have seen four new patients admitted to the ward this morning aged between 40 and 90. They are all unvaccinated.
“What we are seeing at the moment is patients who are going to general wards for maybe 24 to 48 hours and are then able to go home. We genotype all of our samples and we are certainly seeing some genotyping highly suggestive of Omicron.”
There may be multiple factors involved in this decreased severity: these include the impact of vaccines, better drug treatments and the possible lesser severity of Omicron.