UK patients' waiting times hit record high in January amid COVID pandemic peak

LONDON -- The number of people waiting for medical treatment in England reached a record high in January during the country's second COVID peak, official figures showed Thursday.

Figures from National Health Service (NHS) England showed that 4.59 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of January, the highest number since records began in August 2007.

The number of patients waiting more than 52 weeks to start hospital treatment stood at 304,044 in the same month, the highest number for any calendar month since January 2008, the data showed.

With lockdown in force and many hospitals dealing with record numbers of COVID patients, January also saw a 54 percent drop in people admitted for routine treatment.

Despite battling the January peak, when more than 100,000 people needed COVID hospital treatment, NHS England said staff still managed to care for 1.3 million people without the virus.

That's a significant rise on the 847,000 treated during the peak of the first wave in April 2020.

"Admitting more than 100,000 COVID patients to hospital in a single month inevitably had a knock-on effect on some non-urgent care," Stephen Powis, the national medical director for NHS England, told The Guardian newspaper.

"However, thanks to the hard work of NHS staff and the innovations in treatment and care developed over the course of the pandemic, hospitals treated more than 1 million people with other conditions in January, at the peak of the winter wave, nearly twice as many as they did last April," he said.

"That is a testament to the skill, dedication and commitment nurses, doctors, therapists and countless other staff showed in the most challenging period in NHS history," he added.

More than 23 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest official figures.

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has confirmed that the government is "on course" to offering a first vaccine dose to all adults by the end of July.

To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines.