Sharp rise in virus cases puts pressure on hospitals

The United Kingdom's state-run National Health Service is grappling with a sharp rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations that clearly shows the pandemic "is not over", the government's chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty, has said.

"COVID cases are now rising quite rapidly-from quite a high base-and this is driven by a number of different factors, of which BA.2, the new Omicron variant, is a large part," he said during a speech at the annual conference of the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Public Health. "Rates are high and rising in virtually all parts of England."

Whitty said the sharply rising caseloads of hospitals has put the health service, which is known as the NHS, under "significant" pressure, and he said modelling suggests the number of people ending up in hospital because of COVID-19 is likely to keep rising into April.

The NHS has been working so hard to deal with the pandemic during the past two years, he said, that other areas of public health, including efforts to tackle obesity and alcohol addiction, have taken a back seat. The upshot of that change in emphasis has been that childhood obesity rates are now much worse than they were before the pandemic began, and alcohol abuse has become an increasingly worrying and common problem.

There are currently 16,720 people in hospital in England with COVID-19; the largest number since January.

The Office for National Statistics said in its latest data release that 3.3 million people in the UK had COVID-19 during the week ending March 12, which was significantly more than the 2.6 million people who had it a week earlier.

The increased transmissibility of the BA.2 strain of the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has been cited as one of the main reasons for the spike in infections, but the recent ending of all government restrictions on socializing and testing is also widely acknowledged to have contributed to the worsening situation.

But, the top government adviser, who is also England's chief medical officer, told delegates people waiting for the pandemic to end need to think again, because COVID-19 will likely be around for decades.

The UK marked the second anniversary of the start of its first virus lockdown on Wednesday, with events held across the nation to honor the frontline workers who tackled, and continue to tackle, the disease, and to remember those who lost their lives because of it.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the 164,123 people who had died in the UK from COVID-19 as of Wednesday would "never be out of our hearts and minds".

Commemorative events held to mark the anniversary included a memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral in central London, a minute's silence held throughout the nation at midday, and the shining of lights from the windows of homes in the evening.