Covid-19 hospital admissions rising quickly as Northants cases soar

The number of Covid-19 patients being admitted to Northamptonshire hospitals is rising fast, leading health bosses to warn other services could come under threat if covid admissions continue to rise.

There are now 38 patients being treated for at the Kettering and Northampton general hospitals, which is more then treble the number reported at the end of September.

At a covid oversight this morning (Oct 22) the boss of the Northamptonshire Clinical Commissioning group Toby Sanders said the increase was a ‘cause for concern’ and appealed to Northants residents to adhere to social distancing and covid hygiene practices to stop the spread of virus further.

Positive case numbers have been increasingly rapidly in Northants in recent days with 178 new cases reported in the county on Wednesday. There have also sadly been a growing number of deaths at the two hospitals, with three people dying of Covid-19 at Northampton General on October 13 and two covid related deaths at Kettering General since October 7.

He said: “As of yesterday we had 38 patients across our two hospitals that were covid positive and a number of other query covid patients.

“And whilst that number sounds small and as a relative proportion of our hospital bed base it remains thankfully still relatively small, two things are important for us all to note.

First is the rate at which that has been increasing over recent weeks so in direct response and a couple of weeks from those larger numbers going up from a community perspective we have seen the numbers stepping up quite significantly and doubling and trebling.

“So over the course of August we were typically seeing single figure numbers across the two acute hospitals, so the rate that stepped up to the 38 number yeterday is a cause for concern from an NHS perspective.

And that’s not that we don’t have the capacity at the moment to be able to cope and support our patients – the real risk at the moment for the NHS locally is that as those numbers start to increase we run the risk of starting to have to reduce other services that we have been working really hard with our staff over the summer to get back in place so lots of other non-covid related services, elective treatments, day case work, diagnosis, outpatient work – really critical to people’s health and wellbeing, that we want to be able to continue to support and provide, it is that balance as we go into autumn and winter.”

Mr Sanders urged people to listen to the director of public health and practice covid hygiene safety so that the local NHS can ‘keep other services running for as long as we can through autumn and winter.’