Flu hit hospitals in England even harder last week, as a ‘tidal wave’ of infections led to a 70% increase in hospital cases across just 7 days.
The NHS is encouraging eligible people to get vaccinated without delay if they haven’t done so already to avoid “festive flu” with an average of 1,861 patients with flu in hospital every day last week – up from 1,099 in the previous week and a staggering 3.5 times higher compared to the same time last year.
Norovirus and RSV are also on the rise – norovirus cases are up by 10% from last week and almost two thirds since (64%) last year and 152 children were in hospital with RSV each day, up by over two fifths on the same period last year (107 week ending 10 December 2023).
The “tidal wave” of seasonal illnesses is prompting further “quad-demic” concerns across the NHS with staff pulling out the stops to deliver almost 28 million vaccines so far in convenient places like Christmas markets, football clubs, and supermarkets.
Separate monthly performance data, also published today, shows just how hard NHS staff have been working to deliver care to patients with record numbers of elective treatments and tests and checks in October – showing signs of further improvement in NHS productivity.
Despite busier urgent care services going into winter, the waiting list fell from 7.57 million to 7.54 million with staff delivering a record 1.67 million treatments in a month, up 6% on the same month before the pandemic (1.57 million in October 2019). The estimated number of patients waiting in October was 6.34 million.
The number of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks (3.1 million) is the lowest since June 2023, while the number of waits longer than a year (234,885) is now the lowest since December 2020 and down 46% on the peak of 436,127 in March 2021.
Date: 16 December