Credit: Reuters
London could run out of intensive care beds in four days with the whole of the country using them up in two weeks.
One nurse says that staff is already allowing weaker patients to die in a bid to save others from the coronavirus outbreak.
Staff at the Northwick Park hospital in Harrow told The Daily Telegraph that doctors are rationing care to those most likely to survive.
The senior nurse said that shortages are forcing staff to make decisions about people's care and medical workers have built a new six-bed car ward because the site has run out of space.
'We’re already in an Italy situation where the doctors are deciding who should be put on the ventilators, and who should not,' the nurse said. 'Most of the people who passed away have been elderly with various comorbidities, but we also have younger people struggling to breathe, and they will sometimes get the ventilators first.'
The nurse also said that there aren't enough people to operate machines and that even staff with flulike symptoms are coming in because there's nobody else to care for the patients of the Covid-19 crisis.
It comes after a University of Cambridge study assessed how different regions of England are coping and modeled how their level of ICU units will cope with the imminent influx of COVID-19 patients.
Researchers claim five out of seven commissioning regions in England will have more critically ill COVID-19 patients than they can treat within two weeks.
All of England — except for the North East and Yorkshire and the North West — will run out of ICU beds in two weeks' time, the study predicts.
London is the most severely affected and ICU beds are expected to run out in the capital before anywhere else in the country.
According to the latest figures, England has recorded 390 deaths, with the UK total today hitting 422.
More than 8,000 cases have now been confirmed and the UK's death toll has risen almost six-fold in the space of a week, with just 71 fatalities recorded last Tuesday.
The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, where it is scrutinized by other academics, but has been released online to help inform clinical practitioners.
Intensive care beds are needed to treat people exhibiting severe symptoms of the novel coronavirus and require around the clock care and are reliant on a ventilator.
The damning prediction comes as a study claims ICU nurses are spread thin as the coronavirus burden on the NHS increases.
The healthcare professionals are having to look after six patients each, as opposed to the normal 1:1 care administered in the specialist units.
'If mechanical ventilation cannot be provided to patients who need it, they will die,' says Dr. Ari Ercole from the Division of Anaesthesia at the University of Cambridge.
'ICU capacity is a crucial concern as additional capacity takes time to create both in terms of staffing and equipment.'
The team took data on cases of coronavirus provided by Public Health England and compared it with patterns of epidemiological spread in Italy.
Italy is now considered the epicenter of the pandemic as it has had the most deaths of anywhere in the world.
More people have died in Italy than in China, despite having fewer cases.
Doctors say this is because the spike in cases rapidly overwhelmed the healthcare system and made it impossible to administer suitable care to all.
After creating a complex computer model to predict the spread of the disease in England, it was revealed that by April 6, all regions will have full intensive care units, except for the North East and Yorkshire as well as the North West.
And by this date, these two regions will be seeing bed occupancy rates of around 90 and 80 percent, respectively.
'If our assumptions are correct, ICU capacity may be completely overwhelmed very quickly in England,' added Dr. Ercole, who is also a Fellow in Clinical Medicine at Magdalene College.
'A large increase in ICU capacity is required extremely urgently if we are to be able to treat patients with life-threatening COVID-19 in the near future.'
The predictions were posted online alongside the model and the paper but the academics acknowledge the model makes a number of assumptions and may not be entirely accurate, but is based on the best data available at the time of publication.
Dr. Ari Ercole told MailOnline these predictions had been made before Boris Johnson's address to the nation introducing effective lockdown and strict restrictions on movement.
However, in the paper, the researchers write that expanding intensive care capacity in the country is extremely difficult due to the complexity of the machines.
Dr. Ecole said: '[The study] doesn't take into account the capacity that the government believes possible with its proposed measures.
'However, if our numbers are correct it does suggest that those measures need to be implemented and realized very urgently and this will be a substantial challenge.'
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By JOE PINKSTONE FOR MAILONLINE
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