Covid-19: UK calls in military to cover hospital staff shortage

The Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom said on Friday (7) that the deployment of military personnel to support hospitals that are suffering from a shortage of staff and extreme pressure due to record cases of Covid-19 in the country has begun.

The government said 200 members of the Armed Forces were made available to support the National Health Service (NHS) in London over the next three weeks.

The UK is experiencing an outbreak of coronavirus cases due to the Ômicron variant, and has reported over 150,000 new cases each day over the past week.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain could withstand the outbreak without further restrictions thanks to vaccination and the strain’s lesser severity, but warned of some challenging weeks.

The government also deployed the Armed Forces to assist with Covid-19’s testing and vaccination programs.

“Once again they are stepping up to help NHS workers who are working 24 hours a day across the capital, helping the health service in this difficult winter period, where the need is greatest,” said the Minister of Health, Sajid Javid.

The UK reported nearly 150,000 deaths from Covid-19, and two years after the pandemic, its state health service was already facing a staffing crisis even before the recent Ômicron outbreak, according to a parliamentary report published on Thursday (6). .

Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the Board of the British Medical Association, said there were unprecedented levels of NHS staff shortages.

“Although the government turned to the Army for help in London, let us not forget that we have a national problem at the moment,” Nagpaul told Sky News. “This is a national problem and we’ve never seen this level of understaffing before.”