This is how many coronavirus patients are in York Hospital right now

Coronavirus admissions to York Hospital are expected to peak within the next week, a meeting was told last night (Wednesday).

And that means some planned operations will be postponed to enable staff to free up capacity, said Lucy Brown, director of communications at York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

She told a meeting of the City of York Outbreak Management Advisory Board: “We currently have 71 patients in York Hospital that have tested positive for coronavirus.

“The number of admissions we’ve seen in both York Hospital and also Scarborough Hospital, which is part of the trust, has been increasing.

“It is positive to see that the cases and the positive tests in the community are going down but as we’ve discussed before, there is a lag before you start too see hospital admissions.

“And we have seen those increasing in recent weeks.”

She said the trust was anticipating that Covid-19 admissions would start to peak in the next week or so.

They had ‘comprehensive plans’ to manage that surge, which included releasing more beds for Covid patients.

Surgery postponed

That is bad news for some people waiting for surgery.

“We’ll need to postpone some planned operations to manage this peak in admissions,” Lucy told the meeting.

“It’s important to stress this isn’t a wholesale cancellation of all planned work.”

For the first wave of Covid-19 in March, the whole of the NHS was instructed to pause all of its planned work to prepare for an influx of coronavirus patients.

But this time they were planning to “protecting as much of our cancer and urgent work as we possibly can”.