Hundreds of hospital patients in Manchester currently have Covid. According to the latest data, 423 patients at NHS hospitals across the city had Covid last week.
Two of these patients at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) hospitals required mechanical ventilation to help them breathe. It comes after the trust which runs North Manchester General, Manchester Royal Infirmary and Wythenshawe Hospital faced unprecedented pressure during the pandemic.
However, speaking to councillors last week, group director of strategy Darren Banks said the number of Covid patients in hospital now is comparable to the peak of the pandemic.
He said: "We still have significant numbers of patients in our hospital with Covid and that still impacts on how we are able to treat and the productivity and efficiency that we can provide from our hospitals.
"That remains a challenge. At the peak of the pandemic, there were 450 patients in our hospitals with Covid – that was the absolute peak.
"But in January this year, we still had 430. So it really hasn't gone away even though that might not be the perception when you read newspapers."
Manchester council's health scrutiny committee met last week for an 'extraordinary' meeting to discuss access to NHS services this winter. According to a report presented to the committee on Wednesday (February 22), the number of people in MFT hospitals with Covid reached 433 in January which is approximately 12 pc and equivalent to roughly 12 of the trust's wards.
However, later in the report, it says that Covid patients occupied 18.9 pc of MFT's general hospital beds in January 2023. This is almost three times higher than NHS England's planning assumptions at the start of this financial year.
The official coronavirus dashboard on the government's website says that, as of February 22, there were 423 Covid patients in MFT hospitals. This includes 89 patients who were admitted to the trust's hospital in the last seven days.
The number of patients in mechanical ventilation beds has fallen significantly since the start of the pandemic, however. Peaking at 79 patients on April 21, 2020, as of February 22 there were two patients, according to the dashboard.
According to the report, MFT had more people with Covid in its hospitals than other parts of the country throughout the course of the pandemic. Between April 2020 and February 2022, 11 pc of the NHS trust's occupied beds were taken by Covid patients on average, compared to a national average of 7 pc.
Covid also continues to affect staffing, according to the report. The absence rate at MFT peaked in April 2022 when it reached approximately 15 pc, the report says, but in November 2022, the figure was still 7.3 pc which means there are an additional 450 staff absent compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The NHS trust says that since the start of the pandemic, it has reported Covid patients as those who test positive until they are discharged. However, a new electronic patient record allows a further level of granularity to be reported.
Clinical teams can now detail the point at which the patient is no longer being treated for Covid or subject to appropriate infection prevention and control guidance. In moving to a new, more detailed approach to classifying Covid positive patients, a spokesperson from MFT said it anticipates reporting a lower number of Covid patients occupying beds across the hospitals it runs.
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