HEALTH workers said they were “alarmed and bewildered” by the Tory government’s inaction today as new data revealed that Covid-related absences among hospital staff almost doubled in England last month.

A staggering total of 24,632 staff at NHS hospital trusts were ill with coronavirus or had to self-isolate on Boxing Day, up 31 per cent from 18,829 a week earlier and nearly double the total of 12,508 at the start of the month, according to NHS England.

England’s health service also confirmed that it had recorded the highest daily number of Covid-19 hospital admissions since last January — a total 2,370 on December 29 alone, up by 90 per cent week-on-week.

A total of 12,395 people were in hospital with Covid-19 as of yesterday morning, it said, which is the highest number since February 25 and up 68 per cent from a week earlier.

Office for National Statistics data meanwhile revealed that an estimated 2.3 million people across the UK had the virus in the week before Christmas.

This represented a major increase from 1.4 million in the week to December 16 and was the highest number recorded since comparable figures began in autumn 2020.

The government later confirmed that a further 189,846 lab-confirmed Covid-19 cases had been recorded in the UK as of 9am yesterday — another new record for daily reported cases. 

The worrying data came as the government continued to forgo measures beyond Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “Plan B.”

Nightclubs in Scotland and Wales were closed to New Year’s Eve party-goers, however, after the devolved nations tightened restrictions in response Covid-19’s omicron variant.

NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor warned that the health service was facing a “perfect storm” of rising virus hospital admissions and increased staff sickness without any new measures in England.

“The NHS is putting in plans to step up once again for patients with the new Nightingale surge hubs, extra support from community services and virtual wards, but there is no doubt the whole system is running hot,” he said.

“While the government seems determined not to increase restrictions in England, it is vital we all behave in ways that will not exacerbate an already dangerous situation.”

Helga Pile, deputy head of health for trade union Unison, told the Morning Star that health staff were “alarmed and bewildered at the government’s failure to act.

“Ministers are sitting back and watching as the NHS is engulfed by successive waves of new patients, while staffing levels plummet.

“Unless ministers take swift, decisive measures to push back the spread, the damage to patient care and the morale of exhausted staff will take years to repair.”

The calls came as experts warned that the NHS could be overwhelmed by omicron patients in the coming weeks.

Professor Peter Openshaw, who sits on the government’s new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group, told BBC Breakfast that the threshold for a dangerously high level of hospital admissions “will be reached quite quickly.

“What I’m very concerned about is our NHS staff, my dear colleagues who have worked so, so hard. How are they going to cope?”

Professor James Chalmers, a consultant respiratory physician at Dundee University, said that omicron was likely to cause a “substantial wave of hospitalisations” over the next two months.

The fact that the variant seemed to result in milder illness would be cancelled out by the sheer volume of cases, he told BBC Radio Scotland.