The waiting room at the Royal London, in the East End's Whitechapel, is normally busy with 500 patients walking in to see a doctor, but due to the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown that was ordered by the government, the hospital is deserted for the first time in years.
Not a chair is filled and not one vending machine in sight, and the usual queue at the reception desk is non-existent. A medic took a picture of the deserted hospital and stated that the image was worrying. She said that this is happening because people are scared to go to the hospital and people are staying at home even if they have serious illnesses. If this continues, it will cost lives.
Coronavirus fear
Health Secretary Matt Hancock urged non-coronavirus patients that need urgent care to seek help immediately and the NHS is ready to help. Hancock was speaking in the House of Commons after doctors and medical charities warned of a hidden health crisis among non-coronavirus patients who could die.
The public is avoiding accident and emergency departments because of their fear of the virus and because they do not want to overburden the NHS. The number of people going to the hospital with suspected heart attacks has halved since March, from 300 to 150 a day.
As many as 5,000 people normally expected in the same period have not turned up. The Cancer Research UK has warned that 2,700 cancer a week are currently going undiagnosed. Additionally, ambulance emergency response times are their worst on record, as heart attack victims had to wait two hours on average, and because of this, there were fatal consequences.
On top of this, a lot of people who are seriously ill and awaiting life-saving operations or treatment are being turned away by doctors who fear their patients may catch the virus on the wards of hospitals. Even organ transplants have fallen dramatically as last spring more than 80 a week were carried out.
The collateral damage of COVID-19
Since the pandemic, only a handful of the most urgent heart and liver cases are being operated on weekly, as surgeons are hesitant to put patients in intensive care units close to highly-infectious coronavirus patients.
The result of this is that across the UK, there is a dramatic increase in deaths fro illnesses other than the virus. And since there are a lot of people who are not being diagnosed with serious ailments, there will be a lot more in the future.
The Office for National Statistics last week revealed that deaths in England and Wales in the week to April 10 were the highest for 20 years, and much of this was because of the coronavirus. Almost 1,800 of these additional fatalities were not caused by it. Doctors have described the phenomenon as the collateral damage of COVID-19.
An emergency nurse stated that the staff of the hospital is waiting in vain for patients. Health experts are worried that the relationship of trust between the public and the health service is being broken. Although a lot of people are diagnosed with COVID-19 and are in the hospitals because if it, a lot of others may lose their lives even though they are not diagnosed with COVID-19, only because they are hesitant to go to the hospital.
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