the limits of the nhs. sophie hutchinson, bbc news. dr bharat pankhania is a senior clinical lecturer at the university of exeter medical school and says any new restrictions might already too late to prevent the current surge in infections. within reason i feel that the pulse of infections that are going to come our way has already occurred, because people will have been exposed and now they will be incubating it and in the next couple of weeks we ll see that manifest as cases. having said that, prevention is always good and we should nevertheless continue to stop further cases from arising and that would be good infection control measures like wear your mask properly and of course be fully immunised. let s talk a little bit more about where we are at on the time lag between infections occurring and potential hospital admissions, and i say potential although clearly
because of shortages of lfd and pcr tests, so now is the time to act to reduce the rising number of cases if we can do so. the government is trying to factor in other considerations, the economy, allowing people who have been fully vaccinated and so on and gone through that programme of being vaccinated to be able to go out and about and enjoy their life in a relatively normal way, so how do you balance these two things? you are coming from the scientific, the medical point of view. the government is looking at that plus many other perspectives. it s a difficult one to get the balance right, isn t it? whilst it appears difficult, i always feel economy and health go together, and we can make it work, but together. so what we have to do is wherever possible allow the infection control
which is likely to test the limits of the nhs. sophie hutchinson, bbc news. dr bharat pankhania is a senior clinical lecturer at university of exeter medical school, and says any new restrictions might already too late to prevent the current surge in infections growing further. within reason, ifeel that the pulse of infections that are going to come our way has already occurred, because people will have been exposed and now they will be incubating it and in the next couple of weeks, we ll see that manifest as cases. having said that, prevention is always good and we should nevertheless continue to stop further cases from arising and that would be good infection control measures like wear your mask properly and, of course, be fully immunised. let s talk a little bit more about where we are at on the time lag between infections occurring and potential hospital admissions,
hospital admissions are fluttering and falling in some areas. what these figures show is that on the 18th of january, out of patients in hospital in england, half were being primarily treated for covid, and others being treated with covid, so primarily with something else. the incidentalfigure has been steadily rising, it was about quarter of 8% in the autumn, it has been rising nearly half. it s important to point out they might be going on for other reasons, notjust a broken leg, they could be being treated for a stroke or cancer, and covid might be complicating that. it also means you have to put in extra infection control measures, so people with covid still have to be isolated on other wards, and that causes pressure and difficulties within the nhs. also, with staff absence, those rates have been falling. so now