British hospitals, particularly in London, are struggling to maintain staffing levels due to the number who are having to isolate with COVID-19, a senior emergency doctor said on Thursday.
With a new highly transmissible Omicron variant of the virus surging, Britain on Wednesday recorded its highest number of daily coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, with a further 78,610 COVID-19 infections reported.
"The acute problem is actually to do with staffing," Katherine Henderson, an emergency consultant in London and President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told BBC Radio.
"Even if we are not seeing a big rise in hospitalisations yet, we are already seeing the effect on not having the staff to run shifts properly and safely. So we are worried about patient harm coming about because we just don’t have the staff."
Henderson said London was particularly hard hit.
"We are looking at probably about 10 per cent staff, that is doctors and nurses, who are having to be off."
Israeli troops and tanks pushed on Saturday into parts of a congested northern Gaza Strip district that they had previously skirted in the more than seven-month-old war, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, medics and residents said.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is no longer in immediate danger but still in a serious condition, his deputy said on Sunday, four days after an assassination attempt that sent shockwaves through Europe.
At least 47 people have died after continued heavy rain and flooding in northern Afghanistan, an official said on Sunday, a day after a similar number were killed in a central province.
Russian airstrikes killed at least ten people and injured many others in a recreation area just outside Ukraine's northeastern city of Kharkiv on Sunday, local officials said.