Patients with the Omicron variant of Covid have been admitted to Nottinghamshire’s hospitals.
Health officials annoucned the news as the NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) made a call to the public to book their booster jabs on the run up to New Year.
At a media briefing on Friday, 17 December Public Health and NHS bosses announced three new walk-in vaccination sites will being set up to deliver more booster jabs.
Targets to deliver up to 1,000 jabs a day from the new sites have been set by the local NHS.
It is believed the booster jab is the best defence against the new variant, which was first detected in South Africa and is sweeping across the country.
Amanda Sullivan, from the CCG, said there is still “a relatively high” number of patients battling Coronavirus in hospitals including at the City Hospital and Queen’s Medical Centre.
A small number of them have the new variant, she said.
From December 14, a total of 176 hospital beds were occupied by Covid patients – 24 of which were in critical care.
She said Omicron will rapidly become “the variant that is causing people to go into hospital”.
However, true figures are difficult to understand, because it takes time to go through full identification of the variant, she added.
“But we do believe we have got a small number in our hospital, similar to other areas,” she said.
She added: “The NHS is responding with a huge drive to vaccinate the public over the next few weeks. This is a heroic effort by NHS staff and partners.
“Our existing sites have significantly extended their opening times and the amount of people that can go through. Overall, we have tripled our capacity to do jabs until the end of the year.
“We are opening three new walk-in vaccine sites – open from Monday. They will add to the more than 50 vaccination sites we currently have.
“The new sites will administrator up to 1,000 vaccines per day and will go live from 1pm until 5pm and operate 7 days a week, 9am to 5pm.
“Those new sites are the Richard Herrod Leisure Centre (Carlton), the Victoria Health Centre (Nottingham) and the Newark Showground.
• Covid UPDATE: 51,000 booster appointments available in Nottingham and Notts before end of December
“In addition to that over 51,000 additional bookable appointments have gone live up to New Year’s Eve and more slots are being added each day.”
She said support from the military to administrate jabs has also been welcomed.
“There is plenty of capacity and appointments we just need people to come forward and get protected. It will be our best defence this winter.”
