ROYAL Berkshire Hospital has not seen a significant increase in Covid-19 cases over the last two months and staff are coping well with the current demand.

That's the message from Dom Hardy, chief operating officer at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who said: “I definitely expect us to cope”.

He added: “At the moment, we’re not seeing that real increase in cases and hospital admissions that we saw in the first stage of the pandemic.

“We had 10 days in the first half of September when we had absolutely no Covid-positive inpatients at all.

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“Then on September 14, we had our first second-wave Covid patient and we’ve seen the numbers very gradually increase over the subsequent two months.

“That increase has been nothing like the extremely rapid peak that we saw from very late March into the first two weeks of April.”

He also said staff are managing well “at the moment” but contingency plans are in place.

When the national lockdown ends on December 2, England is expected to return to the three-tier local lockdown system.

Areas will not be considered for medium alert (Tier 1) restrictions if their local hospital is overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients.

The latest NHS figures show that on November 5 – when the national lockdown began – 65 beds at Royal Berkshire Hospital were occupied with Covid-19 patients.

On that day, just one of the trust’s mechanical ventilation beds was occupied by a patient with the virus.

Between March 19 and November 4, 132 people were admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 and 745 inpatients were diagnosed with the virus after admission.

The trust has discharged more than 500 patients after treating them for the virus but also recorded 246 Covid-19 related deaths.

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A backlog of patients requiring treatment for medical conditions not related to Covid-19 has built up during the pandemic.

Mr Hardy said around 1,200 people have been waiting over a year for treatment, but he expects that backlog to be “largely eliminated” by April or May in 2021.

He added: “Where patients have urgent need, such as those who have unfortunately been diagnosed with cancer, we do expedite their treatment.

“In no way do those urgent patients wait anywhere near that long.”

His comments came at a meeting of Wokingham Borough Council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee on November 18.