Covid: England and Scotland record further 157,758 cases as pressure grows on NHS
Scotland logs new record of 20,217 infections
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Your support makes all the difference.The UK has reported a further 157,758 Covid cases in the past 24 hour period, government figures show as Omicron sweeps through the country.
Some 137,541 of those infections were logged in England and 20,217 in Scotland, a new record high. No data was available for Wales or Northern Ireland.
The latest official figures come after Boris Johnson ruled out further restrictions, saying England would continue with plan B rules despite growing pressure on the NHS.
Speaking on a visit to a vaccination centre in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, the prime minister accepted that hospitals would come under "considerable" pressure in the coming days.
But he insisted that plan B measures, which include wearing face masks in some settings and guidance to work from home, were the right way forward.
Mr Johnson pledged to "make sure that we look after our NHS any way that we can" as a critical incident was declared at a hospital trust in Lincolnshire.
He warned "there's no question Omicron continues to surge through the country" and added: "I think we've got to recognise that the pressure on our NHS, on our hospitals, is going to be considerable in the course of the next couple of weeks, and maybe more."
The PM said he appreciated the strain NHS staff were under, and that it was "vital that we make sure that we help them by trying to contain the pandemic" by getting vaccinated and following plan B measures.
He warned it would be "absolute folly to say that this thing is all over now bar the shouting".
Monday's data also showed that a further 42 people had died in England within 28 days of testing positive for Covid.
Separate figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there have now been 174,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate.
According to the latest available data, some 51,800,798 people in the UK have one dose of a vaccine and 47,451,922 a second.
Meanwhile, a total of 34,205,472 Britons have received their booster vaccine.
As of 27 December, the last date on which information is available, there were 11,918 patients with Covid in hospitals across the UK. Just under 2,000 of those were admitted on 27 December, the data says.
Earlier, NHS bosses warned that parts of the health service were in a "state of crisis" due to staff absence.
Hospitals wards also continue to fill up with Covid patients in several regions across the UK.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said some hospitals were having to declare "a critical incident".
His comments came after United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which includes four hospitals, declared a critical incident due to staff being struck down by Covid.
"Some hospitals are making urgent calls to exhausted staff to give up rest days and leave to enable them to sustain core services," Mr Taylor wrote in a blog published on Monday.
He added that many hospitals had been forced to ban visitors to reduce the spread of infection, while "NHS England is continuing to plan for surge capacity".
"Community and social care services, which were already massively overstretched, are at breaking point.
"In many areas, ambulance services are unable to meet their target response times," he added.
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