Only five patients currently in critical care with Covid-19 in Sheffield

In an open letter posted on Sheffield Teaching Hospital’s Facebook page, they revealed that as well as the number of patients in ICU coming down to just single figures, they had also now discharged 1,000 people who had recovered from the disease.

The Facebook post, entitled ‘Moving to the next phase: recovery and reset’, also said they were now discharging more patients than they were admitting with the virus.

It said: “We have now discharged more than 1,000 patients who have recovered from COVID-19 and it is all credit to our amazing staff who 20 weeks on from our first COVID patient are still giving their all to help people who need our care.

“We are delighted to say that we are now discharging more patients than we are admitting to our hospitals with this awful virus and thankfully we are now having days when we do not have any deaths.

“However even one death is still too many and we all wish we could have changed the outcome for those families and friends who have been devastated by the loss of their loved ones. We are also very aware of the impact on our staff who have cared for and treated each one of those individuals, often for a number of weeks, in the hope they might recover.

“Thankfully we are also seeing less critically ill patients now and to put this into context at Easter we had 70 patients in critical care and now we have 5. In total we have cared for just over 1,375 patients since the first person arrived way back in February. This is a phenomenal achievement in terms of treating so many people with a virus that we had not even heard of at Christmas.

“As well as caring for those patients who have the virus our teams have never stopped providing emergency or urgent care to those with other illnesses and conditions like strokes, heart attacks and some cancer care where it was appropriate and safe to do so.”

Editor's message: Thank you for reading this story. The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on our advertisers and thus our revenues. The Star is more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism. You can subscribe here www.thestar.co.uk/subscriptions for unlimited access to Sheffield news and information online. Every subscription helps us continue providing trusted, local journalism and campaign on your behalf for our city.