BRADFORD could require 30 times more intensive care beds than it normally has to look after people suffering from coronavirus.

The figure was revealed in a Radio 4 programme ‘The NHS Frontline’, which followed Professor John Wright, who is helping the Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI) prepare for the pandemic.

Through a series of recordings, the first on March 16 - the day Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave his first televised address about the danger of Covid-19 - Professor Wright paints a stark picture of what may come.

In one conversation with Tom Lawson, a consultant in critical care and anaesthesia, Prof Wright, public health doctor and Director of the Bradford Institute of Health Research at the BRI, asks him: “Did you see the report from Imperial about the latest estimates for what the impact is going to be.”

His reply lays bare the stark forecast of what the hospital might face.

“Yes, it’s interesting that it sort of chimes very much with some of the calculations we were doing.

“They’re estimating that in Bradford we would have peak need for approximately 500 ICU beds.

“This is on a background of 16. The numbers that we were working on a while ago, I’d suggested that at the low end we’d be looking at 150 and at the high end, 1,000.

“Obviously it depended very much on what the Government decided to do in terms of mitigations. So, we’ve been working to see if we can get that 16 anywhere near even the low end of those numbers.”

A reconfiguration of the hospital has taken place, with the creation of special Covid-19 wards.

Prof Wright explains: “Hospitals in the time of an epidemic need full blown isolation wards.

“One of the lessons from the hospitals in Wuhan was how much the virus contaminated the whole ward from furniture surfaces through to soap dispensers. So we need to start treating our Covid wards as red zones of infection and get all the staff acting accordingly.

“As well as expanding our ICU capacity, we’ve identified the first two Covid wards – ward seven and ward 31, but we’re also still dealing with the end of winter, dealing with acute medical patients who are being admitted with lung and heart disease.

“Exactly the sort of patients who are going to be at high risk from Covid, so we need to protect these patients, but we also need to protect the staff.”