As omicron spreads, Europe scrambles to shore up health care

By MIKE CORDER
Associated Press

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Nations across Europe are scrambling to prop up health systems strained by staff shortages blamed on the new, highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus. Troops have been deployed to London hospitals. Health care workers infected with COVID-19 are treating patients in France. The Netherlands is under a lockdown, and tented field hospitals have gone up in Sicily. The medical director of Britain’s National Health Service said Friday that the wave of infections crashing over the continent as omicron spreads “means more patients to treat and fewer staff to treat them.” The head of a hospital doctors’ association in Naples, Italy, says, “The situation is critical, much worse than what it appears.”