The country’s medical director is warning that the NHS in England is busier than ever over winter.

Professor Sir Stephen Powis said rising rates of flu and the vomiting bug norovirus were putting hospitals under huge strain.

Around 95% of beds were full in early December – a rate usually only seen in the depth of winter.

It appears the pressure is also affecting ambulances with two-thirds of staff facing delays in dropping patients off at A&E.

They should be able to hand patients over to hospital staff within 15 minutes of arriving, but 67% of arrivals last week took longer than that.

The average handover time was slightly more than 44 minutes.

Sir Stephen, medical director of NHS England, said: “The NHS is busier than ever as we head into winter, with flu and norovirus numbers in hospital rising rapidly – ​​and we’re still only at the beginning of December, so We expect pressure to increase and we have a long winter ahead of us.

“There have been warnings for some time of a ‘tripledemic’ of Covid, flu and RSV this winter, but with rising cases of norovirus it could rapidly become a ‘quad-demic’.”

Out of more than 100,000 beds, there were an average of about 1,100 flu patients last week – four times more than at this stage last year, marking the first peak of flu this winter.

About 1,400 beds were occupied by Covid patients and 750 beds were occupied by norovirus. Another 142 children were in the hospital with RSV an average of every day.