The number of patients with Covid at Kent's under-pressure hospitals has more than doubled since the start of last month.

Sites across the county are treating 225 people with the virus amid an unprecedented A&E crisis that has seen one trust forced to declare a critical incident.

That figure is 145% higher than the 92 infected patients recorded in the county on December 1.

While most are not in hospital because of Covid, the extra effort required to keep those with the virus isolated is piling more pressure on already stretched hospital teams.

KentOnline recently revealed how more than 1,300 people attending the county's A&E departments in November were left waiting 12 hours or more for a bed.

Such was the scale of the pressure, Medway Maritime Hospital had to declare a critical incident to protect its most vulnerable patients.

The Gillingham site had just six Covid patients on December 1, but this figure has since risen five-fold.

On the other side of the county, East Kent Hospitals has seen the number of infected patients more than treble, from 22 to 77.

Kent's two other trusts have also recorded increases - Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells from 22 to 50, and Dartford and Gravesham from 42 to 67.

The “twindemic” of Covid infections and rising flu admissions is putting pressure on the UK’s under-pressure NHS this winter.

But the biggest issue facing hospital trusts is the significant delays in discharging patients to suitable settings, leading to beds becoming blocked and patients left waiting in corridors to be admitted.

An average of 44% of ambulances waited at least half an hour because of delays in handing patients over to hospital staff in the week ending January 1, according to data from NHS England.

The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine says the current A&E crisis is much worse than ever before.

Dr Adrian Boyle, who attended Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s emergency talks with health leaders on Saturday, told the Sophy Ridge On Sunday programme on Sky News: “Every winter we seem to go through this thing where there is another A&E crisis.

“It’s important to recognise that what is going on at the moment is much worse.

“The visible markers are ambulances waiting outside hospitals, but that is only a visible marker of the whole system being under stress.

“What we are seeing is that if you go into emergency departments you will see people being looked after in inappropriate areas and long waits to be admitted.

“If you go into the wards, they are full. Fundamentally, the big problem we have got is that we don’t have enough beds. Our hospitals are too full for us to do the jobs we need them to do.”

Dr Boyle said emergency care performance has been deteriorating due wider staffing issues within the NHS, lack of beds and capacity, and lack of social care – all problems he said are due to under-resourcing.

He also suggested that changes can be made once there is the political will for improvements.

Dr Boyle said the problems behind the crisis go back “way longer” than the pandemic, which has additionally loaded “a lot of disruption on to hospitals”.

He told the programme: “If you go back before 2015, we did not have problems with ambulance handover delays. We did not have very often people spending more than 12 hours in emergency departments.

“Fundamentally, the big problem is that our hospitals are just too full.”