BRITAIN could see 600,000 omicron cases a day, overwhelming the country’s already stretched testing capabilities, experts have warned.

Sage member Professor Andrew Hayward told BBC Breakfast today: “If you think about getting a year’s worth of rain over a month, then you’re going to get flooding and potentially severe flooding no matter how much you’ve shored up your defences.

“And that’s the concern here. That the huge wave is going to cause lots of people to be off work, having to isolate, which is going to cause disruption, and it’s going to spill over into people going into hospital.

“The rate at which it spills over is uncertain because we don’t know exactly how severe it is yet. We’ve no particular reason to think it’s less severe than previous strains.”

Prof Hayward said he expected to find out how many will end up in hospital from the omicron variant around Christmas or ahead of the new year.

He said that Britain’s ability to count the growing rates through the testing system is what will make the biggest difference, which he said was currently maxed out at around 600,000 tests a day.

“We’re soon going to exceed that number just in cases alone, so counting the cases is going to become hard,” he added.

According to the latest Test and Trace figures, 88,376 Covid-19 cases were recorded in Britain this morning — the highest daily total recorded since the pandemic began and almost 10,000 more than the previous record set on Wednesday.

And just 60.4 per cent of in-person PCR test results in England were received within the 24-hour target.

England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty said the omicron wave sweeping Britain would “peak quite fast” and that thousands could be admitted to hospital on a single day.

He warned that even if boosters do hold back omicron to a large extent, a lot of people across the country will still “simultaneously fall ill.”

It comes as new A&E figures in England revealed that more than a quarter of patients brought to hospital in an ambulance are facing dangerous delays getting emergency care.

More than 8,400 patients waited over an hour to be handed over from ambulance teams to A&E staff at hospitals last week.

A further 11,102 patients waited between 30 and 60 minutes to be handed over.

Royal College of Emergency Medicine vice-president Dr Ian Higginson said it reflected the way the whole health system was under “intolerable pressure.”

He said: “Emergency departments are full and with no beds to move patients into, ambulances are being held outside and unsafe handover delays are becoming normalised rather than being seen for the failure that they represent.

“This is a crisis of patient safety. Exceptionally long waits, ambulance handover delays, crowded departments, care in corridors, all put patients and their safety at risk.”

Dr Higginson said hospitals were particularly struggling to discharge patients needing community support because of the lack of social care.

Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted: “It’s pretty obvious from what medical experts are saying that much more needs to be done to tackle omicron.

“But the Prime Minister is too weak to stand up to those in his party who’ve always put profit before people.

“Boris Johnson is putting his own career before public health.”

Downing Street insisted there was “sufficient PCR capacity for those with symptoms” but slots available at test sites would increase by 100,000 per day and additional lab capacity for up to 150,000 tests was also being secured.

“We will continue to try to turn around those tests and get the results back to people as quickly as possible,” a spokesman said.