It’s bad already in our local hospitals (sw London), it’s just not showing up on the official numbers for some reason. My sister is a senior mw and sits on the planning committee, local hospital has 8/12 ventilators with critical cv patients, 300 confirmed positives sent home to self isolate (these were the numbers beginning last week). The official figures for the borough are 17 confirmed cases. 25% of pregnant women attending appear to have cv symptoms but they’re only testing if they’re experiencing breathing difficulties as they don’t have enough swabs available to test everyone. The hospital planning document sets out that 50% of patients will require ventilators, that’s 250+ ventilators needed, they have 12.
I think lockdown is coming, the government are doing their ‘making the decisions at the right time’ thing. They’ve said all along they will do whatever it takes, now they need to get on with it. In this area it should have already happened, they’ve left it too late.
We’ve got schools essentially still open as everyone and his dog is a key worker and lots of employers are taking advantage of that. A friend of mine is an exams officer and has been told she still needs to go to work despite exams being cancelled this year! The school she works for has said she’s a key worker?! Her dh works for the nhs but her school don’t care, they’re expecting her to be at work on Monday. Our school are trying to accommodate her kids.
We have a dog with high exercise needs so walked to the park yesterday, we kept our distance and walked on the fields but the play park was busy with children.
I also think supermarkets mixing their elderly/vulnerable hour with nhs workers is a bad idea, you’re bringing together the people most likely to have been in contact with the virus with those most vulnerable of dying from it. They should be separated! Elderly in the morning, nhs in the evening. Or give them all the home delivery slots and keep them away from the shops all together.
It’s going to go downhill rapidly round here and an awful lot of people will wake up to the realities too late.