[quote 2bazookas]@Queenzoopla
And I'm sick sick sick of this "NHS will be overwhelmed" business : if the government had been funding the NHS properly it wouldn't be "overwhelmed" would it.
Yes, it would, because that is the process of pandemics.
ANY health system has a finite number of buildings, beds, staff. When unprecedented circumstances produce a flood of additional inpatients, and staff infections reduce the number available to work, no system has enough resilience to take up the slack. While still maintaining the usual services.
Nurses and doctors take years to train so the supply can't just be re-stocked like goods on supermarket shelves.[/quote]
Extra demand has always existed during Winters. NHS staff have always had to struggle into work with the usual Winter bugs we all suffer through annually.
A lot of people need to start looking at the actual figures & not at the media hysteria. Even at the very peak of hospitalisations, Covid patients only accounted for 25% of hospital beds. Now given that at that point the NHS was only dealing with emergency Patients, There was a shed load of underused capacity.
Have a think about all those silly tic toc videos put out by medical staff. A great many staff had it pretty damn easy during Covid, While their colleagues were working themselves silly.