When my neighbour died of covid they put his body in morgue storage for about 3 months. He died in a care home and it was complex trying to arrange the funeral.
I think they were probably expecting a second wave of normal covid and planned accordingly. They would have most likely coped if we did not have this highly infectious variant.
A doctor calling into LBC the other day said they simply don’t know if a patient has covid without symptoms when they come in as an emergency with something else. So they might have a hip fracture and then they are tested and they find covid. He was saying they’d need two hospitals next door to each other to manage the sort of complexity of separation.
Going back to what Annie said about the Tories making a hash of the NHS …
In today’s D Mail: Boris Johnson vows to swell ranks of public sector staff after hailing recruitment of 6,000 doctors | Daily Mail Online 6,000 new doctors hired last year along with 13,000 new nurses and many more to come over the next few years. Pray tell me how THAT is making a hash of the NHS?
Well they have about 40k nursing vacancies and check how many doctors have retired in the last few years after they changed all the contract terms (it was well publicised how the consultants were leaving in droves after the pension rules changed plus GPs retiring in the last few years because of all the pressures etc). So it’s like an elastoplast trying to fix a massive leak.
The pension rules changed in 2016 because the allowances were changed to prevent anyone adding to their lifetime pension pot of £1.1m max. I agree this meant that SOME consultants were effectively working for free but not all of them. GPs retired for the same reason not just because of the “pressures”. The pension changes were bought about because the Labour government had left “No Money In the Pot” thus causing austerity.
Here’s some data on GP numbers :
“Since 2015, the number of permanent, fully qualified GPs has fallen by around 2,200. Even when including our estimate of the GP workforce registered with PCNs, there is still a decrease of 1,800 full-time equivalent GPs. We would have expected levels to increase to be on course to deliver 5,000 more GPs as soon as possible.”
What? No radiographers? 
Here is a nice paper summarising doctor shortage causes :
https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdfplus/10.1308/rcsbull.2020.78
The UK has 2.8 doctors per 1,000 population, which puts it well below the European Union (EU) average (3.4/1,000) with only 4 countries in Europe having lower numbers per capita (Ireland, Slovenia, Romania and Poland).2 A report by the Royal College of Physicians in 2016 argued that ‘the UK did not currently train enough doctors to meet demand.’3
Three of the main areas of shortage are psychiatry, general practice and emergency medicine, although all specialties have been impacted
In response to the government’s medical
school changes, the British Medical Association (BMA) has had a number of concerns including that, ‘it would take a decade for the increased student numbers to translate into
more doctors on the ground. The proposals would do nothing to address current workforce pressures.
A study questioning 12 cohorts totalling 30,272 doctors graduating between 1974 and 2012 found that the most recently qualified cohort was far more likely to report that they would probably or definitely not practise medicine in the UK (15% of respondents).
In addition to new graduates considering whether they wish to work within the NHS, an increasing number of senior doctors are taking early retirement
A BMA survey carried out at the end of 2018 found that 60% of hospital consultants intended to retire at or before the age of 60 and 50% were less likely to do 80
extra sessions.17 The chief executive of NHS Employers, Danny Mortimer, says, ‘the health service is suffering from a severe workforce shortage and any suggestion that skilled senior clinicians are looking to reduce or end their NHS commitments should be a cause for alarm.’
In retrospect this could have all been planned for, but this kind of catastrophe appears without warning, that’s why it is a catastrophe.
I look at other countries and see that they are also struggling to cope, even ones like Germany who seemed to have it all under control in the beginning.
There is no right or wrong way to deal with something of this kind of magnitude, you just have to make it up as you go along. People should take more responsibility for their own health and not keep blaming other people.
Austerity was over well before the change. The whole austerity approach has left us in this position. It made sense at first but went on for far too long. Now it seems money is no object! So many u turns on everything that it seems policy is just going in a perpetual circle.
Well I haven’t heard or read that the nursing bursary is reinstated. There’s some other sweetener but it doesn’t make up for the removal. But I was just explaining why Tory govt policy has created this situation. We have had these debates here many times in the past but at that time there was no pandemic. It’s all too little too late.
So how come we keep inviting people to come to live and work here when we know we haven’t got housing, schools, utilities and worst of all, health care to go round, but still they come…And now illegally from across the channel…
I think the people we are inviting here from abroad are doctors and nurses. Apparently a third of the current NHS clinical workforce qualified abroad.
I wonder whether our population is still increasing. Over the last year I mean.
Pandemic planning is ongoing at many levels of government and academia, for example:
In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, but the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016.
“We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people,” she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies,” Davies said.
Sheer government incompetence … :!:
Exercise Cygnus
Exercise Cygnus was a three-day simulation exercise carried out by NHS England in October 2016 to estimate the impact of a hypothetical H2N2 influenza pandemic on the United Kingdom. It aimed to identify strengths and weaknesses within the United Kingdom health system and emergency response chain by putting it under significant strain, providing insight on the country’s resilience and any future ameliorations required. It was conducted by Public Health England representing the Department of Health and Social Care, as part of a project led by the “Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response Partnership Group”. Twelve government departments across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as local resilience forums (LRFs) participated. More than 950 workers from those organisations, prisons and local or central government were involved during the three-day simulation, and their ability to cope under situations of high medical stress was tested.
In the scenario, participants were placed in the seventh week of the pandemic – the peak of the crisis, when there is the greatest demand for healthcare. At this stage, an estimated 50% of the population had been infected, with close to 400,000 deaths. The hypothetical situation was that the vaccine had been made and purchased but not yet delivered to the United Kingdom. Hospital and social care officials were to come up with emergency plans managing resource strain, while government officials were exposed to situations requiring quick decision-making. To make the situation more realistic, COBRA meetings were held between ministers and officials. Simulated news outlets and social media such as “WNN” and “Twister” were also employed to give fictitious updates.
Results from the exercise identified four main learning points and 22 further recommendations. In general, it showed that the pandemic would cause the country’s health system to collapse from a lack of resources.
I just wondered if the ‘Nightingale’ hospital in London was situated in ‘Barclay Square’…?..:-p Now that would be cool!
Well I could have told them that Omah, and saved them some brass…
It’s a bit of a coincidence though don’t you think?
What is … 
Indeed. We can’t keep blaming the EU now, can we?
It’s up to the government to sort out that problem. The answers are not difficult, even to the extent that even I have stated some perfectly workable solutions.
Doing all of these trial runs prior to the virus being let loose on the world…Do you think some people know more than they are letting on Omah?
We didn’t do any practice runs for leaving the EU…And being short of food would be worse that a couple of million people getting the flu each year…