Quote Originally Posted by oldcolner View Post

Let’s hope our hospitals can cope with rising numbers.
I think they can.

"If the government prepares for a tsunami that never arrives, it can end up using language that scares people away from using hospitals and seeking care. Then you end up with what we had last time: 40,000 empty NHS beds at the peak of the virus and many of those who would otherwise be treated dying at home. Not that this is discussed much in Covid strategy meetings. Sage, SPI-M and the Joint Biosecurity Centre — which all shape the Covid strategy — are focused only on the virus. There is no equivalent group calculating the harm done by lockdown: the cancer deaths, mental health caseload and the loss of life that always accompanies economic crashes. During the 2009 swine flu outbreak, the ‘reasonable worse-case scenario’ from Sage envisaged 65,000 deaths. There was no lockdown. Just 457 died."