Much more pertinent to us than worrying about the Casedemic in the USA, are the figures for NHS bed occupancy rates that the Mail has managed to discover (I try to keep a track of these but they can be hard to find, the Mail is obviously more resourceful than me).
"NHS England figures show that there are thousands more hospital beds spare this year than last winter. On average, 77,942 out of 88,903 (87.7%) available beds were occupied across the country in the week ending November 22nd, which is the most recent snapshot. This figure does not take into account make-shift capacity at mothballed Nightingales, or the thousands of beds commandeered from the private sector.
For comparison, occupancy stood at 94.9%, on average, during the seven-day spell that ended December 8th in 2019, which is the most comparable data available for last winter, when around 91,733 out of all 96,675 available beds were full.
Just four trusts – Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust (FT), University College London Hospitals FT, Calderdale and Huddersfield FT, and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh FT – are busier now than they were a year ago.
Dr Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of Buckingham, said Downing Street was running a “brainwashing PR campaign” with “data that doesn’t stack up”. He told MailOnline: “We’ve gone back to how it started in March, with the Government claiming we need the measures to protect the NHS. The data you’ve shown me proves that it doesn’t need protecting. It’s dealing with COVID-19 very well indeed.
“What the data shows is that hospitals are not working at full capacity and they’ve still got some spare beds for COVID-19 if necessary. The public is being misled, the data doesn’t stack up. Fear and scaremongering is being used to keep people out of hospital.”
There is no second wave, the NHS is not being overwhelmed, the government and the mad scientists have to pretend there is to cover their backs, they've dug themselves into a hole and they're still digging. I sincerely hope some of these people end up in prison when the inevitable public inquiry gets to the bottom of this scandal.