When this 5h1tstorm broke the predicted deaths worldwide were many times more horrific than they ended up being. It was right to lockdown and do the necessary to keep deaths as low as possible and to avoid having worldwide health services crippled.

What has happened is a huge focus on Covid patients to the detriment of everybody else. Looking at the current rates of new cases, hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths and the demographics of those figures, in NL anyway, the majority of new cases are in school age children and the 25 to 30 age group. Demographics that have low instances of serious illness, hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths. On the other hand the current slight and expected to rise further numbers of everything Covid from new cases to deaths are already resulting in heart, cancer etc patients not getting appointments and treatment. This is the perfect preparation for the next wave of deaths. That is, now, totally unacceptable. All illnesses should get treated and, if beds are full, that's the point where the hard decisions should be made as to who gets the last bed? A cancer patient, heart, lung etc or a Covid patient? I'm glad I don't have to make that decision.

Yesterday, the head of Dutch ICU's came out and said that we can no longer scale up above the max of 1150 ICU beds we have available. The reason has nothing to do with beds but with a lack of ICU nurses. That deficit has 2 causes, the current sickness rates among ICU nurses which are more than twice the norm and the absences are longer due to the cause (burnout and mental health issues in the main) and ICU nurses either moving to other wards/specialities or leaving nursing completely as they can no longer handle the pressure of ICU. It takes 18 months to fully train an ICU nurse.

In short, time to stop giving Covid priority above other issues. The tipping point has likely been reached, and passed, and prioritising Covid will end up causing many more hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths from other diseases than would be saved by the current prioritisation of Covid.