Re: Winning the Covid-19 war

Posted by Jeremy on
URL: http://uk-hbbr-forum.61.s1.nabble.com/Winning-the-Covid-19-war-tp4031334p4031441.html

This might seem a bit harsh, but I don't believe that the number of deaths is that significant.  The core problem seems to be that, if we had done nothing the NHS would have been overwhelmed in a short period of time, leaving us with virtually no health care system.  We saw just how close Italy (which has around twice the number of hospital beds per head of population than we have) came to this, with people lying on the floor in corridors being treated.  Had we had the same volume of hospital admissions that Lombardy had then our hospitals would have been brought to their knees pretty quickly.

The infection rate now seems to be under a degree of control; over the last few days the number of daily new cases hasn't risen at anything like the rate that it was before lockdown.  It seems that the lockdown measures are working to just about allow the hospitals to cope, but I don't know how much longer they can carry on working the way they are at the moment.  There's only so long that people can work 12 hours on, 12 hours off, before fatigue starts to really impact on their ability to work safely.