Country Wide Demand for Hospital Capacity Means a National Lockdown Today Is Essential
South East ICUs are filling up rapidly or are full already [Three intensive care units in London 'full' on New Year's Eve, leaked email shows]. Hospitals, such as the Royal Free, which were once able to accept their neighbour’s spillover no longer can. Patients are being helicoptered across the country so they can receive care [Covid patients 'evacuated' to Bristol from South East due to hospital pressures].
The combination of the new variant, delayed lockdowns, a lack of attention or adherence to the rules, and the social expectations of Christmas and new years, means a conservative bet that the volume of patients from the South East alone will be enough to eat up the entire of Britain’s capacity would be a wise one. Unless we are to get to a place where the idea of care for all collapses the entire country needs to be placed in lockdown today to preserve what spare hospital capacity there is in areas where COVID is less prevalent.
This new lockdown needs to be stricter than those before it [Coronavirus: Return to full lockdown might not be enough to control new variant, Sage warns]. The optimistic ideas of schools that are open to all and leaving your house to go to non-essential work that can’t be done at home need to be evaporated. The lockdown needs to be policed aggressively, by the army if necessary. We may already be too late to avoid the collapse of the NHS (my gut tells me we are), but if not we are certainly at the tipping point. Anything that can be done to avoid or minimise the scale of the collapse should be done, and that means locking down the country today.
About The Annoying Centrist: I listen to/read/follow the hard-left, the far-right and everything in between. I try to pull the facts from what I find and create a balanced position in the middle with compromises which meet the needs of reality and are hopefully palatable to most across the political spectrum.