Pope John XXIII
Vital Football Legend
Firstly, Nightingales are a shocking waste of £220m of taxpayers money; they were there for propaganda only because, after a decade of the Tories running down the NHS, there was never the staff available to run them. That is why they are unoccupied, not because of lack of need.The percentage of ICU beds occupied in England on December 20th was lower than this time last year in every region of NHS England.
Nightingale Hospitals are still empty.
This may change with the new strain, hopefully not and these measures look like a logical contingency if this happens, but looking at the raw data it's no worse than normal 'winter pessures'
This is a fact, how these are interpreted is crucial; BTW I am not advocating a different course of action (yet)
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You also need to remember that the entire country is under some form of lockdown and has been since November, with around 20m living under stay at home rules.
People aren't getting pissed at the weekend anywhere. They aren't getting paralytic and getting into fights. The number of people out is less, so the number getting hit by cars is going to be significantly less. In fact, there are all sorts of everyday accidents/incidents that might see people in an ICU that are not going to be happening with the same frequency under lockdown.
And yet, ICUs are very close to capacity because of COVID.
If you ease lockdown, not only will you get increased transmission of COVID and even more patients (hardly matters what age) but you will also see your normal, accident/incident related ICU patients on top of that