The radical reduction in attendance at England's A&Es poses some interesting questions: how will that affect reported performance? and will people draw the right conclusions from any change in performance? A sort thread...

Performance might get better. If it does, many will draw the conclusion that the underlying problem in normal times is that too many people attend A&E. This will be the wrong conclusion...

A&E performance isn't correlated with volume of attendance. Mostly because the long waiters are usually a small subset of all attenders (specifically those needing an admission to a bed)...

Fewer easy-to-treat-quickly "minors" doesn't speed up finding a bed so they get a similar number of of long waits for a lower attendance total -> worse performance...

But, in the current crisis, performance might improve. If it does it will be because the balance of free beds has shifted in response to #coivid as easy-to-discharge patients are cleared out to make way for virus cases...

And the victims of #covid have not yet filled all the spare beds. Or, possibly, there have been so many #covid admissions that the free beds are used up and the A&E still can't find free beds quickly...

So reported performance will be worse despite vastly lower attendance. Personally I'd make a small bet that this is what we will see. But it could easily be the opposite...

Just don't assume A&E performance is up (if that is what happens) because attendance is down. That would be a mistake.