I’m seeing tweets about empty hospital beds and conspiracy theories etc.

Empty beds are a good thing.

Let me try to explain what’s happened over the past month

About 4weeks ago, maybe earlier in London, hospitals started to cancel elective operating...

This was partly to prevent vulnerable people catching Covid in hospital but also to start to free up bed space

Effectively over the past 4 weeks or so hospitals have been emptying.

I think this was the cause of the dancing videos. A calm before the storm so to speak.

The beds are now filling back up but with Covid patients who took up one ward, then 2 etc. ITU beds filled up and expanded into the operating theatres and then onto further wards

Hospital staff are slowly being diverted into Covid work from other specialties

The aim has always been to have more capacity than is needed

Trauma injuries have reduced because people are at home not doing much

The fact that hospitals still have spare capacity is good because as lockdown gets lifted cases will rise again.

If we can start to lift lockdown, and control the spread, whilst still having huge capacity in our NHS we can possibly prevent being locked down to this degree again.

Spare capacity is good- it will ultimately mean everyone that gets Covid19 gets the opportunity to fight it with hospital help if needed

Our doctors won’t have to face the same horrible decisions that Italian ones have had to face.

Rather than begrudging the fact that we still have spare beds and aren’t war zone like and we should be praising the planning and hard work and be thankful for it imo.

There is no conspiracy theory behind spare hospital capacity.

It’s simply a plan that’s-so far-working