I think it's probably not right to claim the NHS "coped with the first wave of covid".
Yes, we avoided a triage situation of choosing between covid patients for the last ICU bed.
But that was bought at the cost of stopping everything else. That's not coping, it's redistributing.

We shifted resources - staff, space, kit - from most other parts of the service to meet the anticipated demand from covid. We'd seen Italy's health service horribly overwhelmed by their first wave, so it was an appropriate response. But it wasn't new capacity that we'd created.

It was existing capacity refocused from many other health conditions to focus on one: covid.

We still dealt with emergencies (although many people were too scared to present to hospital with their emergency conditions until quite late on) but elective work largely stopped.

There was not much spare capacity to draw on after years of trimming "fat" from an emaciated system. We didn't have PPE stocks ready. We didn't have lots of spare ventilators. We didn't have all the drugs we needed. Even the Nightingale was staffed by people from other hospitals.

We didn't "cope": large parts of the health system came to a halt to stop people dying in the short term from covid. We will see a long tail of secondary deaths from other conditions that went untreated.
We didn't know how bad the first wave would get so the move was appropriate.

But restarting the rest of the NHS safely is going to be difficult, especially while the virus is circulating in the community.

If we have another wave in the meantime, that means more elective care deferred while we fight fires, and more deaths from other conditions later on.

Meanwhile after months on extremely harsh rotas, doing difficult and often unfamiliar work in stifling PPE, staff are flagging. The initial adrenaline is fading, but the slog continues as we try to restart elective work, with one eye anxiously watching the R0 creeping up.

So please don't feel reassured that "the NHS coped well with the first wave". Continuing to rob Peter to pay Paul is going to cost lives in other ways.

We addressed the first wave well, but we can't keep this up forever. We may find ourselves with no choice but to try, though.

So please do what you can to remain as safe as you can and limit your risk-taking. We will do our best but the NHS doesn't have infinite capacity and, as I've set out above, what we had wasn't enough to deal with one covid wave at the same time as everything else we needed to do.

Probably no healthcare system could maintain all its usual services and deal with a big covid outbreak - I’m not denying that or saying the NHS failed. I’m just saying: large covid outbreaks mean choices being made about what we carry on doing while trying to address the outbreak