Coronavirus: No, “the cure” is not “worse than the disease”. Anyone telling you this either doesn’t know what they are talking about or is peddling their own agenda.
This is not a trivial illness. For the majority of people it might be mild or even asymptotic,

But for a significant minority, it is a severe, life threatening illness. This is more likely the case if you are older (mortality increases above the age of 50), if you are significantly overweight,

But we are also seeing young fit adults develop critical illness with covid.
The U.K. healthcare system coped well with the first wave, because we stopped a lot of other activity and diverted resources to deal with the huge numbers of sick covid patients.

After the social distancing and “lockdown” measures were introduced infection rates plummeted, as did hospital admissions and intensive care admissions. The NHS was then able to restore the “usual” work and start to catch up on the backlog.

But now infection rates are rising rapidly again, accompanied by rising hospital admissions and intensive care admissions. This varies by region at the moment, but in some parts of the country hospitals and intensive care units are close to running out of beds because of covid.

The NHS cannot deliver a “normal” service in terms of treating cancer, serious chronic illness and non-covid life threatening emergencies at the same time as dealing with a very high covid infection rate. It simply doesn’t have the resources, particular the staff.

We all know the NHS was rather stretched before covid happened. Hospitals and other healthcare resources simply can’t cope with large numbers of very ill patients with covid on top of this, at least not if we want all those other conditions to be treated as well.

If we control the infection rate of covid at low levels, as was the case in July and August, the NHS can cope well. Yes, this has economic impacts, impact on jobs and on mental health. But if we don’t control the infection rate, the NHS will not be able to cope.

If we don’t control the infection rate, if it continues to grow as it is doing currently, or even if it continues at current levels for another few weeks, hospitals will be overwhelmed and people will die who would otherwise have survived. This scenario would be appalling...

Hospitals would be full. Emergency Departments would be overflowing (and unable to maintain safe social distancing of patients), ambulances would be queuing for hours outside emergency departments, or just be told the A&E is “closed”. People calling 999 would be waiting hours.

We are not at this point yet, but in some areas, such as the North West, our hospitals and our intensive care units are approaching being completely full. The dramatic increase increase in covid admissions has happened in just the last 10 days or so. It is frightening how quickly

We are coping, at the moment. If community infection rates start to fall again the NHS will be able to cope, but it infection rates rise, or even continue at current levels in the North West, the NHS will not be able to cope and we will have to make some difficult decisions.

To all those campaigning against tighter lockdown measures, those who don’t want to wear masks, those who want to continue “life as normal”, this is what you are campaigning for: an overwhelmed NHS that won’t be able to care for sick patients with covid, or any other conditions.

Those people are effectively campaigning for a massive increase in completely avoidable deaths and a situation where for the next 6 months or more we would have a completely overwhelmed NHS and anyone who gets sick would simply not be safe.

We need to control the community infection rate of covid to a level where hospital admissions numbers and intensive care admission numbers are low. Then the NHS will be able to cope and we will all be able to receive the great (free at the point of delivery) healthcare we want.