In the most simplistic terms

There are a number of beds in the NHS.

Hospitals can surge - reorganise beds, open some capacity but at some point they can’t surge anymore.

Staff you can’t create. You can change roles and rotas but you can’t create trained staff

So you let covid-19 run amok. You add huge numbers of additional patients to the usual number of emergency care cases - the heart attacks, strokes, trauma patients, other pneumonias etc.

Might some of the covid-19 patients have had other illness and therefore might not be additional numbers - of course.

But you still have huge numbers of extra patients needing care. Some of whom will need critical care - and those beds are far fewer in number.

So we surge. We create as much capacity as possible. We reorganise things as far as possible. We alter ideal staffing levels in critical care to cope.

We quickly reach a point where you cannot continue doing everything else - the elective work goes first.

But you overwhelm the system. It is like running water into an overflowing bath with the plug in. There is no where for that water to go in the bath. You get a flood - we would get to a stage where you cannot treat patients.

And then you end up in the worst position.

Then you end up with - well who do we provide care to? How do you decide which patients to admit, which patients can have critical care?

And you do it with reduced staff - from sickness, from family sickness, from exhaustion.

This is why we have to reduce transmission of the virus. Because otherwise we risk overwhelming hospitals and even with transferring patients out - eventually you overwhelm a region, and in the worst case scenario you overwhelm the NHS.

No one wants restrictions. We are all fed up of covid. But without restrictions to try to reduce the spread of the virus we will end up in the flood scenario where we overwhelm the NHS.

We have to reduce the flow of the tap. We can’t turn it off but we have to slow down the flow