Winter as a whole, I’m sorry to say, is going to be extraordinarily difficult for the NHS and unfortunately common practice is going to be at the fore.
It doesn’t matter whether we have a relatively small but non-trivial amount of covid, or whether we really have a further increase in winter.
If you ask 100 modellers, you’re going to get over 100 answers, just like it’s going to go out. I think what we have confidence in is the top end we would have faced, potentially if things went wrong [like] Last winter, except for one exceptional escape version, isn’t going to be…
I think the top end risks are very low, but we can certainly go up. We are only two to three times away from really quite serious pressure on the NHS – it is already serious but it will be very difficult to deal with.
So, the margin of error is quite small.
Zero covid this winter is an utterly impossible dream… we hope we can keep it down to a rough low.
But we’ve got flu again. There’s a lot of debate about whether we’ll have fewer flu years, because many people are actually meeting far fewer people than they were two years ago. Maybe he’ll catch the line. On the other hand, we have less natural immunity in the system, we can have a really severe spike, and we can have a flu vaccine that doesn’t match the flu we get very well because there hasn’t been enough flu circulating. Southern Hemisphere to actually get a fair fix on this.
We are definitely getting some serious other respiratory infections. And we have normal winter pressure on cardiovascular, slips and trips, and everything that goes with it.
So if you take them all on top of each other, and then you add in the fact that there’s no doubt we’re seeing, as we knew it from the beginning, people who Later, they delay coming to see the doctors. The stage of their disease, and therefore the more seriously ill, and the fact that we have to catch up on things like screening, and we have to keep up with the pace of vaccination – that’s an extraordinarily tall order when you add them all up.
I wish I could claim the sunlit highlands and by Christmas it’s all going to be great but, sadly I’m afraid [that’s not the case]. But we are in a much better place than before.
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