England's A&E crisis may be causing 500 deaths a week, a close match for non-Covid excess deaths

[Bruce Stephens]

This is another of John Burn-Murdoch's analyses in the FT.

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@jburnmurdoch: NEW: the collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week, a close match for non-Covid excess deaths Let’s look at how we reach that conclusion, by taking a deep-dive in...…

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[Bruce Stephens]

What did you specifically glean from it in terms of why in 2022 is there a problem?

I think it's a buildup of things. People are doing more stuff (during lockdowns some reasons for wanting A&E fell quite a bit), but I think mostly it's that staffing in the NHS and social care has been under stress (people are leaving, retiring, etc.) and (with Omicron) are sometimes off sick (more so than with Delta just because Omicron has infected many more people and seems (anecdotally, anyway) to reinfect faster).

It seems to me much of this is caused by locking everyone down and all the other measures they brought in (which cause missed diagnoses, appointments, treatments, increases in obesity and unhealthy living and people now suddenly returning to A&E as pre-pandemic times),

I'm sure there's a bit of that. He specifically suggests failures to diagnose cancers early may well cause deaths in the future but probably aren't doing much yet.

I think there are real questions about whether a less restrictive approach earlier might have helped things, but I doubt it: the NHS has for a long time been under stress (in the 2019-2020 winter there were plans to delay all non-urgent surgery even before we knew anything of the pandemic, just in case there was a winter that was a bit colder than average or flu was a bit worse). And when we got the pandemic, there were genuine fears that ICU would be overwhelmed (as happened in northern Italy). I haven't heard anyone working in hospitals that thought that time was relaxed: just about everyone was helping out in emergency care looking after Covid patients.

I'm sure some of the things that we did were stupidly unnecessary. Reasonable (maybe) to worry about people sitting on park benches and things the first time around, but stupid to close playgrounds for subsequent "lockdowns". (And various public health authorities are still stressing the importance of hand washing. Which is good general advice but largely useless for this disease.)