Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Not in the time frame we need - I know it’s a tired phrase, but this is a direct consequence of austerity. Cutting the nursing bursary, systematically decreasing the number of acute hospital beds (over the long term), underfunding services, the list goes on. All of this means the NHS is continuously running at >95% capacity when it should be at 80-85% to have the slack to soak up things like COVID, and because it’s been going on for years it will take years to rebuild from the damage. Although it does pretty well outcomes-wise given the amount of money spent on it, if you compare the NHS with health systems in comparable countries across a number of metrics (eg ITU beds, Acute hospital beds, physicians per capita etc) it’s lagging a long way behind. All of this is scary when faced with something like COVID, because whatever Rishi Sunak says we can’t pull 5,000 ITU nurses out of our backsides at the drop of a hat.