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Let’s just pray they have actually put in some procedures to protect care homes this time.
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The care home death numbers are a massive scandal but I think the media focus purely on case numbers & deaths misses the point that hospitalisations are a much bigger problem. From a "keeping the system afloat" perspective care home residents dying without going to hospital places very little strain on the NHS. Large numbers of younger people getting sick and spending a few days in hospital or a few weeks in ITU is a nightmare.
Like you say, there were a lot (~20,000 iirc?) of care home deaths in the March/April wave. If even 5,000 of those had instead been hospitalisations of younger patients the NHS would probably have keeled over, certainly in London/Birmingham. Hospital admissions starting to rise again should be a massive signal that some kind of intervention is needed...not sure what form that should take (hopefully Chris Whitty has some ideas).
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charliem
@JWestland
Hospitalization is still relatively low, but the increase is now mostly among younger people. [well derr with schools/unis back]
It was really in carehome settings that the virus killed many people earlier in the year. I don't know if that means we don't need to be as worried/lockdown as hard.