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One of the drivers for that was hospitals releasing untested people back into carehomes... yes about 50% so 20K people.
But yes hospitalisation rates going up is also a problem, indeed once there are enough cases it will become a real issue. What happened to those Nightingale places?
Germany had local teams checking up on people and giving them oxygen to try to stabilize that way, before it got so bad they had to go into hospital. Will that work here? I doubt the infrastructure is there, maybe they are doing trials?
It would be awesome if there was something reliable you could use to check if you really should go to hospital but I don't think that exists. And if cases go up enough, even with the most care you end up with full hospitals.
I don't know either... I got an oxygen finger clip at home, bought a thermometer to ensure we don't call for help unless really needed, but also don't delay help if needed (oxygen saturation dropping below, say 90, is not a good sign) bought a forehead thermometer to make temp checking easier but what can you really do?
And so off we go into another lockdown potentially and I really hope they won't close the gyms as I really need to get out of the house during the coming darkness and I already bought all the stuff I need from shops :)
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JWestland
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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).