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How many excess/preventable deaths have there been and will there be due to much of the healthcare system being shutdown?
In theory if you keep the rest of society shutdown then healthcare might do better. When there are fewer Covid patients hospitals will be able to get back to the usual heart disease and cancer treatment.
One measure for a successful relaxing of lockdown is hospitals are busy with Covid patients but not swamped. In that situation regular healthcare suffers again.
It seems likely that we have a new endemic disease. Perhaps we need to increase the number of hospitals/beds/doctors/nurses/etc so we can do the pre-Covid healthcare as well? It will of course take lots of money and a decade to do that.
jellybaby
Austerity causes deaths. There are some links to non-pandemic specific research from here:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme#Mortality
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In 2017, the Royal Society of Medicine said that government austerity decisions in health and social care were likely to have resulted in 30,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2015.
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Those were funding/policy decisions not in a time of a pandemic. Do you think it's better or worse during a pandemic? How many excess/preventable deaths have there been and will there be due to much of the healthcare system being shutdown?