Excess deaths have been high all year and this is likely to remain the case for the next decade. We’ve obliterated the health service and also damaged the economic engine to pay to fix the problem.
(And I’m still downvoted. Open your eyes people, it’s basically Stockholm syndrome at this point!)
And the ones over 80 ended up catching it anyway.
Then there’s the fact that, even though it’s milder for pupils, they can still get: if you know what it can do to your granny before you get it, it’s going to be terrifying; and if you get it mildly and then granny dies from it, you’re going to feel survivor’s guilt and worry if you killed her.
Then there’s the fact that parents were already keeping their kids off school before the official lockdowns, because so many people saw the government wasn’t taking it seriously (which later became the PM almost dying from it, but it was obvious they didn’t care well before then).
And I don't think it really was done, when UK decided to not implement any lockdowns initially (right or wrong, don't know), most of the response was emotional. How dare you not care about dying people???
(I’m glad to say that Boris Johnson pattern-matches against what I wrote in the final few paragraphs).
I’m sure some deaths will have a causal connection to the lockdown, but I can confidently say that about literally every possible course of action or inaction by any major government on any topic no matter how mundane; to talk about risk to the NHS, one must show that the caused effect is also a substantial part of the total.
In fact, now that Covid is more or less over, our health service has become so dysfunctional that only now we are turning people away due to capacity issues (or leaving them in the back of an ambulance for 10+ hours).
We didn't save the NHS, we broke it.
* Overloaded nurses retiring early or shifting career (one of my in-laws switched from nursing to become a builder).
* Pay offer too low to encourage new nurses to join the NHS, as they are valued worldwide and have offers in other countries.
* Long-term systematic political footballing.
* Brexit (harder access to the UK from the rest of the EU combined with the exchange rate shock making the pay offer look worse).
* Many elderly patients have nowhere suitable to go after they’ve been treated, because community care is covered by council taxes not central government and the local councils can’t cope. Fixing this requires shifting the tax burden in ways that the government does not have sufficient support to get through even if they wanted to, and it’s not clear to me if they want to.
* Medical costs dominated by the elderly, combined with demographic shifts (important because the non-elderly not only pay the taxes but also do the actual work) which IMO was caused in part by newspapers in the 1980s and 90s deciding that the topic they wanted to treat as a social scandal was all the single mothers and teenage pregnancies, leading to government policy of making all the students of that era as frightened as possible of starting families ever, leading to later families, leading to smaller families, which combined with the social dynamics of basically ending the construction of new council housing (and any boost to the private sector being insufficient) meaning that poor people had a much harder time getting a home, and also the fact that effectively forcing widespread two-income-no-kids relationships without extra home construction leads to house price (and rent) inflation rather than people being able to afford more which again leads to the same demographic shift. Oh, and all that also makes the take-home pay of nurses much worse than it might otherwise be, making it even harder to get nurses from overseas or to keep nurses trained in the UK.
* COVID and long COVID
Waiting lists for elective treatment are high because hospitals are full of mostly elderly people who can't be safely discharged because the social care system is broken - largely due to lack of capacity due to underfunding. And the government recently cancelled the national insurance rate rise that was supposed to fund improvements in social care.
Accident and emergency departments, as well as intensive care, can't move patients into regular and high dependency hospital areas because of the problem above. Which is why ambulances have to wait for so long outside hospitals. Which is why ambulance waiting times are seriously dangerously high.
The NHS generally has a lot of burnt-out people who are quitting or retiring faster than they can be replaced. Part of the problem is low pay (arguably partly due to under-funding of the service) and perception of that NHS roles are high-stress. The same is true for GPs (who generally aren't NHS employees) although the shortage of people wanting to become GPs is less about pay and more about the stressful nature of the job. The stress of dealing with the pandemic also substantially contributed to burn-out.
Ultimately, the UK isn't willing to fund public services properly. Health, education, social care, police, military - they're all grinding to a halt after running hot for too long with not enough people or funding.
If you want to take the argument further - we're looking at the economic damage caused by 14 years of austerity topped-off by brexit. The UK economy can no longer fund the expected activities of the state at the level that people expect.
>the social care system is broken
Here, you are talking about social care for old folks. The relevant question here is - why has it got worse over the past 2 years? What we had before wasn't great - old folks basically sold everything they had so minimum-wage staff could care for them in their dying last few years, and needed constant attention from NHS-provided services. Which part of that is now properly broken, and why?
A post about this from two years ago: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/our-impact/campaigning/care-in-cris...
Residential social care (primarily for elderly people, but also for younger people with specific issues) is mostly provided by the private sector and part-funded by the state. The amount that the state will pay care businesses to provide that care hasn't kept pace with their costs, and private care homes are increasingly ejecting loss-making residents and/or closing-down completely. This has been going on since at least 2017 and is starting to accelerate as energy costs increase. The state has very little residential care capacity left.
Home-based care is also a mess - again due to lack of funding. Salaries don't compensate for the job stress, and people still working in the sector are over stretched and burning out. So people who might have been able to live semi-independently in their own homes are pushed into the residential care system which (except at the high-end) is crumbling.
Again, its a system/coordination problem. I'd argue that part of the problem is inherent complexity, but a bigger part is that the politicians who are setting policy are ill-equipped to deal with these types of problem because very many of them believe in market-only solutions. When a system gridlocks like this, they don't know what to do.
It seems to me that the excess death in my country will reach the baseline (maybe a bit higher since the average age is growing, but not much) as long as this summer is an outlier. UK data almost tell the same story, but I don't think you had the same heatwaves, and I don't know how to explain what is happening right now.
Putting that on the lockdowns only would need explaining why this effect isn't seen in France, as ours were both longer and more numerous I think (we had three, and only two in the UK, right?).
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
What we're seeing is a long and accelerating dissolution of social care in the community, mostly elderly nursing but also mental health.
Most hospitals are at least 40% occupied by patients awaiting discharge but who can't be discharged because there isn't a nursing home space, or enough community nursing to support them at home. They stay in hospital.
This blocks admissions. Which blocks ambulance transfer. Hospitals give surgical beds over to ease waits but this only makes things worse. Now people aren't getting surgical treatment, and it's more likely they'll end up coming in for the symptoms.
Covid made things worse, mainly by treating nursing staff horribly, but this was already a trend. We urgently need to pay nurses more, and desperately train a hundred thousand more. Neither look likely under this government.