Just listened to Luke Johnson telling me that hospitals had plenty of capacity.

So was the tripling of ICU capacity in my trust in my imagination? Was the fact we were ventilating people with Anaesthetic machines in recovery normal? No.

Luke is wrong.

#Newsnight

This was a system on the brink of collapse. We took 600 staff out of their normal specialities of work, stuck them in PPE, exposing them to personal risk and a disease we had never seen before, in some of the sickest patients we have ever seen

#Newsnight

Everyone it appears is an expert on #COVID19 and #Intensivecare now. But they aren’t.

While some areas were spared, in high prevalence areas hospitals converted ad hoc areas into makeshift ICUs and field hospitals.

COVID was all consuming - it swamped us

#Newsnight

What stopped the NHS treating cancers and heart disease and other conditions was not restrictions, it was the all consuming effect of COVID which sucked in our staff and closed operating theatres which became makeshift ICUs

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We are all very aware of the impact lockdowns and other restrictions are having on businesses. We know people are losing their jobs, we talk to our patients and their families they are facing obvious struggles.

#Newsnight

It will take years to recover economically, and psychologically. But many of us warned of the dangers of COVID and watched in horror as the government sleep walked into the avoidable disaster of the first surge. It didn’t need to happen.

#Newsnight

People are making a fundamental cognitive error. First somehow they forget that this is about the lives of tens of thousands of people. It’s not a negotiation with the government. It really is a choice about how many fellow citizens we will allow to die.

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Second they seem not to realise that the virus is autonomous. It doesn’t think or feel, it just invades out cells and copies itself. If our behaviour supports transmission it will be transmitted. There is no reasoning with it.

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Any reasoning is with our behaviour. Every smart arse who decides not to wear a mask on a bus becomes a potential superspreader, and to be frank we should be taking more stringent precautions in offices, and probably at home.

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It is my most profound hope that we can minimise the death toll before vaccines are widely available.

Why don’t we make plans for a celebration, a thanksgiving, this summer, when we can remember the dead and come together to plan our future?

#Newsnight