HOSPITALS had almost fifteen percent fewer patients this December compared with 2019, despite the Covid crisis.
But they are being ovewhelmed by the surge in infections because of a lack of beds and staff, experts said.A freedom of information request to NHS England revealed that on December 22, three days after Boris Johnson introduced tier four for millions, more than 13,000 fewer beds were occupied than the same date in 2019.
The new data suggests a key reason hospitals are struggling is this lack of capacity.
Hospitals
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William Walter Kay BA JD
- Credentials: BA JD
Canada’s Covid-19 Resistance – What Dr. Hinshaw’s Affidavit foretells
A foundational myth of Canada’s Covid protest movement has it that at some climatic point in this horror-show the judiciary will rush in to vanquish our medical tormentors. A recent ruling by Justice Kirker of Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench pours pails of ice-water onto this fever-born fantasy.
On December 7 the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) et al filed an Originating Application in pursuit of declarations vitiating Alberta’s Covid-related Public Health Orders on the grounds that these Orders violate Charter-protected rights and freedoms.
Acknowledging that this proceeding will take time to adjudicate, JCCF filed a Notice of Application, on December 10, seeking immediate suspension of the impugned Health Orders pending the outcome of the overall case. The hearing on this interim relief, pitched as a bid to “Save Christmas,” was held via video on December 21.
JCCF’s team submitted an impressive portfolio of affidavits, memoranda and precedents. Counsel for the Alberta Government responded with a 7-page Affidavit signed by their Chief Medical Officer of Heath, the catatonic Dr. Deena Hinshaw. After a snap hearing Judge Kirker dispatched JCCF’s lawyers with shoeprints on their trouser bottoms.
Hinshaw’s Affidavit might have been cobbled together in an afternoon of copying and pasting from the Health Ministry’s website. Supporting documentation consists of 5 simple graphs.
Interestingly, as far as hospitalizations go, Hinshaw’s Affidavit presents a rather flaccid argument for a lockdown. She claims Alberta’s 2018-2019 flu season wrought 2,310 hospitalization stays including 341 intensive care unit (ICU) admissions. In 2019-20 there were 2,339 flu hospitalizations including 262 ICU admissions. Covid-19, from March 5 to December 16 2020, (a period longer than a flu season) generated 2,862 hospitalizations and 506 ICU admissions. This hardly warrants martial law.
The death count, however, tells another tale. Hinshaw claims Covid has already killed 790 Albertans while the seasonal flu killed only 659 Albertans in the past 10 years combined. This eye-popping stat no doubt arises from treating a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 as grounds for deeming Covid-19 to be the primary cause of death for any subsequent fatality, regardless of co-morbidities.
The gaping lacunae in Hinshaw’s Affidavit is the provincial aggregate death tally. If there were excess deaths in 2020 Hinshaw would have brandished this. Lack of discussion on this subject beckons a negative inference.
JCCF will surely grind out a truer depiction of the body count; but they labour in vain. A date hasn’t even been set for hearing the originating application; and its outcome is predictable.
According to Canada’s Constitution a government may limit any right or freedom provided it does so in a lawful manner consistent with democratic principles. Apparently, a Health Ministry press release suffices to discharge such obligations.
An appeal all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada (should they deign to hear it) will take years. By then Covid will linger only in the glittering treasures of Big Pharma shareholders.
Wherefrom the notion that judges would ride to our rescue? All senior judicial appointments in Canada are agonizingly scrutinised by partisan wonks deep within the Federal Government. They’re not seeking outside-the-box thinkers.
Moreover, Covid proceedings will entirely turn on the testimony of epidemiologists and virologists drawn from the Borg-like international medical-industrial complex. Legal authorities will side with medical authorities.
Resistance to the Covid reign of terror needs to explore additional pathways.
Nightingale hospitals built during the first Covid-19 lockdown still remain ‘on standby’ despite parts of England being plunged under draconian Tier 4 measures.
It has been suggested the hospitals are largely deserted, despite Boris Johnson’s dramatic decision to plunge a third of those in England under tough Tier 4 measures from Sunday.
Hospital pharmacists discovered Dec. 16 that some vials of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines that are supposed to hold five doses actually contain six or seven, The New York Times reported.
The discovery may mean the U.S. supply of the vaccine is more robust than previously thought, but it has also caused confusion over whether to use the extra doses or throw them out, since the extra doses weren’t part of Pfizer’s guidance.
Federal officials have to carefully track the number of vaccine doses to make sure there’s enough for everyone who received an initial dose to receive a second dose three weeks later. The extra vials may complicate that effort, The Hill reported.
There are approximately 30,000 student-nurse places in the UK each year, which, given nursing is a three-year course, means there are about 90,000 student nurses in total (notwithstanding dropouts). Moreover, there are 84 university nursing departments throughout the UK, each with a body of nursing professors, senior lecturers and lecturers, many of whom will be registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (although they are not required to work clinically to maintain registration). In this emergency pandemic, it would seem quite rational for these students and teaching staff to be deployed by government to staff the Nightingale Hospitals.
- Intensive care ward occupancy down to 75% from 84% this time last year
- Hospitals across country declaring incidents as they struggle to cope
- But wards are less busy too – 89% full compared to 95% in December 2019
- NHS warns of invisible pressures unique to Covid, such as ward segregation
NHS data still shows hospitals to be quieter than they were this time last year even as coronavirus’s second wave bites and the number of Covid patients approaches levels seen in the crisis’s peak in April.
By plunging London into a Tier Three lockdown, the Government is going to do terrible harm to the city, the entire national economy, and to millions of lives.
No one can predict the number of people who will lose jobs, suffer poor mental health or who will have life-saving operations postponed until too late.
All we can say with any certainty is that all these things will happen, and not to a few isolated people. The harms caused by these new restrictions, like those caused by the previous over-reactions, will be immense.
- The Government is withholding much of the information we need to draw our own conclusions about better ways to handle the crisis.
- The weekly average number of Covid deaths in the capital is just over a tenth of what it was at its peak in April.
- Weekly average Covid admissions to London’s hospitals are a quarter of what were in the spring.
- The [UK Government’s] obsession with secrecy is not intended to hide the facts from enemy agents but from us, the general public.
- This disease is not like Spanish flu, or the plague. It does not sweep away young and old indiscriminately. In fact, many younger people – now more likely to catch Covid – will have it without even being aware. They will be infected but not affected.
- The average age of people dying with a Covid infection is 82 years and four months – 14 months more than the average life expectancy in Britain.
- In November the total number of deaths in London was very little different to the average over the past five years.
- Covid is a respiratory virus that spreads on the wind. Just look at the leaves blowing around – that’s what viral particles do when we walk past each other.
- Cloth or woven paper masks are no barrier to this tiny virus either, as shown by the world’s only controlled study, from Denmark, which found that they only made a small, ‘non-statistically-significant’ difference.
The number of covid-19 infections likely to have been acquired in hospital are rising again for the first time in three weeks and their proportion of all cases has reached record levels for the second wave, HSJ can reveal.
More than 10,000 people acquired coronavirus when they were being treated in hospital for other illnesses, The Telegraph can disclose.
Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said that 139 out of 357 Covid-19 patients they had treated had caught the virus there – 38.9 per cent – with board papers showing that five patients had died.
When children and teens are overwhelmed with anxiety, depression or thoughts of self-harm, they often wait days in emergency rooms because there aren’t enough psychiatric beds.
The problem has only grown worse during the pandemic, reports from parents and professionals suggest.
With schools closed, routines disrupted and parents anxious over lost income or uncertain futures, children are shouldering new burdens many are unequipped to bear.
Categories
Does the NHS really need protecting? – BBC
A quick glance at the latest data on hospital beds shows there were nearly 13,000 beds free at the end of November.
That’s 50% more than last winter.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201202041425/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55151832
- Two-thirds of the private sector capacity that was block-purchased by NHS England was left unused over the summer
- Unprecedented block contracts in place for almost all the private hospital capacity, thought to be worth around £400m per month
- Comes as waiting times for elective care and diagnostic tests have steeply increased
- Capacity to carry out chemotherapy treatment was among that not fully used
- Insiders blame confusion and communication over contracts, and some argue the contracts were not needed
YouTube has removed interview so we have archived the video in the above location. It is currently available on Unlocked Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/unlockedunitedkingdom/videos/vb.112364983833705/409747283542470/
- Despite the fearmongering, the number of Covid-19 deaths is significantly lower than the peak back in April
- Latest ONS estimate shows that in the week ending November 14, new infections were already levelling off
- GCHQ has embedded a team in Downing Street to provide Boris Johnson with real-time updates of Covid-19
- Analysts will sift through vast amounts of data to ensure Boris Johnson has the most up-to-date information
The Imperial model had larger errors, about 5-fold higher than other models by six weeks. This appears to be largely driven by the aforementioned tendency to overestimate mortality. At twelve weeks, MAPE values were lowest for the IHME-MS-SEIR (23.7%) model, while the Imperial model had the most elevated MAPE (98.8%). Predictive performance between models was generally similar for median absolute errors (MAEs)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.13.20151233v5.full
- The vaccine reduces symptoms; may prevent infection but this has not been proven.
- Mass testing is not the way out and could be very problematic.
- Around 1% of the population are infected and probably have no symptoms.
- If you are under 65, there is less risk than the regular flu.
- The number of people dying is the same as any other year.
- People of dying of respiratory diseases is about the same.
- Covid deaths will continue to go up.
- Hospitals are less full because they’ve increased their capacity; they’re not struggling to cope.
- Prevalence for the virus has plateaued.
- We should continue to be careful but COVID-19 is ‘not a major player’
THE fact that Covid cases were already plummeting across London is yet more evidence the new lockdown is a mistake.
Yes, a few hospitals around Britain are under huge strain, as NHS chief Simon Stevens says.
But many have few Covid patients or none.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13122295/the-sun-says-new-national-lockdown-mistake-covid/
* Beds have never been less than 85% full for a three-month period since 2010
* Spring this year was the first time, because patients were turfed out for Covid-19
* And occupancy remains below average levels despite second wave, stat shows
* Boris Johnson has returned to his ‘protect the NHS’ slogan for second lockdown
NHS hospitals in England appear quieter than usual for this time of year even though they are treating more than 9,000 patients with coronavirus.
