ITU capacity can be easily overwhelmed. there's just enough beds for a "normal" year, but not geared up for a pandemic.
One of the biggest problems is Covid requires distancing, so you actually lose some beds on a Covid infused ITU ward.
Good news that cases are coming down though.
All capacity can be easily overwhelmed, I doubt many will stomach the cost of adding a third more capacity to leave it empty except in emergency situations. One of the main issues with efficient healthcare services is that efficiency often requires making best use of resources which makes responding to changes in demand difficult.
To repeat though, critical care (as majority of ITU beds are flexibly configured so can jump between ITU and non-ITU critical care) beds have increased in response to the pandemic. The latest peak had a relatively small number of adult critical care beds occupied by patients with covid (around 350), about 200 unoccuppied only available to covid patients. Occupancy excluding only available to patients with covid was about 80% around the norm for critical care. Prior to the pandemic critical care bed numbers weren't routinely collected during summer, the total available around 4200 is significantly higher than prior to the pandemic during winter where bed counts are higher in response to seasonal fluctations.
The challenge for the NHS is primarily workforce with a huge number of vacancies rather than absolute bed numbers.
I was about to post about this FAKE headline but you beat me to it.
The BBC have plunged to new lows; they really are a disgrace.
The headline is completely misleading and their disclaimer that " more recent figures suggest cases may be on the way down" does not excuse their actions and is a huge understatement.
Note their use of words such as "suggests" and "may"; these weasel words were chosen very carefully in order to suit the BBC's agenda.
The BBC say "People are still able to catch the infection even if they have had Covid before"; this is not technically wrong but the wording is, in my opinion, at best incomplete and at worst misleading, as the majority of infections are not reinfections, despite the vast majority of the population having already been exposed to Sars-CoV-2.
The BBC grudgingly admit towards the end of the article that fewer hospital admissions are testing positive and that there are fewer admissions.
The wording of this article is disgraceful, but is entirely consistent with the stance and behaviour I now expect of the BBC. I used to consider the BBC a far more respectable and trustworthy source of information prior to the pandemic, but my confidence in the BBC is now at an all time low and I now finding myself questioning many of their articles, not just Covid ones.
I can't see a name associated with this article. I'd like to see those responsible brought to account and for a full investigation to take place into the BBC's reporting of the pandemic throughout the past couple of years.
The ONS is now the most reliable source for UK covid infections. The only other one attempting to measure UK covid infections is Zoe, but that has the latest peak around the same as early April which was substantially higher in the ONS data than the latest ONS numbers. Possible different proportion of symptomatic infections between the two but could easily be that Zoe finds it harder to evaluate infection probability given symptoms without the subsequent test data.
"suggests" and "may" commonly appear in scientific papers particularly where data is inconclusive or subject to limitations. The covid dashboard case numbers by default are for England so are different to the UK headline. Northern Ireland don't publish case numbers anymore, Wales the different case definition means the numbers flatline compare to England/Scotland, Scotland while published Public Health Scotland refer only to ONS infections in their bulletins as they view it as more reliable and England most cases are from lateral flow tests beyond government guidance. It's hard to know how representative those who still take lateral flow tests are for the wider population, it's plausible that group comparatively would take more precautions during high prevalance so would peak earlier. (For similar reasons the people most likely to be admitted to hospital may also take more precautions so peak earlier than the general population). Dashboard only measures 'new' infections rather than current which peak earlier as well. My guess would be the peak for new infections is roughly right with medium confidence meaning "suggests" rather than "shows".
The BBC have fairly consistently only reported the ONS numbers rather than covid dashboard post the testing change. The original post of this thread is to an article where they don't mention the dashboard numbers even though they would have been increasing. The latest article does while slightly inconsistent is understandable for context that both new or current infections are likely to either peaked already or will soon. It's one of the trade offs of doing less testing that reliable infection data and trends take longer to be confirmed.
I'm not aware of any publicly available reliable data on how many recent infections are reinfections? The dashboard only counts them where both infections are recorded which is unlikely. Methodologies that take into account unrecorded infections, e.g. from ONS data, are likely to show the majority of new infections are now reinfections.
