Having read your other post I take this now as sarcasm.

Yip, they're all just lazy, part of the problem, expressive waste, lefty woke snowflakes.
(Just thought I'd join in)

Honest question because I don’t know, but what was an Oncologist/Urology/Cancer consultant- and their team - doing with COVID patients ??

Offering the best care they were able. All hands to the pump sort of thing. It’ll have been difficult even for those working in more immediately relevant areas of medicine, trying to treat patients with a new disease. But they’ll all have some useful/applicable knowledge from their training/rotations.

There’s also things like patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, etc., etc. being routinely treated with immunosuppressive therapies, and managing the additional risks associated with that, developing and implementing new treatment guidelines, which will also have created more work for oncologists, neurologists and other specialists. To be fair, I don’t know how much impact that had overall, but it was something I was quite aware from my work.

You make a good point about teams, as well. There’ll inevitably have been disruption to them and I can easily imagine that’ll have created bottlenecks, or required fewer people to each do more.

Cheers for that, clears things up with me a little, not sure it’s something that can be measured but based on all this there are going to be a lot more deaths from other causes than COVID that would have been avoided under normal circumstances

Do you know if GP’s have had similar roles because a lot of practices don’t seem to be having as many face to face or even telephone consultations- and it sounds like it’s going to be the norm rather than going back to the old ways- and things like telling my 80 year old mother the only way she can book an appointment is via an online service, of which there was not a chance of her doing that.

You think of the intellectual horsepower in the NHS - its huge some of the brightest people in this country work within it. What was the bottleneck that Covid caused that stopped the NHS functioning as normal? ICU all its capacity was used up by Covid patients. In a private company that issue would have been tackled and an alternative strategy devised and implemented pretty quickly and given cost wasn't an issue even more so. Next will be we didn't have the staff - how difficult would it have been to retrain nurses to work in ICU with Covid patients - let's face facts most of them were receiving exactly the same treatment. You could then have deployed your expert ICU nurses/doctors back to doing what they were used to everything carries on?

The idea that the whole resources of a hospital were directed towards Covid doesn't hold water - you would simply wouldn't have the room to house them all. A&E was very quiet - normal surgery non-existent through put was down 80-90% are you seriously suggesting all that excess capacity was all used up managing Covid?

On other matters - there is now a ground swell for unlocking everything earlier given the numbers - Labour want to go with the current timetable. Labour didn't want schools to go back - why because the unions didn't think it was appropriate - have we seen a huge spike since schools returned?

Brexit seems to have quietened quite a lot - to most people it has had no impact to the normality of their existence - which is what Boris told them - Starmer on the other hand said it would be armageddon which as yet hasn't happened. Labour said it was a mistake not joining the European vaccination program - how wrong he was.

Foreign aid - most people would suggest the money is better spent here at the moment - Labour just don't seem to be able to judge the mood at all.

Labour seem to be nowhere - if it was for Boris being sly and underhand with a few things Labour wouldn't have anything to say

Good grief, you've created enough straw men in that post to populate a series of Worzel Gummidge.

Just to acknowledge that I have been looking at this through a fairly narrow window, and I am just some random on the internet.

I think GP surgeries were nervous about becoming infection hotspots, and that contributed to more remote consultations. I’m not really sure, being honest.

I think you raise a good point about your mother and online services. My parents are around that age, just a little bit younger and I know what you mean. I think the pandemic has accelerated a lot of trends, in an already fast changing world, and it is getting difficult for older people to keep up and access the services they need, in both the public and private sectors.

To ZZB:

I think the pandemic was a metaphorical public health tsunami, rather than creating a bottle neck. Not all problems have solutions that allow optimal care for everyone. Like after a battle or a disaster when doctors have to let some people die who they could maybe otherwise save to focus on others with a better chance, or let somebody lose an eye to save somebody else’s life. It really wasn’t just like a bad flu year. Also it went way beyond ICU, there were plenty of very sick people needing care without being on a ventilator. I am seriously suggesting that COVID-19 required A LOT of extra resource and that inevitably affected other elements of healthcare delivery.

I don’t share your confidence that a private company would necessarily have come with a successful alternative strategy, and haven’t seen one suggested. If anything, I’d suggest that track and trace suggests that directing large amounts of public money to the private sector is not necessarily a universal panacea.

Brexit has been swamped by COVID-19. And in fairness, we did avoid a no deal. I mean, it is poop - but it is done. There’s no political mileage for Labour in it, and even the Tories are on fumes in terms of stoking resentment against the EU for enforcing the agreement they campaigned for and signed up to.

Foreign aid - I’m a sceptic. It is often seems to be more about bribery than a real support for ordinary people. Those bribes sometimes aren’t even well-incentivised.

Labour aren’t saying a great deal of substance, I agree. They need at some point to do more than drawing public attention to Carrie Antoinette, Johnson’s inability to redecorate a flat with a public-funded limit of £30,000 and his solution to funding the outstanding £58,000 to get it to a liveable standard. He obviously should have got Marcus Rashford to start a campaign for him. But it is a start and feels like it has got more of a chance than Corbyn’s approach. A low bar, admittedly.

In a post-Brexit, post-Cummings reality, what do you think are the most important Government messages and policies are?

I'm glad you spotted that - It's not even subtle

Some very good point - I take on board your point about the impact of Covid - but I disagree as to how the NHS reacted - it could have been significantly better - the extended waiting lists across all disciplines is testament to that. Stopping vital cancer care seems ridiculous to me - the oncology units are usually separate entities and cancer care is by no means an isolated case.

For me - finish the vaccination program, get the waiting lists down - throw money at it, get kids back to where they should be in terms of learning - again invest but wisely, return society to some degree of normality - no masks etc., clean up the government's act or the perception. Review taxation if we all need to pay more so be it.