A Senior Doctor Writes…
Mon 11:32 am +01:00, 14 Dec 2020
The senior medic who’s a regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics isn’t impressed by the scare-mongering that NHS panjandrums have been doing about the current risks to the service.
Take John Hopson, the CEO of NHS Providers. He produced a Twitter thread on Saturday to publicise a letter he and his deputy, Safron Cordery, have written to the Prime Minister.
Firstly, why is Hopson allowed to give a running commentary in the media about communications to Government? He is employed by the NHS and should not be doing this. Any normal employee would be dismissed for acting in that way.
Or is it just NHS employees who dissent from Covid orthodoxy who are disciplined or fired for speaking out in public?
Hopson and Cordery claim the number of COVID-19 inpatients has increased in the past fortnight – but as you can see from the graphs above, there’s little evidence of that. Their gloomy prognosis depends on trusting the notoriously unreliable community testing data in various hotspots – Essex, Kent, London and parts of Lincolnshire – and predicting that London and the South East and South West are about to witness the same levels of infection and hospital admissions that were seen in parts of the North in September and October.
Number 12 of 18 in Hopson’s interminable twitter rant exposes the real reason behind the NHS pressure on the Government for further lockdown intensification.
That is a tacit acceptance of planning failure – all these problems were entirely predictable (and indeed predicted) in the summer. Hopson and his mates failed to do anything effective about it. They only had five months…
They are clutching at straws to conceal their own incompetence – effectively blaming the public for the problem and implying that locking everyone up again is the only solution.
The rational approach if they are short of beds is to scale back routine work – annoying I know, but that’s less bad than crashing the economy again. NHS executives don’t want to do that because it exposes their woeful inadequacies as managers. They prefer to blame the public – hence a lockdown of convenience. I seriously expect them to play this card each and every winter from now on.
I do know there are current bed problems in London but they are not due to increased Covid admissions on the basis of their own figures released up to 8th Dec.
It’s the usual increased winter admissions from the elderly “acute on chronic” maladies.
Needless to say, Hopson fails to mention the 20% nosocomial spread – mainly among the elderly, spread by infectious staff and patients who have not been properly segregated.
This is a problem of their own making and the shroud waving is a classic NHS management tactic to divert attention and avoid accountability.
Rather than listen to these doom-mongers, the Government should scrap PCR mass testing altogether and replace it with lateral flow tests as a mass screening tool with any positive cases thrown up by LFT verified by a PCR test done in a proper NHS lab (not an ersatz Lighthouse Lab) with a cycle threshold below 35.
Of course, there will be a lot of resistance to that because it would require the DOH to accept it had pissed £22 billion of taxpayers up the wall, handing it out to Dominic Cummings’ mates for no proper reason.
https://lockdownsceptics.org/
