I know someone who just got handed a guaranteed poor cancer outcome because her preventative surgery will only be done when it’s an emergency later on.
These will be easy to write off as incidental deaths and poor health outcomes which is why they aren’t prioritised as high as covid outcomes. Honestly, staff have complained about this too, but when it comes to triage do you stick a 90 year old on a ventilator or do you reserve the ICU capacity for 10 cancer patients waiting for preventative surgery with a better outcome? That’s the hard decisions being burned for political capital.
The real travesty is we have to choose and that is down to our politicians and the slow wind down of NHS funding and political tennis for the last 30 years.
Had we locked down 2 weeks ago when SAGE said "Lock down now or else!" we'd have fewer people in hospital and more beds for preventative cancer surgery.
Sure, you could go round with a flamethrower burning anyone over the age of 70 for using precious resources just so you could have the pub open for a few more days. Is that your solution?
So the hard questions are never asked for which we sacrifice a good chunk of our population to dwindling cancer care, mental health issues and economic decline. Those scandals can be written off statistically by the next lot.
And yes I’ve had it. And yes I’ve lost three relatives to it. And quite frankly they were all circling the drain already.