Wards are full of (mostly) non-Covid patients.
A&E have nowhere to put the ill guys who rock up/are sent in by GPs so they are stuck in A&E for 6-24+ hours waiting for a ward bed to appear.
For 20+ years hospital development has been run on a "shorter stays on average" basis (more use of day surgery, faster recoveries from less invasive procedures), with bed occupancy increasingly close to or juat above 100%.
So overall bed numbers fell.
Add in 8 years of austerity/'efficiency gain' and a gradually more multimorbid population and the system was at creaking point before Covid appeared.
Now we have the same hospitals with less bed availability due to infection control measures/staff shortages (and believe me that's gonna get a lot worse)/social work doing less with less resources/ a care sector on its backside.
And it's November.
The only real lever hospitals can pull is stopping/delaying elective procedures.
And that often ends up simply having more presentations in extremis months down the line.
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