It's been a terrible season for respiratory infections (RSV, Covid, Flu) and gastro bugs, the most vulnerable can't afford to eat, let alone turn on the heating, and social care availability has been in decline for a decade, worsening significantly in the past year, nuking front-door availability at hospitals, doctors and the transport they rely on.<p>All of which I mean to say: No. Shit. Sherlock.<p>It's all so painfully obvious to anyone paying attention. The doctors and nurses and care homes and mental health workers have all been screaming about this for a decade. Cuts upon cuts upon redirected funding upon private providers upon universal credit cutting benefits upon cuts and failures and all that before covid, all before inflation lowering everyone's incomes.<p>We need to hire. We need to train. We need to retain. We need to build. We need to instill the fact that care home workers, pastoral carers for our elderly are such bloody important roles because without them helping people live outside hospital, nobody else gets seen. We need to pay them, we need to pay them to pick up shit and talked to dementia sufferers more than Jeff Bezos can pay them to pack boxes.<p>If we can't do that… It's over. But we need to have a serious conversation about what we actually want to do with the infirm in this country. Letting them freeze to death in their own homes feels like state-mandated euthanasia without the "eu". Huh, a wild Brexit joke appeared.<p>We need a General Election.
Could covid be the last straw to the NHS that A&E can't serve patients in a timely manner?<p>I have experience the 48 minutes ambulance wait second hand. A friend of mine was having heartache and called ambulance. He was told to wait for 45 minutes. His wife insisted to drive him straight to A&E instead. The moment he steps out of his car he crashed. That's was about 20 minutes after the emergency call. Had he waited longer he would be gone.<p>On another occasion, I had simultaneously received a letter from NHS, telling me to return for minor operation, and a phone call from doctor, telling me no further follow up needed. I can't reach the doctor through phone call so I go for the consultation anyway. Turns out the hospital did schedule an appointment for me, a different doctor did prepare to perform a biopsy on me, upon further clarification, the doctors did discharge me. I wonder how much is it due to the system being overwhelmed, how much is just normal error.
Headline> Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years<p>Article> [2022] represents one of the largest excess death levels outside the pandemic in 50 years.<p>Article> Though far below peak pandemic levels…<p>2022 is not even “the worst in 3 years” which would be a reasonable inference from their headline.
It'll still probably take a few more years to get the full picture of what the cost of the lockdowns was since it takes so long for the statistics to be collated.<p>For example, turns out the lockdowns got one of my family members by making it difficult to get a diagnosis on what turned out to be a cancer. Hopefully the 6 months (approx) delay on getting it dealt with doesn't turn out to be important.
Sweden has no excess deaths in 2022.<p><a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...</a>
We've had 3 years of reduced exercise, and people are 'making up' for being cooped up by engaging in more activities that they couldn't before. Taking those road trips, going to that amusement parks, snowboarding, mountain biking, etc.<p>Not to mention supply chain shortages in medical and medical-adjacent fields, paramedics, etc. at a time where some people have overlooked long COVID symptoms<p>As well as an economic depression at a time where we're suffering a cultural PTSD from the previous few years.<p>Even if COVID isn't found directly responsible for these deaths, I suspect it is indirectly responsible.
It may be relevant and of interest to readers around the world to learn how we in Britain access the NHS, our envy-of-the-world National Health Service.<p>The main way is via your allocated General Practitioner (GP). To see a GP you need to telephone the GP's place of work, known as a surgery, and to have any chance of getting a same day appointment you need to call at 8am precisely. Don't call at 7.59 because you won't be connected, and don't leave it until 8.01 because it will be far too late. Call within the first few seconds after 8am and you'll be informed that you're in a queue, behind several dozen earlier callers.<p>After an hour of waiting you'll get through to a non-medical receptionist who will ask you about your symptoms, and make a judgement about whether or not you or your child is worthy of one of the few remaining appointments for that day. If you're a very pushy mother, or someone who really enjoys talking with GPs' receptionists (which most people don't) then you may have some success in this. If you're just a chilled out guy who doesn't like to fuss, you've got no chance.<p>You'll then be informed that to make an appointment for a later date you need to try again for a same-day appointment the next day by repeating the process above the following morning. It is not possible to arrange an appointment for any time further in the future no matter how long you are prepared to wait.<p>The <i>only</i> other means of accessing the NHS is by rocking up at the Accident and Emergency (A&E) department of your nearest large enough hospital. Unsurprisingly given the above, these are rather busy and you may be waiting for a day or so before you get seen. To avoid adding to this delay you should make you own way to A&E because ambulances routinely take several hours to reach you for the most urgent cases (heart attacks, stokes etc) or up to a few days for, say, a fallen elderly person, and on reaching the hospital you wont be able to leave the ambulance and enter the A&E department for up to another day.<p>However, once you're in the system and being seen by a specialist then by all accounts you do get fairly well looked after, so putting in the hours at A&E or regularly playing the GP telephone lottery may well prove worth your while if you wish to make use of our envy of the world NHS.
I think the societal response to this implies that after 3 years of adapted behavior to limit risk of excess death, people are kind of done.<p>There better be at least a decade until the next pandemic, at this point even the black death wouldnt convince people to go back into lock down.
I read a paper in 2016 that was attempting to understand if there was a human cost to Austerity.<p>They succeeded in finding a causal link between austerity measures and increased mortality.<p>At the end of the paper they estimated that 120,000+ people have died as a result. Additionally: that the the rate of excess deaths was increasing year on year.<p>There is an issue with highlighting this;<p>For starters, many people are very likely to bury their heads in the sand:<p>* "How do you know that it's related to Austerity" (not reading the paper)<p>* "They would have died anyway"<p>* "The world is different from the time period it is modelled from" (it corrects for this by comparing also to other roughly equivalent economies)<p>* "The UK is different than other advanced economies!"<p>The other issue is that it sounds so insane and conspiratorial.<p>120,000 is a large number. It's approximately the size of Stratford upon Avon.<p>A follow up study puts the number now closer to 330,000, around the population of Coventry.<p>Somehow people will blame the NHS for not being efficient, though evidence to the contrary exists throughout its history, often being one of the most cost effective healthcare systems in operation; or that COVID is a contributing cause to these figures.<p>People are unwilling to hear this: This was a problem well before the pandemic.<p>Source (2017): <a href="https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722" rel="nofollow">https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722</a><p>Source (2022): <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_885099_en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_885099_en.html</a>
I'm surprised it's not fentanyl. I work at a homeless shelter and there isn't a week that goes by when I'm not either trying to recessitate a client who has overdosed or finding their dead body.<p>It's an epidemic, and it's killing males and females who should be in the prime of their lives.
"<i>Data indicates pandemic effects on health and NHS pressures are among the leading explanations.</i>"<p>Relevant charts from the BBC and FT (Financial Times) reveal the pressure on the UK's health service:<p>- Annual changes in health spending in the UK (BBC): <a href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/16A6D/production/_128218729_optimised-healthcare-spending-annual-bars-nc-3.png.webp" rel="nofollow">https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/16A6D/production...</a><p>- Deep lasting cuts to UK health spending (FT): <a href="https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223936848629760/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223936848629760/...</a><p>- Waiting hospital lists (FT): <a href="https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223967903260673/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223967903260673/...</a><p>This twitter thread from FT journalist John Burn-Mordoch is an damning and eye-opening look at NHS statistics (Dec 2022):<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223922474627073" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223922474627073</a>
Now that the BBC has mentioned it, is the Govt going to do a proper investigation of why and do something to fix it?<p>Covid, Covid vaccines or not, excess deaths should be falling because the excess deaths of previous years should mean a deficit of excess deaths in the following years.<p>Something has gone deeply wrong and the Govt is doing nothing and leaving the underlying causes to BBC speculation.<p>These figures should also be analyzed properly by age group, something the BBC journalists are clearly not interested in even though they have the resources to do.
I looked into normalized deaths per capita a while back, sometime late/post pandemic. What was oddly fascinating for me to see is the figures in the early 90s were actually a tad worse than during the pandemic. But progressively since the 90s the death rates have been consistently improving, bar covid.<p>Of course this data reflects the actual lockdowns experienced and not any what-if of the impact of death rates if we continued covid without lockdown.<p>1. <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/deathsintheukfrom1990to2020" rel="nofollow">https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...</a>
Last time I got heavily downvoted for this, but please if you're in the UK do not rely on the NHS. Indeed, you cannot rely on the NHS. There is no knowing whether or not they will have the capacity to save you.
My Great Aunt in Scotland had the flu, which was so bad she had chest pain. She went to her GP who told her to go to A&E. Even with her GP informing the hospital she was coming, and that she had chest pain it took her 14 hours to get a bed.<p>Absolute madness. The system is bursting at the seams. It appears that the UK is breaking apart in so many different ways; the budget, health system, education, etc.<p>I'm not sure a change of government will solve all of this.
something I keep seeing in the comments. is people blaming the gvt for not training more doctors. and yet keep forgetting that students have to incentivized to train as doctors i.e there has to be hope for better pay, better working conditions which are currently not on offer right now.<p>so the smart kids, who might have chosen medicine chose other fields. economics at play - allocation of scarce resources.<p>the only thing that keeps NHS humming in terms of doctors / nurses is due to those professions being recruited from 3rd world countries.
One day the world will wrap its head around the fact that having COVID affects your immune system long-term and as such is bad for future health outcomes.<p>Welcome to my TED talk. Wear a mask.
> type of Covid vaccine has been linked to a small rise in cases of heart inflammation and scarring (pericarditis and myocarditis). But this particular vaccine side-effect was mainly seen in boys and young men, while the excess deaths are highest in older men - aged 50 or more.<p>Alternative explanation. You only see the heart inflammation in young men because its unusual. In older people you already have it because of age so extra inflammation could go undetected.
What a shitty article. No mention of the cuts to the NHS by the tories and the effect that had on its ability to serve the public but they make it seem like this is a side effect of the covid vaccines? What the actual fuck.
This is not just an UK phenomenon though. You can find reports from countries from all the continents, except for Africa. It seems they fared the best in the last 3 years notwithstanding all the apocalyptic news headlines in early 2020 predicting a blood bath once Covid reached them.
Is this really a mystery still? Well we know we can't blame it on fats anymore, our governments have tried that completely failed trope for 70 years now. And looks where it's gotten us. Heart disease is killing western diet eaters like there's really no tomorrow. I think it's obvious that constantly high insulin is the biggest driver of vascular disease. Hyperinsulinemia precedes diabetes and is measurable 10-20 years before your a1c will detect pre diabetes. This drives virtually all diseases of "modern western man/person" - heart attacks, stroke, dementia, connective tissue diseases, diabetes. It's insulin!<p>Low fat diets high in refined carbs disrupting the absorption of k, d, e, a. sugary beverages with zero fiber, 3 meals and 5 snacks a day so your insulin levels never come down even at night sometimes. Your body can never repair itself or stop storing fat instead of using them. 3 meals and 5 snacks a day= zero ability to distinguish cravings and real hunger. Being told to gobble 5+ fruits a day by every dietician. Fruits bear in the winter, we live in climate controlled buildings. Why are we gobbling so much fructose from 5+ fruits a day.