Letters: Why lockdown II was necessary

Cancelled procedures

Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’ and ignored Sage’s call for a second national lockdown. Sam Carlisle (‘No respite’, 7 November) illustrates why this would have been a mistake. Sam reminds us that ‘half of community paediatricians were deployed to acute services’ during the pandemic’s first wave. Many other specialists were similarly redeployed. That the NHS was not overwhelmed in the first wave was precisely because most routine work stopped and staff were redeployed en masse to treat Covid-19 patients. Leaving projections aside, there were in fact 13,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital on Sunday 8 November. This is only 7,000 fewer than at the peak. Hospitals in Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Nottingham have already been forced to cancel non-urgent work to ensure that Covid-19 wards and ICUs are adequately staffed. If people believe such cancellations — and the harm they cause to people with conditions other than Covid-19 — are a price worth paying to avoid a severe national lockdown, they should have the courage to acknowledge this trade-off explicitly.
James Wilkinson
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

We need an inquiry

Sir: Rod Liddle highlights the cruelty of transferring elderly patients from hospital into care homes (‘There is no Santa Claus, Sir Patrick’, 7 November), but the real scandal is the lack of NHS beds which made this necessary. We have fewer hospital beds than almost any other European country — Germany, for example, has five times the number per head of population, which explains why its death toll is a quarter of ours. What is more, the reduction of our bed capacity has been an active policy, enthusiastically pursued over the past 30 years despite repeated warnings that it could lead to disaster. Liddle is quite right: when all this is over we need an inquiry into how we arrived at this point, and, more importantly, to take steps to ensure that we are never in this position again.
Dr