A few days ago, The Spectator published a classified ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ from Sage, written back in the summer and fearing a second wave that would claim 85,000 lives, peaking at about 800 deaths a day. A new leak this morning from the Cabinet Office, using current data, paints a far-bleaker picture: 2,000 deaths a day – even 4,000 if no action is taken. The NHS is shown to be just weeks away from being overwhelmed, even if it uses its surge capacity. This is likely to be the document being used on Boris Johnson to urge a national lockdown. It’s worth looking at in some detail.
We have moved away from being two weeks behind France and Spain and are back in the territory of modelling by SPI-M, the group that feeds into Sage. The document, leaked to the BBC, gives dates when the NHS will run out of capacity: first its standard capacity, and then when the NHS Nightingale ‘surge’ hospitals are filled.
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