Fact-check: is the NHS at risk of being overwhelmed by Covid?

Is it time for another lockdown? Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, is urging ministers to implement sweeping ‘plan B’ winter measures, saying that immediate action is required to prevent the NHS ‘stumbling into a crisis’ arguing that ‘we should try to achieve the kind of national mobilisation that we achieved in the first and second waves, where the public went out of their way to support and help the health service.’

Similar arguments were made to justify the first lockdown – with apocalyptic SAGE scenarios suggesting hospitals would be overwhelmed with a need for 138,000 ventilators (vs a supply of 6,800 ventilators) with a potential need for 72,000 ventilators by November. On this duff advice, the government ordered 30,000 ventilators – only to find the usage of ventilators fall sharply during the pandemic. The lockdown logic was faulty: it did not factor in that people had voluntarily hunkered down long before the 23 March order.