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