Coronavirus Fact-Check #19: Did the NHS REALLY “come close to collapse”?

The UK’s Covid Inquiry just published their third module report, and as per usual the headlines have become hyper focused on one paragraph out of four hundred pages (you can read the full report HERE).

The claim, taken from the introduction by Baroness Hallett, is that the National Health Service “teetered on the brink of collapse” during the alleged Covid pandemic.

Many news outlets have picked up on this, reporting headlines like…

NHS ‘came close to collapse’ during COVID-19 pandemic, inquiry finds

And praising the “superhuman” efforts of the NHS staff.

Is there any truth to this claim?

The bed occupancy stats certainly don’t support it.

Let’s start with the fact  that the NHS regularly operates at or near full capacity in late winter and early spring.

This is just a fact.

The below graph covers the years 2012 to 2025 and shows the number of beds available as blue bars, with the red line indicating the number of beds being used, with the total numbers on the left-hand Y axis, and the percentage on right.

[Source]

As we can see, in the years leading up to 2020 bed occupancy regularly exceeded bed availability.

We can also see that the “pandemic year” of 2020 was the first time in almost ten years that bed occupancy was lower than bed availability.

Yes, lower.

In fact, both the hospital capacity and occupancy were actually purposefully reduced in the spring of 2020 right at the height of the alleged “pandemic,” when  the NHS issued guidance which recommended –

“re-organizing hospital capacity in new ways to treat Covid and non-Covid patients separately”

and acknowledged that

“as a result hospitals will experience capacity pressures at lower overall occupancy rates than would previously have been the case.”

Simply put, in the middle of a “deadly pandemic”, with the NHS “teetering on collapse” they actually reduced bed capacity.

And even despite this deliberately reduced capacity, by mid-April of 2020 NHS hospitals were operating with four times their usual number of empty beds.

Remember the British Government paying for the construction of seven emergency “Nightingale Hospitals” in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Exeter, Harrogate and Sunderland, allegedly to deal with expected overflow of covid cases from regular hospitals?

Well, four of these seven never treated a single “Covid” patient, the three that were used treated a grand total of 388 “Covid” patients in the next two years.

So, was the NHS “teetering on the brink of collapse”?

Well, not in terms of bed occupancy for sure.

This is part of a strain of Covid revisionism which has been doing the rounds recently, and bears careful watching.

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