Do you have a reference for this?
I'm not doubting you but a couple months ago I visited the A&E in Whitechapel for an ankle injury. I asked one of the nurses and the doctor who saw me (they were both lovely but seemed quite stressed) about this and both separately told me there are still too many Covid patients in the hospital. That, and the fact that NHS personnel keep having to isolate.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
The UK has around 150k hospital beds, and 5k mechanical ventilation beds, so its never been about the absolute numbers of Covid patients. It's always been the additional workload due to Covid policies (and that includes staff isolation). Those make sense, if it is deemed that catching and/or spreading Covid is worse than any other healthcare outcome.
So you mean that because there are plenty of hospital beds and ventilators, the system is not overwhelmed?
I see the doctors, nurses and the rest of the staff as part of the system. If there's not enough of them to cope with the demand, then the system is overwhelmed.
The biggest difficulty has been the Covid policies put into place, both inside and outside hospitals. It's difficult, time-consuming, and stressful to follow those policies (both parents work for the NHS, btw), not to mention the number of staff who had to isolate. The social services that would receive many patients after their hospital stay are also overwhelmed/falling apart (probably for similar reasons), so many patients cannot be discharged.
I'll say it again - it all makes sense, if avoiding Covid is the absolute number 1 priority, and if "letting it rip" would have made things worse than they are now.
Not that they were followed particularly well. My dad was in hospital for unrelated reasons, caught COVID and died within 3 days.
I do think that NHS staff did their very best to follow protocols (one of my parents went into great detail about all of the steps they had to go through in between seeing each patient). However, the idea that disposable plastic smocks and perspex screens will do much against an infectious airbourne respiratory virus is just silly on its face.
Really, given the sheer amount of people who caught Covid in hospitals, they should have shut the hospitals and let almost everything else remain open.