In the U.K. we are facing threats once again of restrictions and vaccine passports being imposed over winter should the prospect of an ‘overwhelmed’ NHS be sounded by the Government’s medical advisers in the coming weeks.
But how realistic is this threat of health service ‘collapse’? South Korea is currently providing an object lesson in how the concept appears to be very much in the eye of the beholder.
The South East Asian country has been experiencing a spike in reported infections in recent weeks as the Delta variant has become dominant, hitting over 3,000 in one day for the first time on September 24th.
Three thousand ‘cases’ is very low, of course, compared to our 30,000 or so since early July, and the country is similar in size to the U.K., with a population of 52 million to our 67 million.
While the country does do less testing, deaths are also very low, with daily confirmed deaths currently between just five and 10 a day.
Excess mortality has also remained low throughout the pandemic, currently sitting at around 6% having been negative over the winter.
Despite these enviable Covid stats, though, the country is currently living under various Covid restrictions and the Government has said that while it plans to reopen, it will reverse course should ‘cases’ go above 4,000 per day. Why? According to the Government’s Minister of Health, Kwon Deok-cheol, the South Korean “healthcare system would not be able to cope with 4,000 or 10,000 new confirmed cases per day”.
At a Korea Broadcasting Journalists Club roundtable on Tuesday, Minister of Health and Welfare Kwon Deok-cheol said that South Korea’s medical response system would be “sufficiently capable” of handling a daily caseload of 3,000 or more confirmed cases and that the country would be able to proceed with a gradual return to everyday life, provided that the Government’s late-October targets of fully vaccinating 80% of adults and 90% of senior citizens are met.
He also said that the shift toward a “living with Covid” approach was not hasty, noting that while the U.K. began its gradual return to normal life while its full vaccination rate was just 1.6%, whereas South Korea had a full vaccination rate of 46.6% as of Tuesday.
But he also noted that observation of basic disease prevention guidelines such as wearing masks indoors and regularly ventilating indoor spaces would remain necessary, saying that “our healthcare system would not be able to cope with 4,000 or 10,000 new confirmed cases per day.”
“For that reason, we are considering a phased easing [of restrictions] – based on business types, for example – rather than a full-scale elimination [of said restrictions],” he added.
Vaccine passports are also being considered, apparently in order to protect the unvaccinated.
The South Korean government similarly explained that with the 976 critical care beds and 10,212 beds for patients with moderate symptoms that it had secured as of Tuesday, the South Korean healthcare system would be able to cope with as many as 3,500 new confirmed cases per day.
In addition to relaxing restrictions on private gatherings for fully vaccinated people and gradually removing restrictions on the use of multipurpose facilities, Kwon also said consideration was being given to the adoption of “vaccine passes,” where only fully vaccinated people or other restricted categories of people would be allowed to use certain establishments during the initial stages of the gradual return to everyday life.
He went on, saying that Germany grants permission for indoor events or use multipurpose facilities such as hospitals, long-term care facilities, nightlife establishments, and cinemas only to people who present a pass that certifies they have been either fully vaccinated, have tested negative for Covid, or have fully recovered from a previous Covid infection.
“With confirmed cases currently being observed among unvaccinated people – many of them leading to critical symptoms and even death – we are considering applying such an approach, if only to protect these people,” he said.
I have to say it is bizarre to read the same worries about ‘cases’ getting too high and putting unsustainable pressure on the health service in a country which is experiencing a fraction of our reported infections and an even smaller fraction of our deaths. How can we take this seriously when South Korea has more than three times the number of hospital beds that the U.K. has, 10 per 1,000 population compared to three per 1,000?
Nations whether in the East or West are now being held hostage by their health services and their supposed capacity to cope with coronavirus surges. But it’s clear from the very different scales of these supposed capacity threats in different countries that this spectre of an overwhelmed and collapsing health service is largely a figment of the political imagination.
No doubt a winter Covid wave can stretch a health service considerably. But if even England in January had thousands of empty hospital beds on January 18th, when the number of Covid hospital patients hit 39,254, and did not ‘collapse’ (and the Nightingale hospitals remained empty), then it’s difficult to see how the threat is in any way a realistic one. At that winter peak, Covid patients occupied less than a third of the total hospital beds (31%), while 8,696 beds remained unoccupied. Besides which, if winter hospital capacity is the crucial issue for lockdowns and other measures, would it not be a whole lot cheaper and more effective just to boost it more?
Lockdown proponents will claim that the U.K. winter wave was mitigated by restrictions. But the truth is the U.K. suffered one of the biggest winter surges in the world, regardless of what measures were in place in other countries. States in America with few or no restrictions such as Florida and South Dakota, and light-touch Sweden, did not suffer worse winters. There is thus nowhere that lockdown proponents can point to and say, look, that’s what would have happened here if we hadn’t locked down. There is no reason to think that without restrictions the U.K.’s winter surge would have ended up much worse.
While governments around the world continue to hold the threat of an overwhelmed health service over their populations as a kind of political blackmail (albeit often sincerely believed), the experience of South Korea shows that the threat is ill-defined, largely illusory, and not a sound basis for imposing illiberal measures and ruinous restrictions.
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But we all know the NHS will say it’s being overwhelmed like it does every single year and of course with this.. restrictions return in greater force and passports come in to play. Where I work they have returned to masks because of a “surge” and once again people accept it despite vaccines. There is no hope for a free future and a return to normal and we can’t say they didn’t warn us when they went on about “our new normal” in the first three weeks to flatten the curve.
Yes, I can’t be the only person who looked at the other article ATL, the ONS mask study and immediately thought it was a Government advertisement of what’s coming next!?
Since that study was publicised I have noticed a marked uptick in mask usage in supermarkets near me.
Yes I have noticed more masks in supermarkets too
Especially in Masks & Spencer! <grin>
….
Made worse by many people being forced to quit the job because they can’t/won’t be jabbed. And all the beds that were removed to give ‘covid’ more space.
We could consider telling them to GFT?
And ignore their BS “restrictions”,
I’m in Florida. Almost no masks. That’s because the population has been told they don’t work. It’s just Karen’s and poor old employees wearing them, even inside buildings. Lovely seeing heaving restaurants with few masks.
News Flash: UK Hospitals are always ‘overwhelmed’ in Winter as they will be this year also.
. . . and the drama will continue.
How odd.
In a Daily Sceptic article the other day ( https://dailysceptic.org/2021/09/28/community-masking-where-did-the-science-come-from/ ) they reproduced a FT graph from early 2020 “demonstrating” how mask wearing in South Korea and neighbouring countries cuts cases.
In the picture for this article the few South Koreans shown are wearing masks.
A shame the FT won’t now explain why mask wearing in South Korea hasn’t prevented their case explosion.
Perhaps the “delta variant” is “different” and doesn’t bother with masks? Or will the FT dream up another explanation?
In truth, facts don’t matter to the “experts” and the “authorities”…
Snap
A correlation which accords with the approved narrative = causation
A correlation which is counter to the approved narrative (or a lack of correlation where there should be one, according to the approved narrative) = total coincidence, nothing to see here…
The FT has been a dependable provider of medical misinformation over the last 18 months.
South Korea – isn’t that one of the countries where mask zealots tell us their rates of infection show us how effective masks are? How is that going then?
I see the twitchy trolls are still busy.
Bear in mind the NHS is “overwhelmed” if it has a bed usage of above 90-95% of full capacity.
They try and keep surgery patients separate from medical patients, each part having spare capacity in case of emergencies.
If there is an increased need for medical beds then some medical patients may be moved onto surgical wards as “outliers”. Surgical ward staff don’t like this as they’re not used to medical cases. The medical doctors don’t like it because they remain responsible for these patients and hence have to have rounds on a surgical ward.
Then there’s the phenomenon of granny dumping which occurs in December and January.
Bed blocking due to the lack of social care.
All of these taken together means that patients are held in A&E until beds are available, however, they are not admitted in to hospital until they get to the ward.
Of course they can always discharge patients early as they did in 2020.
On a light note, they definitely don’t like it: 40 years on from my hospital jobs I still get nightmares about having patients on outlying wards that I’ve forgotten about for days! It never happened in real life, fortunately.
Usually the surgical nurses would start panicking and bleeping the medical SHO or registrar or even the consultant within about 10 minutes of the expected round time, and vice versa, except the medical nurses it would be within 5 minutes!
They can them home early with triple strength Midazolam, that should do the trick.
Where did the 10,000 beds go that were supplied to the Nightingale hospitals?
Just physical beds doesn’t do it.
The definition of a bed is one with sufficient medical staff to care for its occupant.
That’s what they haven’t bothered to fix, because they want the pressure to happen.
“Discharge patients early as they did in 2020″…Yes. Killing my father in the process.
Seeing the countries who seemingly did so well at the beginning of this crisis starting to struggle makes me enormously happy. Am I a bad person?
I suppose from the perspective that people might become ill and die, I guess yes, but in reality South Korea isn’t really struggling in any meaningful way. I do sort of get where you are coming from though.
s korea is still doing very well < 3k deaths due to covid19.
Edited for accuracy.
“Doing very well” Did other countries “do” badly then? Are you implying that anything any country “did” actually made a difference?
You need to enable your totalitarian bullshit filter.
Mine automatically replaces “NHS will be overwhelmed”” with “heath workers might have to work hard for a bit”.
Most times I don’t even notice the original scare propaganda.
but they are all “frontline heroes” now – not mere ‘health workers’
Perhaps we should be silent as s korea has done very well, total deaths < 3k.
Much more likely S.Korea doesn’t lie so blatantly about cause of death, as unlike in the UK, the SK government doesn’t want a high level of Covid deaths whether real or imagined.
It was clear from very early on, that Boris and his team of liars were looking to make every death a Covid death. It increased the fear so it could it rule by decree and then go on to jab every arm with one or more of the several Gates depopulating agents., totally all reference to the Nuremberg Code and all other human protocols enshrining human rights.
This winter will be a nightmare in the UK as the government cranks up the restrictions to a new level and of course, there will be a whole host of engineered shortages.
Please tell us what South Korea did so well that other countries didn’t do.
Pre existing immunity.
But, but how can this be?
They all wear masks in South Korea and they have magical warding properties.
It can only help then to sack all your care workers, and have an open consultation, currently active, seeking to apply to make a vaccine for both Flu and Covid compulsory, so that thousands more are forced to resign?
They Know it’s not about public health
We Know it’s not about about public health
They Know that We Know………
Its all psyops and puppet governments isint it. The fact that the NHS didnt invite the media in to see them ‘overwhelmed’ last winter, as they do every year, was enough proof that they weren’t. Wonder if the media will be invited in this year to see a few people lying in corridors as per usual.
And when intrepid individuals secretly entered hospitals to film empty wards and reception areas and complete absence of emergency ambulances coming and going, this was always explained with the nonsensical response that all staff and patients were somehow beavering away (creating TikTok videos no doubt!) in secret, closeted inaccessible Covid wards elsewhere in the hospital. They always failed to explain where genuine A&E cases and routine outpatient treatment were being dealt with and why there was no signage telling them where to go.
Our hospital bed availability is only 40% per head of three decades ago – opening Nightingale hospitals was useless because we didn’t have the staff either. The staff situation is going to be much worse than a year and a half ago because of the government’s abusive treatment and lies. I’d be inclined not to doubt there is a problem.
“opening Nightingale hospitals was useless because we didn’t have the staff either.”
The Nightingale hospitals were always an unnecessary expense. There were never going to be sufficient patients to justify them and I’m sure this was known at the time. 30,000 retired, experienced NHS staff put their names forward to increase staffing numbers during ‘the crisis’ and either were never contacted or the procedure involved filling in a form with multiple questions with tick boxes, many of which could not be ticked. (e.g. confirm you have attended a diversity course in the past three years – questions of that ilk). I recall one retired senior doctor, who put his name forward, complaining that because he couldn’t tick some boxes, he was offered a job as a car park attendant!
It seems it was never intended to take on extra staff, probably because the PTB knew the whole staff shortages issue was a simple publicity contrivance to sustain the ’emergency’ narrative.
South Korea borders North Korea which is an ally of China. China has recently threatened both Japan and Australia with nuclear attack. North Korea is currently firing rockets into the sea of Japan.
Does anybody else look around the world at what is happening and think that we may be witnessing the start of World War 3, a war not just fought conventionally but also biologically?
We should ask the 1% mega rich what their goal is
I did read somewhere that America spent about 2.8 Trillion in Afganistan. That’s American taxpayer money. Where did it all go? Not back to the taxpayer. War definitely benefits certain people.
They’ve stolen not only the wealth of working people, but generations of wealth far into the future. Hence (I believe) the need for a ‘reset’ and this cascade of deception we’ve been witnessing for the last 18 months. They’ve robbed us blind, now they’re going to imprison and kill us to protect themselves.
Better question, what was it all for? Answer, to control the poppy trade.
This is what Catherine Austin-Fitts calls the Banking War Economy. The Fed prints money, the elites force wars. Their buddies in the military-industrial complex make military materiel which then gets deliberately wasted ideally achieving nothing. Massive profits wash back to the 0,01%. Rinse & repeat for 20y. That’s why the ending of the Cold War required a new enemy. Soon they found the “War on Terror”, requiring a bit of investment in self immolation which was blamed on the towel heads. There’s no end to that one but it doesn’t scare the population enough, so they started practising with viruses & other infectious threats around 1993, in parallel with terrorism.
These bastards have been rehearsing the takeover of the real economy for decades.
Apparently, it’s getting too tricky to run the black economy & the one we see in democracies any more. So the best solution is to delete the democracy parts.
North Korea’s rocket-firing is just its usual attention-seeking. China has no interest in it, especially now Australia is now a kind of ally of China in the sense that it has copied CCP authoritarianism.
Doesn’t look as though the conventional bit will be needed.
The original lie, used by governments around the world to maintain the illusion that Covid is somehow different from all other diseases.
“Hospitals overwhelmed” has become a phrase which is used to close down all arguments by the lockdown fetishists. The phrase has been used right from the start of this pandemic, the reason being that anybody questioning it can quickly be accused of being uncaring. Of course, we all know it’s complete BS!
Though how the same morons will continue to peddle this idea when 80%+ of the population has been so-called vaccinated will be an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance to observe.
Oh sorry I forgot, delta variant.
And on a completely different topic,
South Korea had given a first dose of the vaccine to about a third of the population by the end of July, but over the last two months have stepped up efforts and they’ve now given a first dose to 3/4 of the population and have double jabbed about half.
Funny how it works.
OK so the cases may be due to the 2 week window of strongly negative vaccine efficacy following dose one, as seen in the Pfizer trials and the Danish study https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.08.21252200v1 which may also explain Gibraltar, Seychelles, Uruguay, Mongolia and many other countries that had no material issues with COVID until their vax campaigns started.
You can add Thailand to that list
Hold a mo, are you telling me I had to wait 4 more months to get my kidney stone issue dealt with, 4 more months of the worst agony a man can have, and there were upwards of 9k beds sitting empty? Excuse me? I want whoever was in charge of Health fired! Wait, he resigned after his boss said he did a great job because of an affair. Not because of my and millions of others sufferings. I want to scream!
Yes this winter will be worse because flu will be back. And in certain areas people will be in the halls (as they have been for 2 decades as we squashed our beds total). Other areas will be sitting with empty beds, as they did during Covid. The whole system is broken and I’m not doing a 4th lockdown to save it. We just have it billions more, fix your own darn problems!
Every winter even before Covid the NHS has been “overwhelmed”.
The lockdown zealots will use it as an excuse to bring in more unnecessary draconian measures.
This is not about controlling a virus akin to a bad flu (for some) but controlling the masses for other nefarious reasons.
Just because hospitals are overwhelmed in flu season, it does not provide justification for wrecking the lives of the vast majority of perfectly healthy people. Sorry, but with the money they have wasted they could have knocked down every hospital in the country and built new ones. Covid is a hoax, there is no justification for anything they have done, criminal activity has been present and clear since day one, and if this carries on it’s going to get very nasty. Please can we just get on with prosecuting those who are doing this.
I’m sick to death of hearing about Covid. I want it removed from my life. I want my old life back!
I also want to be 25 again: I just don’t know which of these is more likely!
Testing may be less than in this country – but that line graph looks a hell of a lot like a casedemic.
Orwellian reasoning and flogging a dead horse.
Must be a cockup….
Germany had underutilized hospitals in 2020 (67%) and WITH Covid patients occupied only 2% all bed days and 3.4% of all ICU (hospitals deliberately and fraudulently reduced ICU capacity by 30% to get more gov money, otherwise also 2%) days.
If anyone ever believes the ‘health systems overwhelmed through Covid’ lie and the ensuing need for a response, please have them call me for those bridges and phone numbers of the Nigerian princes.
“Bizarre claim” Not really – it’s an excellent argument to use to get what you want – more power, keep the pandemic going, tell people you are doing it for their own good. It’s only bizarre if you seriously believe that any government is sincerely trying to protect public health.
I’ve often wondered what the bogeyman of an overwhelmed Health Service would actually look like – or perhaps better, what it would have looked like last March when we locked down instead. The corridors could have been overflowing, maybe – or emergency laws could have been forced through closing the hospitals to admissions, in which case people would have been dying at home, rather than because they were over-ventilated on ICUs or neglected in corridors. Not a pretty situation, but actually home is where most of the excess deaths are happening right now from cancer, heart disease and so on, and few are visited by doctors.
Even if the hospitals looked like the worst pictures from Italy, and body bags lined the car-parks, the epidemic would have burned itself out in weeks, the bodies would be buried, and the NHS would have quickly got back to normal, because most of the staff, all the infrastructure and even the waiting lists would have remained in place.
As it is the NHS appears to be chronically overwhelmed directly because of the measures taken to prevent it being acutely overwhelmed. And that is worse, not better.
It would have made no difference because lockdown didn’t slow transmission.
We know this for certain.
Is this using the definition of “cases” where people have to be told that they’re sick?
Incidentally, have a DuckDuckGo (or even a Google) for “NHS 2 weeks from collapse”.
It’s always been 2 weeks from collapse, and it always will be.
I would argue that the NHS has already “collapsed”. They’re completely unable to provide a satisfactory service in pretty much every area. It wasn’t ideal before lockdown but it’s been decimated now.
Multiply decimated!
The country has been systematically looted over the years, the utilities which other countries bought from us, our bills are literally being used to pay their own citizens pensions and what is left, the greedy are keeping for themselves.
Anyone else getting censored searches on Bitchute?
Slowly, ordinary people are wising up to the lies of the ‘civil servant/MSM who cried crisis’ over the past 18 months.
There’s only so many times when services “are about to collapse” yet don’t and actually go about their business relatively normally (but mostly ineffectively) before people wonder why NHS managers and their friends in the legacy/left wing media keep peddling the lie of services stretched to ‘breaking point’.
It seems some of us have a far better BS detector than others, and also who have more courage to speak up.
“Nations whether in the East or West are now being held hostage by their health services and their supposed capacity to cope with coronavirus surges.”
It has sod all to do with health and capacity and everything to do with getting shots in arms.
Clearly S. Korea is only just getting ‘on message’.
Powerful video by Tanya Davis Australian Liberal MPTanya Davies MP – Mandatory Covid Vaccines are Unlawful and Side Effects Are NOT a Conspiracy Theory 30-9-2021 – videobanned.nl
Pick an arbitrary number. Make it sound scientific. Most people fall for it. It all seems so surprisingly easy.
Who brags about being incompetent?
For the sake of accuracy: SK is an East Asian country not a SE one. Peace out
Follow the Agenda and you will create the chaos. Easy.
Google “Why the Government wants to destroy the NHS” to find some of the answers.
Therefore keep plugging away at the fact that these ”infections” are not necessarily that at all – that they’re not hospital admissions or even sick people, but the just the result of using a not-fit-for-purpose ‘test’ that doesn’t diagnose ”infection” – that’s usually carried out on healthy people, or those in hospital with other problems.
“No doubt a winter Covid wave can stretch a health service considerably.”
If I remember correctly, we’ve only had one so-called “winter Covid wave” in history to date.
This is part of the problem. Even DS is now accepting and using the terminology… it’s a “Covid wave”.
Nope. It’s a seasonal respiratory infection peak that has been happening in winter for millennia, hijacked and renamed by Mr. Global and the cabal used to inflict outright terror on a gullible and naive population using a massive propaganda drive previously unseen via MSM et al.
We are screwed!
Especially if even DS is now toeing the line and has adjusted its terminology to the official propagandist narrative.
What this tells us is that the SK gov is lying to get jabs and jab ID in place. And that our malevolent masters will carry on doing the same.
We all know that.
That’s why I gave up on DS months ago.
i shared what I regarded as proof beyond reasonable doubt that the whole thing is a manipulated fraud with several leading actors around DS, editors, writers & contributors.
They’re unwilling to even consider it, still making excuses for the authorities. Saying “it was an over reaction & everything else is cover up”.
i can’t distinguish in this response water carrying for criminals or self deception.
Its depressing. If I can’t persuade those immersed in it that it’s a huge crime, forget about persuading a normie (like me in 2019).
Once again, this hinges on the definition of cases. If by case they mean its real definition which is an infection that has symptoms so severe that they need treatment, then that does not compare to here in the UK where we wrongly call a case a positive test for infection which just means an 80% accurate positive infection result where the majority of people will have minor symptoms which require no treatment. These are not cases and just part of our government’s propaganda to exaggerate the severity of the virus and develop their scare tactics.
Failed O-level geography, I see.
One would think the Uk gov’t would be eager to offer the early treatments for Covid that have shown success in reducing serious illness, hospitalisations and deaths. Merck and Pfizer are now trialling their versions of these early treatments. It will be interesting to see how much they charge for their magic oral pills. A five day course of ivermectin costs $1.80.