TWO-YEAR WAIT FOR SURGERY AS BACKLOG OF OPS NEARS 650,000

months than normal waiting for surgery, disabled and/or in pain, severely affecting their quality of life and also possibly their chances of longevity.”

He added: “This virus will be around for many months.

“Our concern is that we may have more surges and research already shows patients with coronavirus who have operations are less likely to survive.

“It was the right decision to stop operations during the initial stages of the pandemic because we didn’t know enough about what we were dealing with then.

“However, we now need to prepare for the future, including the possibility of second and third spikes in infection rates. We need Covid and non-covid hospital sites so that we can urgently start carrying out operations again – or use private hospitals to do the non-covid work.

“Non-urgent does not mean minor, and delaying these operations leads to a lot of suffering and even death and hugely impaired quality of life for many thousands.”

Even when the three month postponement ends this month, services will be forced to restart at reduced capacity due to the need for deep cleaning equipment and the fact that many hospitals are keeping substantial NHS capacity free in case of another coronavirus spike.

The study estimates that even without a second spike, hospitals will still be running at around an average 20 per cent reduced capacity until mid-september, when they would be able to resume much higher levels of surgery.

The report divided the return to normal surgery into three phases. It estimates the first phase from March to the middle of this month – in which non-urgent surgery is cancelled – will lead to a backlog of 516,462 patients waiting for elective surgery.

During the second phase, from mid-june to mid-september, elective surgery will gradually increase over another three months with an average cancellation rate of 20 per cent.

The study found this reduced capacity will add a further 141,271 patients to the existing backlog.

Finally, during phase three, beginning