Fears NHS has become the National Covid Service

Planet Normal is 25! We’ve reached our quarter century, having recorded 25 episodes of our weekly podcast, which is released every Thursday. Our rocket of right thinking, our capsule of common sense, first blasted off in May, during the first Covid lockdown. Since then, 25 guest interviewees have climbed aboard the Planet Normal spaceship, including a string of scientists, policymakers and commentators questioning the Government’s approach to fighting this pandemic.

We’ve given voice, also, to frontline NHS staff – including our latest guest, “Clare” (not her real name), an experienced GP who worries the NHS has become “a National Covid Service”, with non-covid patients losing out.

New research indeed indicates that between January and August, some 4.7 million fewer people were referred to hospital in England, compared with the same eight-month period in 2019. Numbers granted routine NHS operations – such as hip, knee and cataract surgery – are down over a third, according to the Health Foundation, a respected think tank.

Around 140,000 people have waited over a year for a routine operation due to the NHS focus on Covid, the highest level since 2008. And Macmillan Cancer Support – one of the charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal – estimates that 50,000 people across Britain now have cancers still undiagnosed because of Covid-related disruptions and delays to NHS check-ups, screenings and referrals during the March-to-july lockdown alone.

It could take over 18 months to identify such individuals, Macmillan says, raising grave medical dangers. An additional 33,000 existing cancer patients are still waiting on potentially life-saving treatments delayed due to Covid.

The NHS has made progress towards reopening full non-covid services since the pandemic’s spring peak. But there is, says the Health Foundation, “still a potentially huge hidden backlog, as far fewer routine procedures are being undertaken compared to last year”.

Since the first lockdown, attitudes towards the NHS have hardened. Initial fears that 500,000 might die from this virus if no action was taken, with the health service overwhelmed, proved unfounded. The anticipated deluge of Covid patients never materialised, leaving the Nightingale field hospitals – NHS England built seven, at a cost of £220 million – virtually empty.

Many regular hospitals were also effectively mothballed as most nonCovid treatments were cancelled – sparking a sharp rise in avoidable deaths from heart attacks and strokes at home, as well as countless missed cancer diagnoses.

Tens of thousands may end up dying from non-covid conditions because of lockdown – which has fuelled discontent at Boris Johnson’s recent decision to impose a further four weeks of restrictions, reversing his earlier promise.

As national lockdown was reinstated earlier this month, fresh claims the NHS would be overrun were rejected by rebel Conservative MPS, who managed to establish that official projections of 4,000 Covid deaths a day by Christmas were wrong.

Amid the doom graphs and lockdown gloom, last week’s news of a Pfizer vaccine was a welcome and much-needed ray of sunshine. However, the newly formed Covid Research Group of sceptical Tory backbenchers is concerned that signs of a vaccine may now encourage Mr Johnson to maintain lockdown beyond early December – a view shared by many Planet Normal listeners, not least the medics among you.

“I’m not aware of a single student who has been hospitalised with Covid, nor become ill,” says Dr Jai Chitnavis, a fellow in medicine at Cambridge University. “Yet there is a virtual police state operating in most colleges – and for what?”

Anthony, an NHS consultant surgeon, says internal NHS databases already show “a rise in the share of cases presenting with upstaged cancer since March, and more delays because many now have other chronic conditions so out of control they need to be medically sorted out before being fit enough to undertake surgery or other cancer treatment”.

Parliament was “deliberately misled” over this latest lockdown, Anthony says, “because MPS were told the NHS was close to collapse, when briefings to hospital managers showed it certainly was not.”

NHS bosses and ministers reject such claims.

And government warnings that the NHS can’t cope may once again be advanced, along with hope of impending mass vaccination, to justify keeping this national lockdown in place.

For now, the headlines are all about vaccines and Downing Street “Cummings and goings”.

But when this pandemic is over, the failure of the NHS to treat countless non-covid patients during lockdown will loom large in the debate about its future.

Join us on our metaphorical rocket of right thinking, our capsule of common sense, by listening to the Planet Normal podcast – out every Thursday. It’s free – at telegraph.co.uk/planetnormal or via itunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts