> If you die of Covid-19 you were already dying. This illness was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. People with covid-19 need ventilators and inten

> If you die of Covid-19 you were already dying. This illness was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. People with covid-19 need ventilators and intensive care. This isn't just old people with severe comorbid illness, it's younger relatively healthy people too. If we ignore for a moment the old people who were going to die this year with or without covid-19 we're still left with huge numbers of younger people needing intensive care and ventilation. This has knock-on effects: many healthcare systems have cancelled almost all elective healthcare. You might say that a cancelling a knee replacement doesn't matter, but these kinds of surgeries transform life and allow people to live independently for longer. Covid-19 is flooding our hospitals with very ill people, and some of them are going to be pretty poorly when they're ready to be discharged, and some community care or care homes are going to have to deal with a larger number of ill people. The jargon word for this is "acuity". Increased patient acuity increases costs of healthcare, increases risks of harm, increases rates of HCP burnout, decreases access to health care etc etc. Covid-19 is going to have long lasting effects on healthcare systems even though it's mostly killing people who would have died anyway.