Years of skimping and underfunding resulted in an NHS that was having to turn away some patients even before the covid crisis.
Saving the NHS from being overwhelmed has destroyed much of the leisure economy, resulted in millions being thrown out of work or forced to work short time and caused mass poverty and mental health problems.
Even when it's safe to gather again and some of the pubs and restaurants re-open, there will continue to be gaping holes in the high street and the business community.
The impact of all that demand sucked out of the economy will last for years to come. It could all have been so different if we had not had that decade of austerity.
In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, but the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016. "We've just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people," she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. "It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies," Davies said. Despite the severe failings exposed by Exercise Cygnus, the government's planning for a future pandemic did not change after December 2016( SOURCE: New Statesman.)