For two years the British National Health Service transformed itself into the National Covid Service. Now the party is over and 1 in 8 people in England are waiting for hospital treatment.

Lockdowns were sold as a means of preserving access to healthcare. They turned out to be exactly the opposite.

From the BBC:

The newly-released NHS England data shows there were 6.84 million people on the waiting list at the end of July.

It is a record number - before the pandemic there were 4.2 million waiting for treatment. …

Close to three in 10 people waited longer than four hours in A&E in August, while ambulance crews continued to struggle to respond to 999 calls within their target times.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a health think tank, said the figures showed what a "monumental challenge" the government faces. "The new prime minister inherits an NHS in a critical condition," he added.

The data also includes information on two-year waits, which the government had promised to eliminate by the end of July.

At the start of the year there were more than 22,000 people who had been waiting more than two years with another 50,000 getting close to that mark.

There are currently nearly 2,900 people who have been waiting more than two years, but NHS England said the vast majority of these were either people who had chosen to wait or were complex cases that needed more time to assess.

Mass containment, along with mass vaccination, will go down in history as the worst and most wrong-headed policy of the entire postwar era. It did nothing against the virus and exacerbated a whole range of harms it was supposed to prevent. Who can read these stories today, and not either die laughing or weep bitter tears at all that vintage 2020 moral concern trolling, about how our hospitals would “melt down” unless we closed everything? Far from saving British hospitals, two years of intermittent restrictions and exaggerated hospital isolation procedures have put the NHS in “critical condition.” There are people in England, right now, who are dying waiting for care, direct victims of crush-the-curve modellers like Neil Ferguson and techbro geniuses like Tomas Pueyo. We’ll be living with the consequences of this wanton insanity for the rest of our lives.