regularly anyway. are we in a situation where we ve got i regularly anyway. are we in a situation where we ve got so | regularly anyway. are we in a i situation where we ve got so many people stuck at home either without symptoms or very minor symptoms who are fully vaccinated, and that s causing problems in itself? yes. are fully vaccinated, and that s causing problems in itself? yes, it is. when causing problems in itself? yes, it is- when you re causing problems in itself? yes, it is. when you re talking causing problems in itself? yes, it is. when you re talking about i causing problems in itself? yes, it is. when you re talking about fullyj is. when you re talking about fully vaccinated, even people who have had the booster, it gives you 75% or so of protection from having actual symptoms of covid. but there s still, that means you ve still got a one in four chance. if you bump into the will actually have an active covert infection. so you may have very mild symptoms but you w
people are recruited. there s a backlog of gaps in the nhs workforce of 97,000. our health correspondent sophie hutchinson has this report. the number of people caught up in delays for nhs treatment in england is by far the worst ever recorded. patients have been forced to wait while hospitals focus on emergency care for those with the virus. tackling the backlog is an unquantifiable challenge, according to the health select committee. its report sets out the scale of the problem. in september, 5.8 million people were waiting for planned care. 300,000 had waited more than a year for treatment, and 12,000 had waited more than two years. keith makepeace, a keen marathon runner with a family hotel business, in devon, was being treated for stage iv bowel cancer when the pandemic hit. his chemotherapy, which had been going well, was then delayed for six months. so the national health and cancer
actuallyjust think we are on the scale of actually just living think we are on the scale of actuallyjust living with that, not having restrictions, saying if you ve got no symptoms or they are minor, you don t have to isolate because it s endemic and life continues? you re shaking your head so tell us where you sit on the scale of that. so tell us where you sit on the scale of that. ., ,., , ., , ., scale of that. the reason people are exoeriencing scale of that. the reason people are experiencing mild-to-moderate i experiencing mild to moderate symptoms and not getting into hospital as much is the protection afforded by vaccination. it isn t the virus itself. the virus itself is still dangerous, it s still putting people into hospital and people are still dying from nick dying from omicron. the idea is become endemic, we shouldn t be allowing it to do what it wants. the vaccine is designed to give protection across the whole population such that the number of new cases is really
important at the moment i think in terms of trying to stop the spread of the virus. i terms of trying to stop the spread of the virus- of the virus. i want to kind of understand of the virus. i want to kind of understand the of the virus. i want to kind of understand the logic - of the virus. i want to kind of understand the logic of i of the virus. i want to kind of understand the logic of the l understand the logic of the decisions being taken on testing and how you see that, when there is no need now for someone who tests positive with a lateral flow to then confirm that with a pcr test. but if you ve got symptoms and you test negative with a lateral flow, you still have to have a pcr test. how reliable are the lateral flow tests? how can they be effected in one circumstance and not the other? lateral flow tests are not very good at picking up the virus if there is not very much in your nose and throat. so, if you rejust not very much in your nose and throat. so, if you re just
need to do at the moment is do whatever we can to try and stop the spread of the virus from person to person, to give the vaccine a sporting chance of working. and the vision for the future, you were talking about it being endemic, is that it will be an unusual infection and you would have occasional outbreaks which would be easily dealt with by the public health system such that we have outbreaks sometimes of norovirus, for example. they can be quite just a canned hospital wards get closed and so on but it doesn t spread around the population. that s what we should be aiming for. but we need to give that vaccination in conjunction with other measures to try and bring virus numbers down. this is a preventable infectious disease, so we shouldn t really be accepting any level of death, i don t think, at this point in the pandemic. we know how to stop people dying, we should