Some insights from the Netherlands, the country right to the east of the UK: the healthcare system is still under extreme pressure and everyone important is pretending the pandemic is over.

Nurses and other healthcare professionals have been quitting and are not planning to come back because there is no chance of increased pay (which only drives up the pressure to those still working in healthcare).

Hospitals are working through their backlogs. Care that could be postponed has been postponed for two years and now with fewer healthcare professionals and medical issues left untreated for a while (even people starting on chemo got told to wait at some point) the recovery process is slow. This, of course, isn't great for the relatively large elderly population as they're very reliant on lots of healthcare.

I don't know what the state of the NHS is these days, but I've heard distressing signals from all over the UK about people being unable to get a GP appointment in time and the entire hospital system being overworked. I don't know if it's politicians trying to cut more healthcare costs, the pandemic, Brexit, or everything at once, but the NHS doesn't seem to be doing well.

Over here, we have all but stopped testing for COVID. It's seemingly presumed to be endemic by the government, much like other governments seem to do. In every sector sick leave has also been on the rise, as the government told us to expect; the consensus seems to be that the current variants of COVID aren't that much of a risk and we should just go back to normal and let the disease run its course. With reports of long COVID symptoms on the rise [0] I very much doubt that, but the government doesn't seem to care about sick people, so I'm not surprised.

Excess mortality in the Netherlands has been high ever since the start of the pandemic [1]. Every time the virus spreads, excess mortality rises. The covid death rate [2] is claimed to be extremely low but at the same time COVID testing has also pretty much stopped, whereas previously anyone dying with COVID was also written up to have died with COVID. Based on the mortality graphs I'd say we've passed another COVID peak but nobody (I know, at least) takes an official tests so the statistics are very much flawed; wastewater analysis [3] seems to suggest a "hidden" endemic that coincides with the rise in excess mortality, though.

My personal conclusion: we're in (or have just passed) yet another mass COVID spread event but everyone has grown tired of taking any anti-COVID measures, so they stopped caring. I dread to think what the winter is going to look like if the summer death toll is this high. The UK's COVID numbers seem to agree with a similar peak in positive tests but I don't know how well the reporting is done over the pond.

There is also another factor at play: the extreme heat due to climate change we're facing in Europe. In (previously) unusually warm summers or cold winters, old and sick people have always had a tendency to die more often. The heat of the past few weeks definitely isn't the only cause, but I doubt it's not a factor this year with record heat reported all across England.

As an aside: the amount of people here immediately jumping to the conclusion that vaccines are the cause is... quite depressing. We're still very much in a pandemic but everyone just seems to _want_ to blame vaccines while we, as a society, try our best to stuff our fingers into our ears and pretend we can't hear anything. Do whatever you want to feel better, blame the vaccine, blame Bill Gates, blame the lizard people running the Illuminati, but it won't solve the problem.

[0]: https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/nearly-twice-as-many-cases-invol...

[1]: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/31/excess-mortality-in-al...

[2]: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/sterfte

[3]: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/rioolwater

[4]: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/