Early Edition with Kate Hawkesby

I thought Ashley Bloomfield said something quite revealing on Mike’s show yesterday about where the hospital system is at. We know there are more than 700 people in hospital with Covid related illnesses but that’s not in hospital because of Covid – that’s in hospital with Covid related illnesses. Unfortunately, Bloomfield said they don’t know specifically the breakdown on how many of those are in which category, but he said roughly about 30 to 40 percent of people across the Auckland-Waikato region are in hospital not because of Covid, but with it. In other words, it’s incidental to their sickness. On top of that, hospital numbers are actually coming down. And yes, we can ask the obvious questions around why on earth they didn’t fix the health system over the past two years, and why they didn’t staff the health sector properly, and it’s not just this government, it’s a cumulative problem. But here’s the key. It’s not under pressure exclusively due to Covid.  Bloomfield admitted it’s under huge pressure even w