Why health-care services are in chaos everywhere

of lockdowns during the pandemic had one overarching aim: to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Governments hoped to space out infections, buying time to build capacity. In the end, however, much of this extra capacity went unused. England’s seven “Nightingale” hospitals closed having received only a few patients, as did many of America’s field hospitals. A study of Europe’s experience in , a journal, found only one example where there were more covid patients than intensive-care beds: in the Italian region of Lombardy on April 3rd 2020. Although there are now stories of , as the country confronts a great exit wave, it is too soon to know whether these are isolated examples or represent broader, systematic failure.Outside , covid weighs less heavily on people’s minds these days. Yet health-care systems in much of the rich world are closer to collapse than at any point since the disease started to spread. Unlike for unemployment or , there are few comparable, up-to-date figures on health-care performance across countries. So has trawled statistics produced by countries, regions and even individual hospitals to paint a picture of what is going on. The results suggest patients, doctors and nurses are experiencing the brutal after-effects of the pandemic.