This chart compares the patterns of COVID hospital admissions, patients in hospital and deaths over the past year. It shows very starkly that the second surge of the virus has had a much much greater impact. Deaths are 54% higher than earlier but the load on the NHS is 121% higher.
NB Clearly each of these graphs is to a very different scale. I have given them a common scale based on the level at the end of March when deaths and admissions peaked.
I had hoped to include a chart for the whole of Europe for comparison but the ECDC does not publish that data, probably because some countries do not have reliable data for hospital occupancy.
Data from European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) via ourworldindata.org
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