Ben Lowry: It is good that the NHS is nowhere near as badly hit by Covid-19 as feared but other ill patients might be dying

This is understandable, because there is a fear that people will then question lockdown or even breach it.

So every time a trend in the virus spread shows signs of hope, a politician will say it is due to social distancing.

Every time a new statistic shows that the NHS is coping well or that deaths are not rising at the pace expected a TV reporter will go on to say that the statistics do not tell the whole story or cite a different, less promising figure.

But while this might all be understandable, at a time of national crisis and amid a need for national solidarity, it is not good enough.

It is not, for example, the job of news reporters to tell us that social distancing is working and that this explains the good outcomes.

It is their job to look at the matter dispassionately.

And there is increasingly glaring evidence that the NHS is not even close to being hit as badly as expected.

While we cannot yet be sure, we should not just sit back and hope for the best and wait to see.

Governments are soon going to have to make hard choices, that will probably involve significant relaxation of restrictions, much earlier than was expected only weeks ago.

Not only are there clear signs of economic ruin, there are also deeply worrying things happening as a result of non treatment of serious other health conditions.

To get a sense of how much less badly the NHS is being hit consider a few basic numbers.

Medical experts said 80% of people infected with Covid-19 would have little or no symptoms, about 20% would be badly affected, about half of them, 10%, would need to go to hospital and 1% would die.

The UK now has around 14,000 deaths (or around 20,000 if deaths in the community are counted). That means that around 200,000 people should have needed hospital help (perhaps far more if a time lag means deaths are yet to peak).

If that, or anything approaching that, had happened, the NHS would have been swamped, despite the extra beds.

The Nightingale hospital in London’s 4,000 extra beds would have been filled many times over. Yet it is barely being used at all.

London, one of the world’s worst hit cities, is actually seeing the number of patients in hospital with coronavirus fall. Not the just rate of admissions fall, but the numbers in hospital with it fall.

Northern Ireland, which has a far lower fatality rate per capita, currently has 1,900 empty beds. The entirety of the Belfast City Hospital tower block was emptied to make room for Covid-19 patients.

We were told the peak was coming in early April, then Easter weekend, yet the current excess beds are still not even close to being filled.

One possibility is that, notwithstanding shocking deaths such as the pregnant woman aged 28, the people dying with Covid-19 are overwhelmingly very old or people with very serious pre-existing conditions.

If so the expectation of 10 people needing to go to hospital for every death might have been a big over-estimate of the impact of the virus on less vulnerable groups.

If indeed fewer people are being badly affected, then that is wonderful news. And it does not mean that we were in any way wrong to act in a precautionary fashion to meet a possible surge. It was an entirely prudent step.

But now an unexplained and alarming rise in the UK incidence of non-Covid deaths is appearing in statistics (of perhaps hundreds of people a day). This might be a sign that gravely ill people who would get vital treatment are instead dying.

Yesterday I talked to doctors on both sides of the Irish Sea who are seriously worried about this.

So it is not enough to say that we cannot be complacent around lockdown.

We cannot be complacent about the possibility that our restrictions are having unintended consequences that cause immense, and possibly even commensurate, harm in a range of ways: economic, mental, social and even health.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor