>This has been the case for years: there are plenty of people who should not be discharged home to fend entirely on their own, but there's no social care in place to look after them, so they aren't discharged. This is also technically the responsibility of the local council rather than central government.

Not to mention that local government had has its funding cut to the bone (and beyond, in many cases) over the last 12 years of Conservative government.

But my point is that this seems to have been a gradually growing problem for some time, but the recent spike from covid is likely a temporary bump greatly exacerbating it. It'll drop down again. Then, gradually, climb back up to where it is now. If it reverts to the mean quickly, it still won't take that long to get to where it transiently is now based on a straight line trend so maybe it's just a point of pedantry.

tl;dr at a glance it looks like lingering effects of covid have pushed the english health care system into a state a single digit number of years ahead of schedule. It will likely wear off, but getting back on track isn't much of a relief.

When you have a system with no spare capacity a sudden spike in demand causes queue lengths to grow but they never get shorter again.

That's the theory. In reality, the rising death rate will cause a drop in demand.

That could be true of some queueing systems, but its certainly not true of all queuing systems. It is certainly not true of this system because you cannot stay in the queue forever. Over the long term this will converge on a steady state determined by rate of arrival and rate of departure, treated or otherwise, and nothing else.

> It is certainly not true of this system because you cannot stay in the queue forever.

This is true, and people can drop out of the queue by dying. The death rate will increase until the queue is balanced.