Covid19 blog

Michael Gove has just announced that the UK is currently carrying out 8,000 tests per day. Previously, he indicated that not only the NHS frontline will be tested but also members of the civil service. Mr Gove announced today that 25,000 will be carried out per day, but not until the end of April. But why are these statements not attracting more criticism? Is it due to a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the problem regarding testing? The NHS employs over 1 million people, where 423,000 are doctors and nurses in 2019. It was reported that an extra 20,000 doctors and nurses will be able to join the NHS frontline, reallocated from the private health sector. Additionally, up to 65,000 retired doctors and nurses have been asked to come back to the NHS in England and Wales during the crisis. This is the NHS frontline workforce who should be offered testing as a priority, and their number could amount to over 500,000 people. If the government fulfills its promise of ramping up ...

The case of the response and approach that Germany has taken in this pandemic has been interesting to follow. Many of my scientist friends, and people to whom I speak, have indicated scepticism about the reliability of the death rate due to Covid19 in Germany. It did initially seem odd to me that the death rate in Germany was substantially lower compared to many other major European nations including the UK, which at one point had a death rate of over 4% of confirmed cases. At the early stages of its epidemic, Germany had a death rate as low as 0.3% despite its very high number of confirmed cases. However, this death rate has been steadily increasing to the current rate of almost 0.8%. This is much closer to what other areas and countries with similar approaches (e.g. extensive testing, tracing and isolation of confirmed cases) are reporting. Germany has been more successful in their testing approach than any other country. It carries out over half a million tests every week compa...

At 8pm yesterday, outside my balcony and across the UK we all joined in to a tumultuous and sincere clapping to give thanks to people that work in our national health service. Their sacrifice and hard work is quite moving considering they will knowingly face difficult challenges and dangers ahead. The problem now lies in the type of response and protection that the government is able to provide to these health professionals. From the 20 th of January the situation in China was problematic and clearly alarming, many hard questions will need to be answered since potentially we could follow similar trajectories to that of Italy, with serious consequences. Only yesterday evening a government spokesman provided reassurances that personal protective equipment, masks, gowns and other protective essentials are on their way. This is over two months after we found out about the seriousness and potential risk of the outbreak in China. Furthermore, we are yet to see if the equipment that will...

Living through the global pandemic. From now on for the next 3 months, possibly, I will be here in Edinburgh where I will self isolate. I decided to be here with my mother who is working at a care home looking after elderly people with dementia. The global infection almost reached half a million people, I expect the number of confirmed cases to reach half a million by end of today or possibly tomorrow morning. The death toll has reached 21,000 people already and has been increasing by 2000 people per day for at least the last couple of days, due to the increasing number of cases I expect the global death rate to increase even further to more than 2000 people per day soon.  The situation in the UK is very alarming however I am very hopeful. There is a sense of community that is coming together, for instance our local association of residents has been incredibly kind and supportive of my mother, who has been receiving text messages and emails enquiring about her safety or n...