Week 2 - Too Little, and Too Late

The TV is full of pictures of our concerned and busy PM, his Health Secretary and his possibly totally incompetent Chief Medical Officer. Forget the CMO, politicians, and no-one else, have final responsibility for their actions.

 

Why, after almost 3 months, is our NHS woefully short of protective clothing, of test kits for the Virus, and respirators for those acutely ill? Sometime next week, a new supply of test kits will be made available, so that within hospitals at least NHS staff can be tested? Still no test kits for GPs who are expected to look after the general population!

 

The respirators need to be specially made in the UK, as Foreign suppliers aee hard to find. There will be a long delay before tested respirators are available in sufficient numbers for the severely ill who will need them. Depending on exactly how disastrous the next 3 weeks are, the dithering and delay will cost many lives. Had we  still been members of the EU, or had our representative to the  EU been aware of opportunities that he missed to ask for EU help, they might have provided at least some respirators.

 

This is not the worst of it, by a long chalk. The absence of sterilized clothing and face masks of various types will be responsible for huge numbers of deaths of nurses and doctors in hospitals, and this is outrageous. Doctors and nurses are in direct contact with patients who are suffering with the virus, and they deserve the best chance of survival. But they are by no means the only ones: the GPs and PHC workers are equally at risk, and now they are joined by huge numbers of NHS workers (about 50,000) who have now come out of retirement and volunteered for work. Taken together, these are a huge group, and will be needlessly subjected to risks that could easily have been avoided had the NHS to made arrangements for these simple supplies to be manufactured within the UK. Why was no-one, especially the Health Secretary, planning to make good supplies that we know we need, rather than dithering and delaying?

 

Finally, the test kits for the virus. These are relatively cheap, but usually bought from foreign suppliers, who now need them all themselves. But without these fairly simple kits, we cannot know the risk of dying if infected. The reason for this is that in order to calculate a risk, one must know the number if deaths (fairly accurately known) and the number known to be infected. Without that, there is no denominator for calculating risk. Why can South Korea, Singapore or even Germany make a rough job of doing this, but not the UK, the USA, as well as Spain or Greece? Can it really be true that the skills for making these kits really do not exist within the countries that desperately need them? Without these kits, our knowledge of “number alive with the virus” are pathetic underestimates,  depending as they do on clinical assessments of symptoms,  without any confirmation of the diagnosis?

 

Why have these basic needs not been properly addressed? Are we so used to muddling through, that we do not understand the need to manufacture what we need ourselves?

 

We old people must agree to avoid admission if we contract the virus, and face the probability of dying at home, in order to avoid the horrors to be faced by younger people who become severely ill.

 

Who has been responsible for the dithering and delay? There is a certain rough justice in the fact that both of them (PM & S. of S. for Health) have now caught the virus themselves. The chances are good that they will both survive, but the chance that they will acknowledge their responsibility for the carnage is remote.

 

The only good news I can leave you with is that Mr Trump may lose a great deal of support as soon as the American people recognize that he is the Ditherer in Chief, well before the end of our seclusion.

 

14 days gone, 70 days to go,

(29.March 2020)

 

 

David Goldberg