Doctors in Unite believe that comprehensive, publicly coordinated and community based ‘isolate, trace and support’ procedures are vital for control of the COVID-19 pandemic as lockdown is eased. To keep the frequency of new cases in the community manageable people must be supported to self isolate once they are identified as potentially infectious. To this end […]
Tag: SARS-CoV-2
We believe that the failure of the UK government to properly coordinate testing for COVID-19 has contributed to the UK suffering the highest death toll in Europe. Countries that have had lower mortality adopted robust testing strategies early on. Testing centres are not local to where most people live. A common stipulation is that they […]
As a paediatrician, I share the grave concerns of nurse Ian Wilson who has two children at school in Lewisham and experience of working with covid-19 infected patients. In an open letter to Health Secretary Matt Hancock last week, he pleaded that we were not enrolled against our will in a giant experiment that could […]
Since the start of the lockdown we have called for contact tracing and widespread testing as the only means to establish the true prevalence of COVID-19. This is what the World Health Organisation urged all countries to do from the very beginning. We welcome Matt Hancock’s announcement of testing for symptomatic key workers and their […]
It is not possible to undertake any meaningful planning for an exit strategy from the current lockdown without an understanding of COVID-19’s prevalence and our current levels of immunity. On April 2nd Health Secretary Matt Hancock promised to test 100,000 people daily by the end of the month. On that same day the UK was testing ten times […]
The basic principles of epidemiology are summarised by CDCD: count, divide, compare, then discuss differences. Unfortunately discussion of COVID-19 has widely ignored this approach. First, we must count something. Examples of things you might count include deaths, cases of disease, uses of a health service, occurrence of a symptom, or the presence of a risk […]
Treatment without prejudice We believe that all people are of equal value. Whether old or young, rich or poor, disabled or not disabled, we all share a common humanity. This was true before the coronavirus pandemic, and it remains true today. Coronavirus is affecting different people in different ways. Many have a mild illness, but […]
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COVID-19: A GP’s Perspective
As I write we are at the beginning of the pandemic in the UK. We still have relatively small numbers of cases but they are steadily increasing along with, tragically, associated deaths. There is a very fine line between not fuelling mass panic, which is unhelpful, but also in taking sensible precautions. Public health messages […]
Doctors in Unite 