Long time lurker, first time poster. I'm a consultant anaesthetist with some aeromed experience. I also work with a pilot delivering human factors training in healthcare. I have therefore got some experience of hw you think, not a lot, but some.
Most people in healthcare are extremely worried about this. We are no doing a lot of sim training in doffing and donning of our personal protective equipment and practising practical procedures whilst fully PPEd. There is unprecedented planning. there are still pockets of complacency but I have never seen anything like this in my career (over 15 years since medical school). I was at a major london hospital for 7/7. I saw how quickly we created space but that was 1000 people injured. This is on a scale unheard of in modern times. This is an order of magnitude more serious. And it is a tidal wave rather than a big bang. It is ging to be 3-4 months of work like nothing I have ever seen before.
for the vast majority of you this will be nothing more than the flu. And those who say 'it's just flu' will feel vindicated. But for a significant minority this is going to be a teminal event. Mostly those over 75. We are tripling our ICU capacity, and even that seems optimistic. 60-70 beds for a population of 400-500k. Those that stay on ICU will do so for weeks. Assuming we can turn the ICU over twice in 2 months that means we can accommodate about 140 patients. 4000-5000 infections. So even tripling ICU capacity we can afford for about 1% of the population to get infected. China flew in thousands of doctors and built icu only hospitals. That's how they dealt with it. If we allow this to surge and we suddenly get 10000 cases in our catchment area, we are potentially looking for 500-1000 ICU beds. Even in Hubei it only got to 0.1% of the population. It seems very odd to me to let this run through the population
I think this has been handled very badly by the government. They have lacked clarity and resolve and let panic set in. As pointed out above, there are large areas of deprivation in the UK and they will suffer on two fronts the first being that they will struggle to self isolate based on hand to mouth weekly wages or gig economy 'self emplyment'. and the second is that we know deprivation is a poor prognosis for health outcomes anyway.
I think the travel bans are not helpful, they are leaving large numbers of people stranded all over the world but I do think that social distancing and shutting down of congregations of people across the world is sensible. The hospitality, travel and recreation sectors will suffer. The best thing they can do is make it as easy as possible for people to rebook and retain the goodwill of the customers who through no fault of their own have has to cancel.
We were all looking at Brexit as the economic disaster and this black swan flew in out of nowhere.
I have no understanding of 99.9% of what you all do ion here, but I do love reading your dissections of incidents. 99% of you will hopefully have little experience of ICU, but I a extremely fearful that many many people are about to get familiar with it.
Stay safe, stay sensible, encourage your elderly friends and relatives to stay at home, check on them by phone / skype. Deliver stuff to them if you can. Wash your hands.