What Governments Need To Learn About Coronavirus Immediately
Now we’ve come a long way since December and governments around the world have learned a lot but they’ve still got a lot to learn. This is a long post so let’s save the intro:
1. Not Enough ICU beds
Over the last decade we’ve been pushing for less hospital beds and more patients treated in community - that is either at the GP clinic or at their homes. Unfortunately, this creates an issue where we don’t have enough ICU beds. We need more beds. We could have wards being used for anything and everything but keep them ready to be turned into ICU beds if needed. The argument that hospitals are over run is just not good enough. We need to prepare better.
2. Quarantine Transport Vehicles:
Take a look at this photo:
Source/Credit of picture
We couldn’t give the poor bus driver a mask? Is this a joke? We need to build buses where the front cabin with the driver is sealed from the back - like most vans. That way, we can move everyone from, lets say, a plane or a cruise ship, without risking the driver or anyone else. Anyone who may be infected can move around freely in the main cabin of the bus. We could also convert some buses to hold gurneys and beds, to transport supine patients. The duct tape and plastic bags method needs to be a thing of the past.
3. Vaccine Deployment
Once we have a vaccine, what’s the plan? Have everyone come out of lockdown to go down to their local GP clinic and get a shot? What happens if one of those people there is already infected? Every single person there that day will be exposed. Unacceptable. And we can’t have someone going door to door either - for the same reason. The best option here is self administration but expecting the public to know how to do an intramuscular/subcutaneous injection is unreasonable. We need come up with a better way to deploy vaccines. Some vaccines can be administered as a nasal spray. Others as patches you stick to your arm. We don’t have the time to test these out now - but we need to get on this for the next pandemic.
4. Life Critical Equipment
Life Critical Equipment are stuff like ventilators but include anything that would be needed to keep someone alive. We need an excess of these. If we have the money to have warehouses upon warehouses of ammunition ‘just in case’ we go to war - we have enough money to stack warehouses with ventilators. These things last years when stored properly. And it’s not like we won’t use them in the future, even with no pandemic, the current ones will break from normal wear and tear - so we’ll have spares. We should consider doing this will alcohol gels/ disinfectant wipes and PPE too. What do we have to loose?
5. Public Education
We need far better public education regarding health and infection control. We need to be teaching our kids in school how to stay safe. There was video going around (I won’t link it to save the lady some embarrassment) of a lady on a subway eating fast food with medical gloves on. Common sense would tell you to take off the gloves before you touch your food. But then again, if you’ve never had to deal with infection control - this may not be so obvious. People seem to have this idea that having a mask or gloves on makes you completely bullet proof. To the point where they drop their guards entirely. There’s more to be said but you get the point. If doctors and nurses can treat infectious patients day in day out - why are stuff like common colds still spreading? Now, before you say doctors and nurses have PPE - not true, back in my clinical days, I’d examine many patients with coughs and colds with no PPE and still wouldn’t catch anything - there’s a way to stay safe. It takes practice but practice makes perfect. I speak from experience when I say we need to teach our kids these techniques so they get used to them. After a while it becomes second nature like how we don’t really think about driving.
6. Sick Days
People should be strongly encouraged to stay at home when sick. Even the common cold and seasonal flu costs the economy millions if not billions per year. We should be preemptively putting that money to good use by offering government sick pay so people aren’t punished financially for doing the right thing and staying at home. Too often we hear about how people have no choice but to go to work sick - this is unacceptable - especially if we’re talking about communicable/infectious diseases.
7. School Closures
In the UK one the main reasons why the government wouldn’t shut down the schools was because many healthcare workers wouldn’t have anyone to look after their kids so would have to leave their clinical jobs. This is the most backwards reasoning I’ve heard this whole pandemic. They were willing risk the lives of children all around the country because they couldn’t put together a childcare program for essential workers? Think about what they were asking from these doctors and nurses: go put your life at risk every day for the sake of the nation with minimal help and PPE whilst we refuse to close schools and put your children at risk so you don’t have an excuse to not work. Let’s stop with the nonsense - I had former colleagues cry because they were scared to go home and get their young kids infected. The next time this happens - essential workers need to be given a place to stay, like a hotel rented out for essential workers so they don’t have to go back home and risk their families getting sick. The hotels will be more than happy to oblige given it’s either that or go bankrupt. And there should be some emergency child care provisions in place as well. Furthermore, schools need to be ready to shut down at a blink of an eye. We’ve known for years kids spread infections very easily - but they’re kids, they don’t know any better. There’s a reason why head lice and chicken pox is still prevalent. This is a horrendously difficult task - but it’s essential, we don’t have a choice here.
8. Travel Bans
Travel bans need to coordinated. There’s is no use having travel bans in Europe if the virus is just hoping around country to country outside of Europe. Also, the way these governments are handling travel bans is a joke. France just recently said they will allow visitors from Britain to not have to self quarantine upon arrival in France as long as Britain reciprocates for french travelers.
In other words, France will trade quarantining laws with Britain. Why? This is so stupid. It shouldn’t matter if Britain forces visitors from France to quarantine or not upon arrival. If Britain has an uncontrolled outbreak and France doesn’t - Britain has no incentive to force French travelers to quarantine but France absolutely SHOULD have Britons self quarantine when they arrive in France- it’s in France’s best interest. Instead, this has become some bargaining chip countries are using to leverage other negotiations. At some point we have to ask - what are their priorities? Because I can assure you, coronavirus doesn’t give a damn about what political agreements France and Britain have.
9. Economic Back Up Plans
When the lockdowns were announced, governments all around the world scrambled to put together economic relief packages. It took weeks and months but finally, the paychecks started reaching citizens. So if the money was there ready to go - why did it take so long? Shouldn’t governments have had these plans ready? I’m not going to play the blame game so here’s the answer: governments need to draw up emergency economic plans for future lockdowns. They need to have actionable plans ready to go so when someone starts using words like ‘pandemic’ or ‘lockdown’, governments can tell their residents exactly how much money they will get and when from day one. There is no use putting on a seat belt after you’ve crashed.
10. Commandeering Hotels and Schools
Countries rushed to build make shift hospitals whilst hotels where putting together bankruptcy filings because everyone was locked down at home. Do we really need to spell this out? Just take over the empty hotels and put recovering patients in there. I’ve had clinical placements and rotations in PRIVATE hospital wards and they are exactly the same as hotels - trust me, doctors and nurses can make it work. Any spare rooms can be used by hospital staff too. This will save lives, you can keep hospitals running like normal - and avoid having to shut down non-essential wards and elective procedures.
11. Food Shortages
Anyone working with food should be treated as medical essential workers and offered safe shelter away from there families. If the hospitals go down all the patients go down. If our food supplies go down we all go down. Food manufacturing and food storage needs to be protected. How many meat/food processing plants have had major outbreaks of covid-19 amongst their workers? These are problems we can avoid with a little bit of forward planning. Again - doctors and nurses work with infectious patients all the time, this is doable. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel - just ask the people who do it for a living what to do.
12. Investment into Virology
We need more investment into virology research. We are playing with fire here and we’ve just been given a glimpse of the worse case scenario. We need to have far better treatment options. Trying to find a cure after the fact is no longer an option. Half a million have already died. How many more before this message gets through to our leaders and politicians?
13. Public Communication
We need ONE single source for information. If you want to make this one source per country - fine, but a virus doesn’t care about borders. What we need is ONE singular source to speak for the globe. What should we do. What shouldn’t we do. There are so many people talking it’s easy for misinformation to spread. The WHO clearly messed up and lost the trust of the world, maybe the CDC is who we should turn to? Regardless, make an official website that won’t crash and keep the updates and best practices on there. That way we can all access the information we need at any given time, instead of relying on media giants to hopefully pass on the right information.
14. Politics
And lastly - please, for the love of all things holy - forget about your politics. Just put it aside for a few months and lets all just work together. Estimates say world death toll will be in the millions. Let that sink in. Millions of people dead. And we still have politicians playing their political games. Trying to take credit for any piece of progress and blaming each other for anything that goes wrong. This is not the time. How about we all agree that we’ll just vote for whoever does the best job at fixing this? Because the grim reaper won’t ask who you voted for when he comes to collect.
Final words:
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