Corona Virus

[Margaret Pilkington]

another informative video.

[Exile on Spencer St]

Another interesting take from the ‘coal face’.
Need more brave and intelligent people in the health front like him to tell the rest of us what they are experiencing.
Would have thought the notion that Covid-19 may not be just another strain of flu was something worth thinking about in the medical world.

[Exile on Spencer St]

The BBC are at it again. No ‘bad news’ is worth examining in detail before making it their headline news.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52341403

Today’s lead, on the BBC radio and web site at least, is the statistical guess from the National Care Forum that, from deaths in their homes, deaths in all other Care homes are probably much higher than so far announced.
The NCL represents ‘not for profit’ care homes. They have about 111 members. There are 21,723 Care homes in the U.K.
So, the NCL represent 0.5% of all Care homes.

If that number was reflected across all residential and nursing homes, NCF estimated there have been 4,040 coronavirus-related deaths in care homes which are not yet included in official figures.

This smacks of more sloppy statistics, which have already got us into this mess.
Maybe the NCL Care homes, being not for profit, rightly cater to the less affluent. Maybe they are in higher density urban area. And maybe their residents have higher co-morbidities than other care providers.
And just, maybe, you cannot simply project the NCL’s death rates to every other Care home without actually checking the figures first.
But that would require journalism rather than sensationalism.

[Margaret Pilkington]

Exile, you and I both know that whatever figures are bandied about, by whatever media source or government bodies even, are pure unadulterated speculation.
Because.....NO-ONE KNOWS THE TRUE SIZE OF THE PROBLEM.

It is impossible to know because general testing of the population has not and is not being done.
All of it is conjecture.

When all this started and we have been in lockdown 4weeks all but a day, certain measures should have been taken:
Weekly testing of NHS staff.
Testing of all the population who are employed.
Anyone testing positive should have been removed to a safe isolation unit for 21 days.
Anyone showing active symptoms and needing hospital care should have been hospitalised in an isolation hospital (definitely NOT a district general hospital....the air conditioning units to the wards are linked and this being air-borne is a fine way to disseminate the infection).

The advice for those who have compromising health conditions to stay at home is sensible enough, but there has to be an organised way of getting supplies to them.

I could go on with what, to me are sensible measures and precautions, but there maybe some on here who do not take to my ideas very well....and that is ok....I can live with it.

There is far more to this situation than meets the eye.
This has been a social experiment to see how compliant the general public are to being manipulated....so far it has worked.

However controversial these ideas are, you cannot argue with the fact that we have been lied to on an industrial scale.
And that in the end we are going to be picking up the economic pieces for decades to come...except I am at the bum end of my life....so it will be my descendants who are disadvantaged.

[cashman]

true no-one knows its all guesswork, thing is though with a pandemic it surely must be very hard to get the stuff yeh need cos every country in the world wants the stuff, dont really matter whats needed its in very short supply.we have no god given right to have first dabs on stuff,

[Margaret Pilkington]

Some years ago the PPE stuff required was bought from suppliers located in this country.....businesses that supplied the NHS often relied on those contracts to survive.
The NHS is a huge buyer, but it took its custom to China....on a cost basis.
Contracts with suppliers in this country were lost....suppliers then diversified...stopped production of the stuff the NHS once bought.
We should be buying from firms in THIS country, because in situations like this the firms would pull out all the stops to supply what was required...and we would have had first dibs on it.

The government have spent 16 million quid on Ineffectual PPE.
This could have been bought from suppliers here, but as always procurement officers always look for the cheapest and the cheapest is not always of the quality that is required.
Will the government get this money back?
Who knows?

[cashman]

the quantity needed surely could not have been bought from here ? or why are they getting firms who dont make it to do so?

[Margaret Pilkington]

Cashy, I used to be on a product user group (I know it is a while ago now).
This group of nurses would give feedback on the products we were expected to use....stuff that the procurement officer was planning to accept tenders from.....I can tell you that sometimes just a couple of coins would decide yes or nay.
Yes the products were supplied by companies located in the U.K...well, until China muscled in.
China has created this huge crisis....a world crisis....and who do you think will profit from this crisis?
It will not be the UK.
When you rely on stuff from the other side of the world...and a country that supplies the world, then you are asking for trouble....because as you say in this situation we cannot expect first dibs at anything.
If things had been different and loyalty to UK suppliers had been kept, then these suppliers would have jumped to attention and we would have the stuff we needed, locally sourced, giving work to people who live and pay their taxes in the UK.

[Margaret Pilkington]

Originally Posted by cashman

the quantity needed surely could not have been bought from here ? or why are they getting firms who dont make it to do so?

Because the firms that used to make stuff for the NHS....and would have continued to do so were undercut in price by suppliers from China.
Tenders were lost so firms diversified...they stopped making the stuff that they used to make for the NHS.
I am speaking from experience here Cashy.
Cheaper meant that it was bought from China.

[cashman]

i understand that but the situation we are in now is the one that needs sorting first, would suit me if they told china to get stuffed afterwards, but doubt that somehow,

[Margaret Pilkington]

The situation we are in now was created by China.
Yes, you are right about the current situation needing sorting....and I guess that is what they are trying to do....a BA plane was chartered to bring in PPE gear from Turkey.

But if the NHS had any sense they would get a supplier from the UK.

[Exile on Spencer St]

Margaret, from your experience what’s your take on waste in the NHS?
Realise it’s the equivalent of heresy to even suggest a criticism of the NHS, but I’ve heard stories from other people of scissors being thrown away after being used once to cut a bandage or to do some basic chiropody.
I do sometimes wonder if, as well as U.K. suppliers, risk averse and administratively cumbersome public organisations have forgotten the need to re-use (after sterilising in the NHS) some equipment.

[Margaret Pilkington]

Exile, undoubtedly there is waste.
The scissors are defined as 'single use'....in fact I once asked why they could not be sent to CSSD(The hospital sterilising department) and was told that it was more expensive to sterilise them than to replace them.
Where I worked we saved them and one of our consultants used to take a container load of stuff that was surplus to requirements, over to a missionary hospital in India...so they would be re-used over there.
For the cutting of a bandage...the scissors do not need to be sterile and every nurse I ever knew had their own pair of scissors for the non sterile stuff....and we used to clean our scissors daily with alcohol wipes.

As to other waste....commodes, walking frames, elbow crutches...these (or at least some of these) are being recycled.
As a senior Sisre/Ward Manager, part of my job was budget responsibility, so I took the waste of resources very seriously....and it was brought up at ward meetings.
That is my take on how it used to be, but remember I have been retired for almost 18 years so I cannot say how things are now....but I would guess things are tighter.

[monkey hanger]

[QUOTE=Margaret Pilkington;1239310]The situation we are in now was created by China.

that is something we should never forget. mind you in some quarters you are getting the racist finger pointed at you if you say it. for me the only thing we have ever got from china in corona virus and if it was a country we never dealt with again it would suit me. doubt it will happy in the world where cheapest is always best. if it says, made in china, i look elsewhere.

[Margaret Pilkington]

China's ambition has always been world dominance...and in a stroke they will have it because while the western economies are trashed, they will make as much mileage as possible.
Being a totalitarian society means that the people do as they are told...no questions...questions lead to people disappearing....
so they will be told to work their behinds off to pull their economy off the floor(though I suspect that it was never there in the first place - and before someone tells me...I know my belief doesn't make a fact) and suck up businesses like they were a Maccy D milkshake.