We're not all to die then

[Stealaway]

Consultant in acute and respiratory medicine at Northwick Park hospital in north London has passed on this

Hi everyone

Just want to say – I’ve seen quite a few people with Covid 19 since Sunday. The vast majority are fine. They seem to have one week of fever, a few days of dry cough and then sometimes breathlessness on day 8 or 9. Most people are fine to stay at home and recover in about 10 days. If it is going to be bad it is around day 9 or 10 and the breathlessness gets rapidly worse at that point. We have had five patients who needed ITU but they all have heart or lung disease, and are quite elderly. Thankfully children seem to be invincible.

I’ve never known anything like this – but we’re planning for huge numbers of people needing intensive care and working out how to cope. We’ve managed to segregate our whole hospital into unknown (in single rooms), positive and negative areas. We’ve moved a whole intensive care unit and 4 other wards in 3 days flat – this sort of change usually takes at least 6 months to get agreed!
I think we need to worry about our elderly relatives but not our age group or our kids. It seems pretty clear that a large proportion of the UK will get this, hopefully spread out over months rather than all at once like Italy. Once enough people have had it then herd immunity will mean it dies out. So if the frail elderly can hibernate for a few months hopefully we can keep mortality down.
Anyway, if you have any Covid-19 questions, I know an awful lot more about it now than I did 2 weeks ago, so feel free to ask!
BW
Rachel
Dr Rachel Tennant
Consultant in Respiratory & Acute Medicine
Clinical Director for Acute Medicine

 

[jongood]

Aware of some of these spurious social media posts - so I googled her, looks genuine to me

Dr Rachel Tennant

Dr Tennant, who recently completed the MSc in Medical Leadership, explains how the course made her a better leader and why she would recommend it to others.

www.rcplondon.ac.uk

 

[Sandancers]

Consultant in acute and respiratory medicine at Northwick Park hospital in north London has passed on this

Hi everyone

Just want to say – I’ve seen quite a few people with Covid 19 since Sunday. The vast majority are fine. They seem to have one week of fever, a few days of dry cough and then sometimes breathlessness on day 8 or 9. Most people are fine to stay at home and recover in about 10 days. If it is going to be bad it is around day 9 or 10 and the breathlessness gets rapidly worse at that point. We have had five patients who needed ITU but they all have heart or lung disease, and are quite elderly. Thankfully children seem to be invincible.

I’ve never known anything like this – but we’re planning for huge numbers of people needing intensive care and working out how to cope. We’ve managed to segregate our whole hospital into unknown (in single rooms), positive and negative areas. We’ve moved a whole intensive care unit and 4 other wards in 3 days flat – this sort of change usually takes at least 6 months to get agreed!
I think we need to worry about our elderly relatives but not our age group or our kids. It seems pretty clear that a large proportion of the UK will get this, hopefully spread out over months rather than all at once like Italy. Once enough people have had it then herd immunity will mean it dies out. So if the frail elderly can hibernate for a few months hopefully we can keep mortality down.
Anyway, if you have any Covid-19 questions, I know an awful lot more about it now than I did 2 weeks ago, so feel free to ask!
BW
Rachel
Dr Rachel Tennant
Consultant in Respiratory & Acute Medicine
Clinical Director for Acute Medicine

Excellent news !! Still cancelled out French holiday for this year tho.

The detail about how an infection may affect most people is reassuring in terms of what to expect in regards of how you might feel.

 

[Stealaway]

Still cancelled out French holiday for this year tho.

I'm sweating on Macron lifting any restriction by the 4th April so I can be on that train. I want to go away now, its been a long winter

 

[buttons]

No relevance but two of my kids were born at Northwich Park hospital. Many years ago before the hospital was built we used to play on the fields that the hospital now sits. Anyway Northwich Park is a very large hospital in what is now a very mixed population area, my youngest had an operation to repair his eye socket there a couple of years ago. The hospital has direct links with a number of London teaching hospitals who share expertise with NP.
The catchment area for NP is huge with every level of society being treated there. Lets just say doctors working there would have gained as much expertise as any throughout the country.

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[Deneb]

Seems at odds with another apparently genuine report from an NHS anaesthetist, who said that they have several serious patients in ICU under the age of 60, one under 40, which is more in line with the data from Italy currently informing the Imperial College situational modelling, where they have apparently seen rises in the number of much younger victims suffering from serious illness.

Of course it's difficult to know anything for certain at the moment, and reports from any individual hospital are going to be based on relatively small patient samples that might be widely different to the larger picture.

Edit: plus googling the initial paragraph reveals that this "letter" is allover the internet, with widely different attributions as to its author, and in some instances where it is still attributed to Dr Rachel Tennant, the following paragraphs vary quite considerably in content from that quoted above.

Fake news, methinks!

 

[Paddywack]

Once enough people have had it then herd immunity will mean it dies out. So if the frail elderly can hibernate for a few months hopefully we can keep mortality down.

It's a spoof, no clinician would make such a statement, any such statement would come from the hospitals Medical Director or Chief Executive. Besides if it was real she might have mentioned the fatalities at that hospital. <Broken link removed>

I can easily google who is the Consultant in acute and respiratory medicine at my local hospital and attribute a statement to them, if it was legit you would be able to find a direct link to it.

 

[Stealaway]

It's a spoof, no clinician would make such a statement, any such statement would come from the hospitals Medical Director or Chief Executive. Besides if it was real she might have mentioned the fatalities at that hospital. <Broken link removed>

I can easily google who is the Consultant in acute and respiratory medicine at my local hospital and attribute a statement to them, if it was legit you would be able to find a direct link to it.

Oh dear just we had some good news??

 

[bigtwin]

Oh dear just we had some good news??

The good news is that more fake news is being exposed ?

Ian