SoapMactavish

So according to Ukrainian and Russian media, the Flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Slava- class Cruiser Moskva (Moscow) has been hit by missiles and suffered an ammunition explosion and has now been abandoned (read: likely sunk given current weather conditions) Russian Warship, Go f**k Yourself.

And are getting soundly malleted by the Ukrainian forces. You love to see it.

https://static.rusi.org/special-report-202202-ukraine-web.pdf This is quite an interesting read.

See, the interesting thing here is the doctor in question just happens to run a private ‘breathlessness clinic’. Charging £450 for a consultation. No conflict of interest here…. I’m sure he’ll enjoy his meeting without coffee.

So are you a Doctor now as well as a ‘scientist’ ? These are both more common than you think. Folk getting confused and in a state of delirium with an infection is exceedingly common, particularly the older generation who are at a much greater risk of falling. Patients fall all the time in hospital and break hips/wrists etc. The second point about clotting problems is perhaps the biggest complication of Covid, almost every patient ill enough to require treatment beyond the ED has issues with blood clotting. The most common issue from this is Pulmonary Emboli or Micro-emboli due to infection/inflammation of the lung tissue. Other clotting issues like Stroke/DVT/Venous Sinus Thrombosis has been very common as well. As have STEMI’s (Heart Attacks, my day job is fixing these) Which are much more common than the normal incidence of this in non-covid patients without any underlying risk factors. To explain to your layperson on here: the principal blood test looking at blood clotting problems is called a D-dimer. A d-dimer of <150 is normal. Anything greater than that is suggestive (or highly suggestive depending on the level recorded) of there being a clotting problem somewhere in the body. Almost every Covid patient I have seen has an abnormal d-dimer. While this doesn’t explictly mean they have a PE, it makes it very hard to rule one out. A PE is a medical emergency and can prove rapidly fatal, particularly if the thrombus is blocking a vessel close to the heart. You can ‘science’ all you like but you know, as my old ‘da would say “ the square root of f**k all” about medicine. If you had actually been treating Covid patients for the last almost 2 years I might respect your opinion. But you haven’t and I don’t. I’m not on here to debate the whys and wherefore’s of restrictions or things like that. I just state what I have seen and heard. To be blunt, after watching folk suffocate to death for the best part of 24 months I couldn’t give a singular f**k what someone on a football forum with no experience, training or knowledge what-so-ever has to say about the disease process of Covid-19. I also have never once claimed to be hospital management. I work for a living. They are part of the problem. Happy New Year

I mean, Delirium and Clotting problems in particular are massive problems with people who are clinically ill enough with Covid to be in hospital. The point I’m making is there is no sense in putting all the Covid patients in one hospital, then having to move them to a non-covid hospital when something goes wrong with their treatment.

You can’t treat folk with what is essentially a complex multi-system disease process in folk actually ill with it in a dedicated ‘Covid Hospital’. You need access to all the specialism’s on site if there is a problem. Confused and falls and breaks hip - Needs Orthopaedics. Has a stroke secondary to Covid -Needs Stroke team input. etc etc It was one of the major issues we highlighted at the Louisa Jordan was folk would have to be transferred back to another hospital if they developed any weird complications. If it was purely a respiratory illness that didn’t cause any other problems it would be great. But its sadly not.

Not sure if this is serious or not, but you can’t iust charge folk for not being vaccinated and taking space, as frustrating as it is. it undermines the whole ethos of the NHS, and then where do you draw the line? Not vaccinated against Flu? Get in the sea. Most folk not vaccinated are hesitant, not full on tinfoil hat brigade. If you convince the hesitant folk you are quids in. The tinfoil hat, Bill Gates, 5G, Ivermectin and Zinc ones will never be convinced. No-one I work alongside will judge folk for not having had a vaccine so if folk haven’t had it and aren’t sure, speak to a Doctor and ask their opinion.

I was meaning currently, as it transitions to becoming less and less severe I imagine it will change.

We did test most folk coming in with respiratory type symptoms during flu season. There was a wee machine they basically spat into a wee sample tube and it told you whether they had Flu A, Flu B or something else like RSV. We didn’t routinely test for asymptomatic flu patients, I don’t think, (I know some places do as its a fairly quick, simple and accurate test) however: A. Being asymptomatic with flu is rarer than being asymptomatic with Covid, probably due to lower uptake on flu vaccines. B. Asymptomatic folk with Covid are almost as infectious if not as infectious as symptomatic punters. Asymptomatic folk with Flu are significantly less infectious.

Oh yeah its fairly shit now in the community as a whole, but it is still a more infectious and more deadly virus than the flu. We didn’t just keep flu patients in regular wards beside wee Jeanie with Lymphoma before this. Most folk in hospital for most reasons are especially vulnerable to it, vaccinated or not. Particularly on the Intensivist side of things, for example our ITU has 9 beds, Currently 5 of which are taken up with Covid patients. We can put a maximum of 3 in negative pressure side rooms before we run out. Once we get above 3 patients it effectively becomes ‘Covid ITU’. This stops for example complex surgery taking place for things like ruptured aneurysms as these folk need ITU beds for days afterwards. The secondary issue is that staff are having to isolate due to actually being positive. That can’t change. The virus is still infectious and capable of causing severe harm to the kind of people who are likely to be in hospital, i.e. the immunocompromised, cancer patients, people recovering from surgery etc.

Everything else aside I’m getting kind of fucked off a bit with the with/for argument that has appeared on here. Paraphrasing slightly from a collegue down south here: Focussing *just* on COVID hospitalisation and ITU is foolish. The impact that one patient who tests positive (even if they are admitted for another reason) is immense. It requires them to be isolated, managed in a separate area, with their own staff. They can’t go to “any bed”. So say you feel great, have a +ve lateral flow and PCR, but then slip on the ice and break your leg - you’ll need to be on the COVID ward and access a whole different pathway. Just seeing it an “non serious infection” underestimates the impact on the wider system. That means a ward needs to be “flipped” to cohort the positive patients together… so medical patients and surgical patients are bedded next to one another (with added risk of more hospital acquired infection and non-expert nursing). That’s hugely uneconomic as even IF there are 5 positive patients, for a 20-bedded ward, that’s 15 beds that are not being used for work that needs to be done. That’s why case numbers in the community are a concern for the NHS, even if it’s not people breathing their last.

In effect yes. Requirement is no-one in your household positive, double (or triple vaccinated if Omicron contact) a negative PCR and then 10 days of Negative Lateral flow tests before work IIRC. Otherwise the place would collapse. The current issue isn’t so much staff isolating but staff actually being positive.

So basically staff don’t isolate unless they aren’t vaccinated and/or have symptoms. Otherwise its come to work and take daily LFT’s for 10 days. a lot of folk seem to assume that NHS staff are just off for the 10 days by default where its not the case.

Yeah, I’m lying lads, sorry!

I wouldn’t bother engaging them, the lunatics have clearly taken over the asylum.

Godspeed brother. For what its worth its not too bad so far on day 3 of symptoms. Day 5-7 is usually when it gets exciting but I have faith in the Pfizer.

We have very limited beds. In my trust alone 2 entire wards plus an ITU are all put aside for Covid. We will be pushed to our limit in the winter with that capacity being used for Covid. The NHS is not struggling really from that as much as you’d think now that we are exempt. If you get a negative PCR it’s back to work within a day generally for us and then 10 days of Lateral Flow Tests. The only exception being if like myself you are positive, in which case it’s the slammer for 10 days. Edit to add; the higher incidence of Covid within the community, the more of us getting infected, the less staff the NHS has. We can’t just patch a PCR or keep doing our own thing and hope for the best. Its struggling more from inappropriate A&E attendances and conversely the increase in people coming to A&E that are too sick. I haven’t worked less than a 55 hour week since January. The vast majority of my colleagues are the same and we aren’t getting the waiting lists down. If this goes into the winter when you add in all the falls on ice, respiratory infections etc that were minimised during the last year then I think it’ll be dicey. The NHS skates through most December-February periods by the seat of its pants. Again, very few if any people in hospital with covid are asymptomatic. The vast majority of folk are presymptomatic or symptomatic when the are tested. Irrespective of that, they still have to be isolated on a seperate ward or room which takes up more resources.

I think when folk are now arguing that vaccines don’t work and are harmful then we should just give up. The NHS is on its knees, winter bed crisis +++ except it’s summer, we have no more beds, and there are still a fair amount of folk in hospital with covid. Anyone who doesn’t want to get a vaccination that will protect people at a no higher rate of adverse events than without it, is for want of a better word, an oxygen thief. And while I’m here, a point of order about masks. I wear a mask every day at work, I see near enough every single Covid +ve or suspected Covid +ve patient we have. Even when someone without a mask that is Covid +ve and has been coughing all over the place is literally within 20cm of me = never been infected since early April 2020. See my fiancée for 20 minutes without a mask before she mentioned she’s losing her sense of smell ‘because of hayfever’ and turns out is Covid +ve = infected and symptomatic within 3 days.

f**k.

4 folk at my other half’s work now positive including her. I’m still negative but spent the day with her the other day while ‘her hayfever was bad’ so now awaiting my own PCR test. She’s lousy but I’m grand so far.

We already test for flu in hospital even in pre-covid times.

Football’s coming home!