If you work in a COVID HOSPITAL WARD - how busy are you?

[1person100names]

I was just wondering really how busy COVID wards are in hospitals at the moment?

Where do you work?

I wonder whether hospitals in certain regions, e.g Greater Manchester are busier than others?

I also wonder whether you have noticed any changes with cases since March - i.e have symptoms been consistent, has the survival rate improved? Are you using any treatment now that you have noticed has made a big difference?

There are currently no Covid patients in my nearest hospital. Last one was discharged Sunday or Monday. (large town/small city in South East).

Tiny numbers (if any now), central London. The hospital is busy though- trying to catch up with all the work that was on hold due to covid.

It peaked at Easter and them the numbers dropped like a stone and it was pretty much all over within a month. Lockdown went on FAR too long.

About a third of us staff have antibodies.

See my friend is a paramedic too and I actually asked him about this when everyone on MN was saying ambulances wouldn't take people. He said they took everyone unless they were absolutely sure they were fine. Perhaps it depends where you live

Yes maybe. We are in the midlands and I just looked back at the message from my friend sent at the end of March that said she had called 999 twice, but they weren't taking anyone unless they are gasping for breath and lips are turning blue.... I am aware there are other tests they do to check oxygen levels etc, but people were definitely being left at home who would normally be taken straight in to hospital.
My paramedic friend is Yorkshire based and we discussed it again this weekend. He said he had to leave many at home (or in care homes) that they would normally have taken in.

I work in a hospital in the North west. Not on a Covid ward myself but have many friends who work across the trust. We have one covid ward remaining - it has patients, but last time I bumped into someone from there (about a week ago) they had about 10 patients in total. None left on ICU at present.

I work on what is now a 'query covid' admissions ward. We have one positive case, a gentleman who was admitted for something else and his routine admission swab came back positive. He has been on our ward 10 days and that is the only case we've had in last two weeks. We haven't had more than 6 positive cases in the hospital at any one time since lockdown ended. Our covid ICU was stepped down about 5 weeks ago.

I'm really hoping things don't escalate again and we have seen the worst!

Nightingale hospitals are not decommissioned, they are in stand-by mode, but very few staff there - just admin and security. The problem will be if they are needed because there were never going to be any specific staff to work in them, it was going to be a few qualified staff who had volunteered to work in them and quite a lot of vets, dentists, GPs who were untrained in intensive care and who would not stop work again in the event of a second wave so won't be available this autumn/winter.

A friend of mine was speaking to some people who work for the London Ambulance Service. She asked them about this, having heard about it on social media. They said that they'd had no instructions about people's lips turning blue. (The reason she was chatting to them was they were hanging about outside a cafe she was also using, as they had so little to do at that moment.)

It's interesting that the people who claim that their 'paramedic friend' said that was the case never mention the Trust.

It was ridiculously over hyped on mumsnet at the beginning, a lot of people exaggerated, fibbed to get a reaction, you really do have to take things on here sometimes at face value. It’s calming down a bit but you still get the odd one. I’m beginning to think it’s not quite as contagious as they first thought. We will see when the schools go back in September.

@neutralintelligence

Yes of course you are right. The Nightingale hospitals were just a PR exercise by the Government to show it was in control (at a time when it clearly was not). Badly thought out ‘white elephants’ that were not fit for purpose.

I don't think people deliberately exaggerated or lied. If you had Covid at the beginning of lockdown there was very little help unless you were extremely ill. Some GP surgeries were not dealing with Covid symptoms and telling people to contact 111. The wait time for them to answer was at one point upto 3 hours. They were telling people they were not breathless enough for hospital but call back if it gets worse. So I can imagine if you are breathless and scared you felt very alone and some people would have called an ambulance as a last resort when not necessarily needed.

noextremes 2017 - that isn't what I was saying at all. Nightingale hospitals were a very good idea and will be very useful if there is a second wave as big as the first. The only proviso is that staffing is the main hurdle.

@PatriciaPerch

I am not so sure it is as obvious as you think.

Cases of Covid are being confirmed at an increasing rate as testing is ramped up. But hospitals are empty of Covid patients. You could argue that the most vulnerable people have already been killed by this virus and most of those were killed as a result of poor infection control in hospitals and care homes in March/April when the virus was less well understood.
Plenty of people have returned to working and socialising but there is no evidence that is increasing infections or serious illness.
As stated more infections each day is the result of significantly more testing. If you test 200,000 people a day then you are pretty much guaranteed to find more cases than when you were testing 30,000.
Hospitals have generally returned to normal and the overall death rate is LOWER than the average at this time of year.
No doubt that people being encouraged to wash their hands more often is helping infection control (and not just for Covid). Pretty pathetic that so many of the British public seemingly needed to be given a basic hygiene lesson!!!

I had surgery on Friday and was told by one of the nurses that there were less than 40 people with Covid in ITU in the ENTIRE COUNTRY.

@neutralintelligence

They were never going to work. Staff preferred to work in their own hospitals which were fully equipped. Of course they would. So they could never be properly staffed. They were essentially ‘field hospitals’ for a doomsday scenario we never came anywhere near.
Your point that people like dentists / vets might have staffed them in April but won’t be available in the future is no doubt correct. But if you or I are dependent on a vet to save our lives due to non availability of a Doctor then we are drinking in the last chance saloon.

@PatriciaPerch

I know what you mean.

I had a filling yesterday and the Dentist and Dental Nurse looked like aliens. I told them I felt like I was radioactive!

Like all things it will revert to something sensible in the middle at some point.

And hopefully, whether it is a hospital, care home kitchen, dentist or whatever, the experience will have generally raised hygiene standards.

If there is a second wave, they will still need those nightingales. What the D of Health, PHE, NHS should have been doing this summer was training newly qualified nurses or even student nurses in ITU-specific skills.

www.rt.com/uk/497778-flu-pneumonia-deaths-coronavirus-britain/

This article sums up the current situation and why it is quite frankly ludicrous that we are all so restricted. Why have mainstream media switched so seamlessly into reporting cases and barely any mention of deaths anymore? Ah, because the two graph lines are no longer travelling along the same path and that doesn’t fit their doomsday, societal control rhetoric

Yes - why do the mainstream media and the Government delight in scaremongering and overstating the danger?

For the media - sensational headlines sell papers / get clicks.

For the Government - fear makes control easier.

Problem for the Government is that by extending the lockdown for so long it has totally screwed the economy which will take years to recover. So the narrative now has to be that this situation is still 'so serious' to justify the damage already done and the problems that lie ahead.

But hey - could we ever expect honesty from a Government lead by a serial liar who has selected a bunch of 'yes men' for a cabinet??!! Don't expect it to change anytime soon........

It’s been totally over hyped and still people are scared to leave their homes. I went to dinner with a friend of mine who manages a doctors surgery, she couldn’t believe how over the top the reaction to this has been. Not one person in the surgery has had coronvirus, they have been working the whole time. My husband has been back to work in London, since the 1st June, meeting different people each day, i’m back at work, my son has flown to Tenerife and Hungary, non of us have had the virus. We have met friends, gone out for dinner many times. The big test will be in September when my daughter goes back to secondary school, in a bubble of 260.

In my town, the death rate for the last 4 weeks has been below the 5 year average by quite some way, perhaps indicating that the CV19 virus killed some people prematurely but only by a few months.

@Noextremes2017 yep the government, media scared the shit out of the general public and they fell for it hook, line and sinker. The economy is going to take a long time to recover which will be much worse than the virus

www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/12/why-is-britain-gdp-down-more-than-other-major-nations

My friend works in intensive care (ITU) and she mentioned she hasn't had a Covid case in weeks. It's practically back to normal other than carrying on with PPE.

I don’t necessarily disagree with anything that’s said about the government wanting to ‘control’ everyone - but I don’t understand why. What do they get out of us all being too terrified to leave our homes and return to work/shops/restaurants etc? What’s in it for them if it’s just one big exercise in control?