That would be about right I’d say. It’s not all doctors and nurses, you’ve pharmacists, porters, maintenance people etc. That also stretches across different settings.
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At one stage iirc it was the biggest state employer outside of the Indian railway…
It’s why the politicians are all terrified of touching it. It’s an awful lot of votes.
Ok fair enough.
Turns out that healthcare is a big industry worldwide and employs a lot of people, who would have guessed it. This from wikipedia on healthcare in Germany:
Health care in Germany, including its industry and all services, is one of the largest sectors of the German economy. Direct inpatient and outpatient care equivalent to just about a quarter of the entire ‘market’ – depending on the perspective.[7] A total of 4.4 million people working in this, that means about one in ten employees in 2007 and 2008.[42] The total expenditure in health economics was about 287.3 billion Euro in Germany in 2010, equivalent to 11.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year and about 3.510 Euro per capita.[43]
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The US has 17 million working in health care, or 5% of the overall population.
Poor Andrew Cuomo looks resigned to defeat there on cnn
Which place? The whole country? All 50 states? Some states will fare better than others (especially if the Governors ignore Trump and do what’s best for their state) . . . there’s plenty of places in Europe that might also be only a few days from carnage. I would venture to say that the UK might be closer to carnage than the US.
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There’ll be plenty of carnage to go around
The number of new cases in the UK was steady over the past three days. Death rates not though.
I’ll add that I thought a while back that the state governments and city mayor’s might just save trump’s neck.
I am sure that there will be, especially in the cities . . . a log cabin in Wyoming might be the best place to be over there right now!!
**I am actually surprised that the numbers in Florida and Texas are still kind of “lowish” for the population of those states . . . of course, that could change – especially in Florida with the age profile.
Florida is hot all year round and fairly well spread out at least the elderly retirees are
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If you assume that the number of tests being done is similar, then the new cases being similar is unsurprising?
The deaths can’t be hidden. Although they are trying apparently
If they are doing a similar number of tests, and the incidence is increasing, positive test numbers should increase also.
I suppose that if you are testing a sick population, that throws that logic out the window though right enough.
The Tommy’s seem to be fuming that the germans are getting through 500k tests a week.
The only time they mentioned testing was right at the start when they were checking the microphone.
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@anon7035031, I’m watching a bit of cnn and fox news here. Now while I wouldn’t go as far as to say, the a Americans have been blasee about the crisis, they certainly seem to be taking it a lot more seriously today for so e reason. Would that be true?
It depends whether you’re talking about the media or the federal and state government response.
There has been a steady escalation in government response since Jan 31, travel restrictions, guidelines on social isolation, and now most states are in some form of lock down. We are in good shape here so far at least due to earlier intervention. New York has been a big shock to the system, which really exposed how much this had spread and how unprepared a city of that size was. The big mistake, not just in the US, was the time lost in February to early March. That was the time for strict measures.
The media has been a joke, CNN and MSNBC using it solely to bash Trump and Fox to defend him.
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Try not to copy and paste all your posts from Breitbart comment sections.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting, has been joining staff in trying to resuscitate Covid-19 patients at her local hospital
TOM DUNKLEY FOR THE TIMES
Alice Thomson
Wednesday April 01 2020, 12.00am BST, The Times
The last time I met Dr Rosena Allin-Khan she was crying softly as she sat in the canteen of the House of Commons. The MP for Tooting had just returned from volunteering as a trauma doctor in a Rohingya refugee camp. Remembering a mother whom she had met at a clinic in Bangladesh, she choked back tears as she explained how the woman’s entire family including her husband had been slaughtered. “I knew her baby was going to die too,” she said. “She’d had to make a split-second choice to stay with her children being hacked to death or run with her baby.”
Three years later and we are facetiming from her flat in Tooting where she lives with her two young daughters, and she is again distraught, this time describing the scenes in her local A&E department at St George’s Hospital in south London, where she has been joining the staff in trying to resuscitate Covid-19 patients. “In the course of the day a lady came in in her fifties who was fit, but who had become very unwell during the night. She started to deteriorate rapidly and she had a heart attack. I’m not sure she survived; we couldn’t let her family stay with her.”
Intensive care, she says, was already full early in the morning. “The most startling and disconcerting thing was that we had been told it only affects the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, but there were healthy patients who were in their thirties. That jolted me.”
Allin-Khan, 43, realised that they had to treat every patient as though they might have the virus. “Up to 20 per cent were coming with abdominal pain, but also had a fever; we had headaches, sore throats, extreme lethargy.”
With elderly parents, two young daughters and a job as an MP, she didn’t need to return to the front line. “The same drivers that caused me to get on a plane, go to refugee camps and call out genocide are the same drivers for getting my scrubs on and going back to regular shifts at my hospital. It’s ‘Can I save a life today?’,” she says. “This virus is different from seeing human beings fleeing from slaughter or war; most people aren’t fleeing their homes, but there is still a huge frustration that there are deaths that could have been prevented and that no one feels safe any more.”
Least of all doctors and nurses. “It’s a particularly harrowing time for the whole of the NHS family — receptionists, porters, cleaners too, and the people working at the M&S in my hospital, keeping it open so we can eat.”
Although Allin-Khan was in the middle of trying to become deputy leader of the Labour Party, she says she has no regrets about immediately volunteering. “My whole career was A&E, so I am used to seeing the sickest patients, but it’s still quite daunting.”
Her first shift was on Mothering Sunday. “It took a significant proportion of the first part of the shift to find protective equipment — there isn’t the amount we need. There is also a great deal of confusion as to what is the gold-level standard of protection. Staff have bought their own goggles.”
Many of her medical colleagues have looked to her to highlight their plight. “I’ve had colleagues messaging me at 2am saying, ‘I can’t sleep, I don’t feel safe.’ We are all worried we are going to pass it on to those we love the most. When I finished my first shift I called ahead and said, ‘Please make sure the girls don’t run to the door and cuddle me.’ They were so excited it was Mother’s Day, they wanted to greet me and make cards. I had to ensure they stayed well away from me until I had taken off all my clothes and showered. Some staff are avoiding their children; that’s desperately sad as you need human comfort when you return home from shifts.”
They also need ventilators. “When it gets serious it does seem to be the breathing. The biggest terror I think for medics is that if we do become overwhelmed, and we don’t have enough ventilators, impossible choices will have to be made. We have seen that from our colleagues in Italy and that is cripplingly fearful. Every life is someone’s grandmother, mum, sister, daughter, grandson, dad, son, brother. Every life is equal so it’s horrible to make choices.”
She says it’s intensely distressing to watch someone gasping for every breath. “It’s so painful to watch; you step into a mode of thinking straight, doing your best and dealing with the emotion later. What is very hard is not to allow their relatives in with them because the virus is so contagious.”
She doesn’t want to score political points — she feels closer to her role as a doctor than as a Labour MP at the moment. “But I would have felt more comfortable with the social distancing rolled out earlier, so the NHS could have had time to get ready. In Italy the mental health of the doctors is terrible; I worry about our medical workforce after this. They are going to work feeling unprepared, unprotected and afraid. Some feel like lambs to the slaughter; others have been attacked on the street.”
Three doctors have died on the front line. “A disproportionate amount of medical staff die; it does cause you to soul-search. I don’t worry about myself, I worry that by going to work I am putting my family at risk. That is what all healthcare professionals are feeling. It takes an element of courage to go to work. You feel maybe you are being selfish to your family, but I went into the profession to save lives; it’s who I am and what I do best. Even more than being a politician.”
As a child Allin-Khan wanted to become a doctor after discovering her grandmother was blind. Her mother is Polish and was a singer in a Sixties band called Filipinki who, while touring in London, met Allin-Khan’s Pakistani father who was a TV repairman. Her mother brought up Rosena and her brother largely alone. “She worked in a Mobil petrol station, as a childminder and as a cleaner.” She comes from a strong line of women; during the Second World War her grandmother had to hide in the sewers of Warsaw while she was pregnant with Allin-Khan’s uncle.
With problems at home, Allin-Khan messed up her A levels, but her mother helped her to re-sit them and encouraged her to keep her dream. She studied medical biochemistry at Brunel University and, aged 24, got a chance to read medicine at Cambridge, crowdfunded by her Tooting neighbours.
Over the years she volunteered with charities to work in post-conflict situations. In camps in Bangladesh she saw women who had had their breasts cut off, teenagers who had been gang-raped and heard of babies being thrown on to fires, but she never thought she would be working during a global pandemic. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this kind of crisis. “It was a terrorist attack we trained for. This is different from a psychological perspective as we are now in the firing line.”
Allin-Khan is deeply concerned that those with worrying symptoms of cancer and other diseases will be too terrified to seek help. “It’s breaking my heart people may also die because they have symptoms of other diseases, but won’t come near a hospital until perhaps it’s too late. People with illnesses such as cancer may not be able to have their chemotherapy regime in the way they ought to have it.”
Others, she feels, aren’t taking the situation seriously enough. “When I see people not socially distancing I feel disappointed as NHS staff are putting their lives at risk.”
Her 70-year-old mother lives near by. “For weeks we have been phoning her in advance and waving through the window and bringing provisions. We can’t take any chances. In the supermarkets I go alone, I wear gloves, I keep my distance. What devastated me was seeing an elderly lady with a basket who couldn’t get anything. I was going to people behind the till, saying, ‘Do you have a stash of toilet paper or eggs?’”
Her father lives in a care home. “I’m very aware that I may have seen my father for the last time a few weeks ago. He has a form of dementia and he only eats if my brother or I go to see him. Obviously we now can’t, so he may starve. He won’t understand what is going on.”
Yet she says she knows that her family are luckier than many in her community. “I grew up with my mum working multiple jobs to feed us; we lived through a very insecure time. Imagine doing that now with no possibility of income. I’m being contacted by so many desperate families. I’ve set up groups to help and ambassadors on the streets, and I’m doing as much as I can to relieve the pressure on vulnerable people in Tooting. It’s almost as though my own life experiences and my training and my job are all geared for this moment.”
Rising domestic abuse is another huge concern, she says. “Even for the happiest families this is a very frustrating time. With two adults trying to work from home and home-schooling, it can become very fractious. You can’t go to the gym. There will be a lot more people who lash out due to anger, and it will be harder for people to present to the emergency departments.”
She knows her constituency inside out, having taken over from Sadiq Khan when he ran for mayor. When she became an MP, the tabloids ran pictures of her as a part-time model. Does she have any time to be frivolous now? “My daughters, who are five and six, do an online Joe Wicks PE lesson every morning. I’m trying to do educational activities with them, but at the end of the day our children will be fine; we shouldn’t put too much pressure on them. I’m lucky I don’t have to worry about dyeing my hair. My nails have no varnish as in hospital you can’t wear it, but I did buy up my favourite shampoo and I did one big trip to the art shop as I thought, ‘God forbid we run out of felt-tips.’”
Yet it is the virus that obsesses her. “I worry about the refugees and homeless who will get the virus, the people in Africa and Asia, where their economy is so much more fragile and they may not cope. But I believe that people in the West will have learnt that the same feeling that drives you to stockpile and hoard is the same motivator that gets refugees to flee their country. We will all become more generous-spirited.”
She wasn’t amazed by the British people volunteering to help the NHS. The vast majority around the world in any crisis have proved to be kind, giving and selfless. “From the Calais jungle to Palestine I’ve seen people step forward in adversity. I think this crisis will change the way we think and there will be more of an appreciation of life.”
The Labour deputy leadership race is now just a memory, although the results are due this week. “After the catastrophic defeat we had in December I felt I had to step up and do something to get a Labour government again. I thought, having been a doctor, I could bring some things to the table, but I never thought that my expertise would be needed as much or like this.”
She enjoyed the hustings, she says. “I sang Cher from the top of my voice. I was coming up as the outsider. Then obviously this crisis left me with a choice: do I continue campaigning or stop it all to fight this? This was more important. All that matters now is to roll up my sleeves, get into the hospital, help my community and look after my family. I probably won’t even get the results this Saturday as I’ll be doing my next shift.”
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