Kamis, 09 April 2020

Boris Johnson Is Out of Intensive Care as U.K. Extends Lockdown - Bloomberg

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2020-04-09 20:15:08Z
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Boris Johnson Is Out of Intensive Care as U.K. Extends Lockdown - Bloomberg

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750000 people volunteered to help Britain's NHS. Now they're being deployed. - The Washington Post

Justin Setterfield Getty Images Taxi driver Michael Hayes has been offering free rides home to health workers at Newham University Hospital in East London.

LONDON — When the British government asked people to help the National Health Service during the coronavirus crisis, it called for a “volunteer army.” Within four days, 750,000 people had signed up — three times the original target and four times the size of the British armed forces.

Britain hasn’t seen such a surge in volunteers since World War II, when the country pulled together in a way still remembered with immense pride. Now — with more than 60,000 people here having tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and with the prime minister among those who have been hospitalized — organizers are figuring out how to deploy the army, while individuals and companies are engaged in informal volunteer activities throughout the British Isles.

Michael Hayes, 55, is a taxi driver who joined the volunteer army and is awaiting his first official assignment. In the meantime, he spends about five hours a day driving NHS staff home, at no cost, from Newham University Hospital in East London, where his three children were born.

“Some of them come out, they’ve had dreadful days, the worst . . . and they are walking out thinking, ‘I still got to get home,’ I’m sort of like a little ray of sunshine,” Hayes said. “They see me sitting there and I whiz them home.”

Justin Setterfield

Getty Images

Michael Hayes waits outside Newham University Hospital. He has also answered a separate volunteer initiative run by the Royal Voluntary Service and is awaiting his assignment.

The organizers of the government effort said they were “starting slowly” with a soft launch last week, and an official launch Tuesday, when “thousands” of volunteers were offered assignments.

They aren’t involved in medical care. Another 12,000 former NHS workers said they would come back for that. Rather, the volunteers are supposed to help the elderly and others deemed especially vulnerable to the virus by doing such tasks as delivering groceries and medicine, driving people to appointments and conducting check-ins on those in self-isolation.

[Retired doctors in Italy are heading back into the fray to treat coronavirus patients]

“I was so excited I pushed ‘accept’ before I even read the job,” said Steve Pepper, 34, a warehouse manager in Norfolk who got a ping Sunday evening. The request: Buy groceries for a man with covid-19 symptoms who lived about a quarter-mile away.

Pepper said he hesitated over the question of how to pay. “I can’t afford to risk buying groceries for everyone around town,” he said. But he went ahead and spent $36 for “bread, milk, comfort food.” He said the recipient transferred him the money shortly after he dropped the groceries off outside of his door. Pepper said organizers called him to say next time he should use payment methods on their site.

“I think they are still fine-tuning it — this is my one and only task. But it was really good to get out there and finally help someone,” he said.

Starting this week, health professionals, pharmacists and local government authorities can upload requests to an app called GoodSam, which then connects them to an approved volunteer.

Julian Finney

Getty Images

A volunteer from GoodGym takes an order from a woman who can’t leave her house.

Many people are still waiting for assignments, and some have taken to social media to express confusion or frustration that their offer of services has so far been rejected or ignored.

Those who work in the volunteer sector say that the logistics of mobilizing 750,000 people, vetting volunteers, matching supply and demand, and ensuring that everyone is safe is a huge endeavor.

“I have admiration for how they have done it, but it’s a big task for anyone,” said Mark Lever, chief executive of Helpforce, a charity that works with volunteers in the NHS but isn’t involved in this particular project. “A big challenge is matching supply of volunteers, with the demand for their support. You could have loads of volunteers, but in the wrong place. Or volunteers happy to do three things, but your need is for the fourth one.”

Matthew McMurray, an archivist at the Royal Voluntary Service, a charity helping to organize the effort, said that one of the parallels between World War II and today is that a spike in volunteering followed a specific event. McMurray said that after bombs began falling in January and February of 1940, volunteers signed up in droves. Likewise, he noted that the government’s call for volunteers came the day after lockdown measures were announced. “People need to see a crisis and experience it,” he said.

[In fight against coronavirus, the world gives medical heroes a standing ovation]

Up and down the country, individuals and companies are doing their part — including helping local charities and organizing neighborhood WhatsApp groups. In West Sussex, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has made its fleet of autos, including limousines, available for essential deliveries. In London, museums have donated masks and gloves they normally use to handle artwork. In Cornwall, a volunteer group called Flu Friends — formed 10 years ago to help ill and isolated people during the swine flu pandemic — is back in action in the rugged tip of England.

Julian Finney

Getty Images

A runner from GoodGym returns from delivering food to a woman in London.

GoodGym is a charity group that for years combined exercise and outreach with runners as fleet-footed do-gooders completing fix-it jobs for the community. Now, its runners are answering a spike in food and pharmacy delivery requests.

“What I’m amazed about is people’s appetite for doing this under difficult circumstances,” said founder Ivo Gormley.

Damian Lewis, the British star of the drama series “Homeland,” and his wife, actress Helen McCrory, count dozens of NHS doctors and nurses as their London neighbors. McCrory is the daughter of a retired NHS worker, as well. At first, the couple sent pizzas to local hospitals to show their support. Then, with comedian Matt Lucas, they created FeedNHS to raise money — over $1 million so far — and partnered with fast-food chain Leon with the goal of delivering 6,000 meals a day.

“I don’t think NHS will mind me saying this: It’s not known for the quality of its food. And there are only so many grilled cheese sandwiches you can eat,” Lewis said.

John Vincent, Leon’s chief executive, said the teams were working flat out. Everyone’s contribution is seen as vital, he said: “I think it is waking people up. . . . We are learning about reconnecting with each other.”

George Selley

Lucy Zacaria and Andy Smith work as volunteers from the Imperial Health Charity, receiving food at Charing Cross Hospital from FeedNHS.

Tom George, 50, retired deputy commissioner for the London Fire Brigade, signed up to be an NHS volunteer and has had his app set to “on duty” for over a week, waiting for the siren to ring. In the meantime, he’s helping out his neighbors and his mother.

“In Britain, when we need to, when the going gets tough, most people want to help where possibly they can,” he said, adding, “everyone is locked down anyway, so in that sense, I’m not surprised that 750,000 have signed up.”

A Virginia man wanted to help those in need. He surprised shoppers by paying for their groceries.

How you can help during the coronavirus outbreak

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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2020-04-09 18:57:15Z
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Eight U.K. Doctors Died From Coronavirus. All Were Immigrants. - The New York Times

LONDON — The eight men moved to Britain from different corners of its former empire, all of them doctors or doctors-to-be, becoming foot soldiers in the effort to build a free universal health service after World War II.

Now their names have become stacked atop a grim list: the first, and so far only, doctors publicly reported to have died after catching the coronavirus in Britain’s aching National Health Service.

For a country ripped apart in recent years by Brexit and the anti-immigrant movement that birthed it, the deaths of the eight doctors — from Egypt, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan — attest to the extraordinary dependence of Britain’s treasured health service on workers from abroad.

It is a story tinged with racism, as white, British doctors have largely dominated the prestigious disciplines while foreign doctors have typically found work in places and practices that are apparently putting them on the dangerous front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

“When people were standing on the street clapping for N.H.S. workers, I thought, ‘A year and a half ago, they were talking about Brexit and how these immigrants have come into our country and want to take our jobs,’” said Dr. Hisham el-Khidir, whose cousin Dr. Adil el-Tayar, a transplant surgeon, died on March 25 from the coronavirus in western London.

“Now today, it’s the same immigrants that are trying to work with the locals,” said Dr. el-Khidir, a surgeon in Norwich, “and they are dying on the front lines.”

By Tuesday, 7,097 people had died in British hospitals from the coronavirus, the government said on Wednesday, a leap of 938 from the day before, the largest daily rise in the death toll.

And the victims have included not just the eight doctors but a number of nurses who worked alongside them, at least one from overseas. Health workers are stretched thin as hospitals across the country are filled with patients, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who this week was moved into intensive care with the coronavirus.

Britain is not the only country reckoning with its debt to foreign doctors amid the terror and chaos of the pandemic. In the United States, where immigrants make up more than a quarter of all doctors but often face long waits for green cards, New York and New Jersey have already cleared the way for graduates of overseas medical schools to suit up in the coronavirus response.

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But Britain, where nearly a third of doctors in National Health Service hospitals are immigrants, has especially strong links to the medical school systems of its former colonies, making it a natural landing place.

That was true for Dr. el-Tayar, 64, the oldest son of a government clerk and a housewife from Atbara, Sudan, a railway city on the Nile.

He had 11 siblings, and one left a special impression: Osman, a brother, who became ill as a child and died without suitable medical treatment. Though Dr. el-Tayar rarely spoke of his brother’s death, he gave the same name to his oldest son.

“In my mind, I think that’s what led him to medicine,” Dr. el-Khidir said. “He didn’t want anyone else in his family to feel that.”

After graduating from the University of Khartoum, Dr. el-Tayar decided to help address a tide of kidney disease sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa. So he moved to Britain in the early 1990s to train as a specialist transplant surgeon. He returned to Sudan around 2010 and helped set up a transplant program there.

But the deteriorating political situation in Sudan and the recent birth of a son persuaded Dr. el-Tayar to settle back in Britain, where he went to work once again for the health service. Having lost his status as a senior doctor when he left for Sudan, he had taken up work filling in at a surgical assessment unit in Herefordshire, northwest of London, examining patients coming through the emergency room.

It was there that his family believes Dr. el-Tayar, working with only rudimentary protective gear, contracted the virus. Sequestered in the western London home where he loved sitting next to his 12-year-old son, he became so short of breath recently that he could not string together a sentence. While on a ventilator, his heart failed him.

Had the health service started screening hospital patients for the virus sooner or supplied doctors with better protective gear, Dr. el-Tayar might have lived, said his cousin, Dr. el-Khidir.

“In our morbidity analyses, we go through each and every case and ask, ‘Was it preventable? Was it avoidable?’” he said. “I’m trying to answer this question with my cousin now. Even with all the difficulties, I’ve got to say the answer has to be yes.”

Analysts warn that doctor shortages across countries ravaged by the coronavirus will worsen as the virus spreads. While ventilators may be the scarcest resource for now, a shortage of doctors and nurses trained to operate them could leave hospitals struggling to make use even of what they have.

By recruiting foreign doctors, Britain saves the roughly $270,000 in taxpayer money that it costs to train doctors locally, a boon to a system that does not spend enough on medical education to staff its own hospitals. That effectively leaves Britain depending on the largess of countries with weaker health care systems to train its own work force.

Even so, the doctors are hampered by thousands of dollars in annual visa fees and, on top of that, a $500 surcharge for using the very health service they work for.

Excluded from the most prestigious disciplines, immigrant doctors have come to dominate so-called Cinderella specialties, like family and elderly medicine, turning them into pillars of Britain’s health system. And unlike choosier Britain-born doctors, they have historically gone to work in what one lawmaker in 1961 called “the rottenest, worst hospitals in the country,” the very ones that most needed a doctor.

Those same places are now squarely in the path of the virus.

“Migrant doctors are architects of the N.H.S. — they’re what built it and held it together and worked in the most unpopular, most difficult areas, where white British doctors don’t want to go and work,” said Dr. Aneez Esmail, a professor of general practice at the University of Manchester. “It’s a hidden story.”

When Dr. el-Tayar moved to Britain in the 1990s, he was following a pipeline laid by the family of another doctor who has now died after contracting the coronavirus: Dr. Amged el-Hawrani, 55.

An ear, nose and throat specialist, Dr. el-Hawrani was about 11 when his father, a radiologist, brought the family in 1975 from Khartoum to Taunton, a town in southwestern England, and then Bristol, a bigger city nearby.

Credit...University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Many Sudanese doctors at the time were burnishing their skills in Britain before returning home or moving to Persian Gulf countries for higher wages. But Dr. el-Hawrani’s family turned their home into a staging post for Sudanese doctors interested in longer-term stays, hosting their families during exams or house hunts.

“The more the merrier,” said Amal el-Hawrani, a younger brother of Dr. el-Hawrani. “My mum always liked that.”

Being British-Sudanese in the 1980s was not easy. Race riots flared in cities across the country. Mosques were scarce. Dr. el-Hawrani went to school almost exclusively with white British classmates.

The young doctor quietly stood up for his family: When someone once tried to kill a 100-year-old fern in their garden by cutting out a ring of bark, Dr. el-Hawrani snapped off branches and nailed them across the gap so that nutrients could get across.

Still, discrimination bothered him. When it came time to follow his father into medicine, Dr. el-Hawrani told his brother that he “wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon but felt that maybe because of certain prejudices he didn’t get it.”

His resolve only grew stronger after an older brother, Ashraf, a fellow doctor, died at 29 of causes related to asthma. Dr. el-Hawrani discovered his brother’s body.

Before Dr. el-Hawrani’s death, on March 28, he had finally come around to the idea that his only son, Ashraf, named in his brother’s memory, would study English instead of the family trade. Ashraf said in a statement that his father “was dedicated towards his family.”

“Now he has to make his decisions about which university to go to on his own,” Amal el-Hawrani said of Ashraf. “He was expecting to have his father’s help.”

The coronavirus has taken a devastating toll on migrant doctors across Britain, leaving at least six others dead: Dr. Habib Zaidi, 76, a longtime general practitioner from Pakistan; Dr. Alfa Sa’adu, 68, a geriatric doctor from Nigeria; Dr. Jitendra Rathod, 62, a heart surgeon from India; Dr. Anton Sebastianpillai, in his 70s, a geriatric doctor from Sri Lanka; Dr. Mohamed Sami Shousha, 79, a breast tissue specialist from Egypt; and Dr. Syed Haider, in his 80s, a general practitioner from Pakistan.

Barry Hudson, a longtime patient of Dr. Zaidi in southeastern England, recalled their exam table conversations about England’s cricket team.

“He was a big figure in the community,” Mr. Hudson said. “He had a proper doctor’s manner. He didn’t rush anybody.”

Credit...NHS Southend CCG

For families that love to gather, grieving at a distance has been wrenching.

Dr. el-Tayar was buried beside his father and grandfather in Sudan, as he had wanted. But because only cargo planes were flying there, his wife and children could not accompany the coffin.

At Dr. el-Hawrani’s burial, an imam said a prayer before a small, spread-out crowd, and the doctor’s four living brothers and son lowered his coffin into the ground. Then they dispersed.

His brother, Amal el-Hawrani, permitted himself a single intimacy: a hug with his mother, because “I couldn’t turn that away,” he said.

Then she returned to her home in Bristol, along with a son who had visited Dr. el-Hawrani in the hospital. Fearful of passing on the virus, he had to forbid her from his room to keep her from bringing in food.

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2020-04-09 18:30:08Z
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Coronavirus: Raab urges UK public not to ruin lockdown progress - BBC News

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has urged the public to stay indoors over this Easter weekend, telling people: "Let's not ruin it now."

He said after almost three weeks of lockdown "we are starting to see the impact of the sacrifices we've all made."

Mr Raab said it was still "too early" to lift the restrictions.

A total of 7,978 people have now died in hospital after testing positive for coronavirus, up by 881 on Wednesday.

Speaking at the government's daily briefing, Mr Raab said a decision on whether to ease the lockdown measures would not come until "the end of next week".

But he stressed that the restrictions would have to stay in place until evidence showed the UK had moved beyond the peak of the virus.

He said: "After all the efforts everybody has made, after all the sacrifices so many people have made let's not ruin it now.

"Let's not undo the gains we've made, let's not waste the sacrifices so many people have made.

"We mustn't give the coronavirus a second chance to kill more people and to hurt our country."

Mr Raab was speaking ahead of a bank holiday weekend which has been forecast to be warm, and Downing Street earlier said it gave its "full backing" to police forces to enforce the lockdown rules.

The first secretary of state, who is deputising for the prime minister, said Boris Johnson was still in intensive care, adding that "he continues to make positive steps forward and he's in good spirits."

He said he had not spoken to Mr Johnson since he was admitted to St Thomas' hospital on Sunday.

The announcement of another 881 deaths of people with coronavirus is yet another tragic piece of news.

And we know that the true death toll to date is higher: this figure doesn't include people who have died with coronavirus but whose death has not yet been reported to the Department for Health and Social Care.

However this is a fall in the daily total compared to Wednesday's announcement of 938.

Any fall in the daily figure is to be welcomed, but the scientists advising the government have warned that we shouldn't be surprised if tomorrow's figures once again set a record.

They have suggested that the peak of the epidemic may not arrive before next week.

The trends over the last week do suggest that the measures that everyone are taking are having an effect on the epidemic.

Until last Saturday, the number of deaths was doubling every three-and-a-half days, growing by just over 20% every day.

Since then, the growth in the number of deaths has halved, down to about 10% a day.

Even once we pass the peak, we will see more people fall victim to this virus - but there are growing suggestions in the data that the lockdown is having the expected effect.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK's chief scientific adviser, said social distancing measures were curbing the number of new cases and hospital admissions.

He explained that the death toll would continue to rise for about two weeks after intensive care admissions stabilise, as deaths lag behind admissions.

David Rosser, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham, warned people must not become "falsely reassured" by the flattening of the curve.

Dr Rosser said he did not want hospitals "to start reaping the consequences" next week if people broke the rules.

Earlier, Mr Raab chaired a virtual meeting of the emergency Cobra committee to discuss the lockdown measures.

According to new coronavirus laws, the health secretary must review the restrictions at least once every 21 days, with the first review due by 16 April.

There are now 65,077 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK, an increase of 4,344 on Wednesday.

In other developments:

There are now 1.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases around the world, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University
A 101-year-old man has been discharged from hospital in Worcestershire after recovering from coronavirus at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch
The Queen has written to those she would have presented with symbolic money during the annual Royal Maundy service, which was cancelled due to the pandemic
Ofcom has launched a formal investigation into a London TV network's broadcast of an interview with conspiracy theorist David Icke about coronavirus
Admissions to hospital A&E departments in England fell last month by 23%, as calls to NHS 111 doubled

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2020-04-09 16:28:06Z
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Coronavirus: Raab urges UK public not to ruin lockdown progress - BBC News