Well finally... public health England are going to be testing sentinel samples. They should have been doing this several weeks ago, but better late than never. Results from this (if released) will be interedting
“Health officials have announced they will start to test at least 600 extra people every week for the coronavirus in the UK, through local hospitals and GP surgeries.
Some 11 hospitals and around 100 doctors' practices – the locations of which are unknown – have been enrolled into a scheme to automatically test patients with severe chest infections such as flu.
The surveillance programme is intended to ramp up preparations for people infected with the fast-spreading virus to bring it onto UK soil.
Until now, only people who had started to feel ill after returning from East Asia had been tested. Now, broader testing will be done to try to stay a step ahead of the virus.
The hospitals and GPs are expected to be dotted around the country to give a representative sample of the population.
So if, for example, cases are diagnosed in Yorkshire, authorities will know they need to increase efforts to contain it there and stop it spreading to other areas.”
Public Health England announced that patients suffering flu-like symptoms will now be tested for the infection and at around 100 primary care sites, such as GP surgeries.
www.dailymail.co.uk
archived 26 Feb 2020 11:43:49 UTC
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Better late than never, but this wasn’t done at the start and it should have been. I’m not involved in this kind of political level preparedness (more’s the pity, and I have to say it’d be a fun job...) but it doesn’t give me great confidence that the UK or anywhere else is truly understanding the threat level posed by emergent diseases.
As I’ve said before, emerging plagues are an interest of mine and each time something like SARS popped up I’ve said the same thing: that each of these pathogens has the potential to wreak havoc on society. Not that ‘panic this is the big one’ but that eventually, one will be bad and that we should be prepared.
Every single time they’re squelched, and the media starts the character assassination of those who said the same thing, we have become more complacent and less likely to plan and prepare properly.
The big society-damaging threats are either localised natural disasters like earthquakes, wars and conflicts, which can be local or not, and disease. (Stuff like massive carrington event reruns too, but we don’t have much control over that. ) Of those, disease is the single most likely to harm the entire planet and yet we are stunningly stupid on a governmental level about it.
- We should be having in-country capacity for making almost everything on the essential medications list,
- We should be focusing huge effort in finding new antibiotics
- We should be focusing huge effort on generalised vaccine platforms that can be adapted quickly to new pathogens.
- we should have MUCH better surveillance and reporting for novel pathogens. This entire outbreak could have been managed differently with political will to close borders and proper disease surveillance. The latter is what the WHO should be doing and they have failed epically. Some outbreaks they have handled well (can’t fault them for how they handled the recent Ebola stuff, that was textbook) but those have been in countries with no significant economic power and who can be told to shut up and be helped. As soon as the Chinese asked them to look the other way they did. That cannot keep happening.
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