The impact of Covid-19 on anaesthetists and intensive care doctors

You're clearly at the centre of lots of healthcare networks, given your position. One would have thought that people at the sharp end, anaesthetists, intensive care doctors, would have fallen on the brunt of coronavirus and subsequent long Covid symptoms. What's been the feedback that you've been privy to in terms of people contracting coronavirus? virus? Well, certainly we have been following closely stories of whether anaesthetists, intensive care doctors have or have not been suffering from COVID. Of course, we know that many have been. We cannot be absolutely certain whether they caught COVID from their professional, in a professional environment or from a social environment. And up to about two weeks ago, we were pleased that no anaesthetist had actually died. Sadly, we now have had one anaesthetist from the Midlands who's died of COVID. Again, we're not sure whether this was caught in a professional or in a social context and our thoughts obviously go out to his family. However, the incidence of COVID in anaesthetists and intensivists is far less than we would expect given that they are healthcare workers who were, as you say, at the very sharp end of the treatment of COVID-19. Now, there have been quite a few theories about why this is. Certainly, anaesthetists and intensivists were very well informed about the need to wear airborne PPE, personal protective equipment, when managing patients who are undergoing AGPs, aerosol-generating procedures, so that, for instance, in most hospitals in East East created a merit team of mobile emergency response intubation team and were called to the sickest of patients and would then intubate them and you would have thought that they put themselves at the very highest risk when they did that and yet so few have caught COVID-19 and that's almost certainly because they had access to airborne PPE, knew about airborne PPE, doffed it and donned it correctly. And if you look now back on the first surge back at the beginning in the spring of 2020, it seems that people who were catching COVID-19 from their professional work were more likely to be working on wards where patients who either definitely had COVID or may have had COVID were being cared for, but because there were nominally no medical aerosol generating procedures, they were most likely wearing what's called droplet precautions, and droplet precautions includes a fluid-resistant surgical mask that is not proof to aerosols. You can still breathe aerosols through it and round a surgical mask, whereas an FFP3 mask is tight-fitting, and you actually are fit-tested to make sure that no aerosols actually get through. Now, yes, manual ventilation, extubation and some other manoeuvres are aerosol generating procedures. But the hard truth of the matter, a good hearty cough is an aerosol generating procedure. A sneeze is an aerosol generating procedure. We even know that singing loudly and shouting are aerosol generating procedures. And so you can imagine a situation that unbeknown to us, I'm not suggesting that this was through a shortage of PPE or any lack of oversight lack of supervision that people may have been exposed to COVID-19 because they were caring for patients who had or might have had or had it but were unknown to have it in a ward setting, in an A&E setting, in another setting within hospitals.