"Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

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Derek Jempson
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"Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby Derek Jempson » Sun Mar 15, 2020 7:22 am

...because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Well, I can't speak for the rest of you who are over seventy, but I would rather go out as normal and take my chances. I'm not a bloody snowflake!

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Richard
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby Richard » Sun Mar 15, 2020 6:05 pm

Yes! I sometimes work for a couple where the wife is under 70 but her husband is not and if he misbehaves, or annoys her in any way, she just says "4 months" or "quarantine" and he is put in his place immediately. We all laugh at the madness.
You have to wonder really because normal seasonal flu' is often a nasty affair and in the case of 'Hong Kong' flu alone, the 1968 flu pandemic, was a category 2 flu' whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people worldwide.
People stricken became very ill if they were not finished off and yet there was no mass-hysteria in those days.
The virus is still in circulation today, surfacing from year to year in mutated forms of seasonal influenza, rendering vaccines less effective.
Ordinary seasonal flu' can still kill up to 600 or 700 thousand people each year and we just accept it as 'normal'.
Nothing much has changed in the scheme of things?
The world has gone mad and I don't think draconian measures will contain the spread of the latest virus. We are going to have to learn to live with it, contain it, develop vaccines and hope for the best.

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Derek Jempson
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby Derek Jempson » Sun Mar 15, 2020 6:59 pm

I well remember Hong Kong Flu. I worked for a pharmaceutical wholesaler at the time and drugs were flying out the door faster than we could buy them in. Trouble was, a third of the staff were off sick with the disease. Eventually, my wife and I went down with it. However, there was no sense of panic, or if there was, I failed to notice it. We just shrugged our shoulders and got on with normal life, as far as possible.

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seahermit
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby seahermit » Fri Mar 20, 2020 4:13 am

I have, like everyone else, been glued to the stream of news and warnings about the virus but, no, there is no point in panicking - that won't make any difference to anything. We just have to carry on and do the best we can.

I don't normally get flu (or even much in the way of colds) but this virus may be different, who knows? It's a newly emerged one, so as an over 70's person I would be stupid to take unnecessary risks. I will miss the pub at times, also live music evenings etc., but I am certainly not staying in completely and watching endless TV, a quick way to go off my head! It will be atleast a walk round the block, to the shore or a very guarded trip to pick up groceries.

What I do think is that, despite the government's presentation of their response as being an almost miltary exercise, the NHS in reality is woefully underfunded, understaffed and quite unprepared if the virus should get anywhere near as bad as in Italy and the UK becomes inundated with patients.

I have just been immobilised for a couple of weeks - went sleepwalking, fell and got a couple of bad gashes in my thigh. It could have been much more serious, even so I spent all night just waiting in a corridor at the Conquestq, then was taken down to Eastbourne and finally got surgery mid-afternoon. I had to get a taxi back to Hastings (don't ask the price!), got no aftercare or visits whatsoever despite being completely immobile with the pain, and I only managed to get through the next two weeks because a friend came in every day!

This is not a complaint exactly because everyone knows how the NHS is, but the point is that even before a pandemic the NHS is totally disorganised, not delivering effective help where it is needed and the staff seem to have little idea of what they are doing. It is inevitable that there will be casualties i.e. those who get forgotten or ignored and those who live very much on their own and cannot rely on family or neighbours to bale them out.

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Richard
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby Richard » Fri Mar 20, 2020 8:56 am

Sorry to hear about your tumble and gashes seahermit, I hope you make a speedy recovery!
The NHS does seem full of staff, including those highly-paid consultants, who are fairly incompetent a lot of the time, making wrong diagnoses and then going off on holiday for a long period, leaving behind extremely worried patients and family.
G.P.'s are often not much good in knowing what is wrong with the elderly who present with anything that is not absolutely 'black and white' and just refer to hospital, where of course, infections that can, and do kill many, are present.
Certainly overcrowding and long delays are harrowing.
My elderly mother was ill in a care home recently and we had to make a decision whether or not to send her to hospital, or stay amongst carers she knew and loved; we chose to keep her at the home as we knew she would have died in hospital, alone and without anything but basic attention by people she would see as strangers. She couldn't even understand many of the nurses with poor English and the last time she was admitted she contracted pneumonia twice and we were asked 'do you want to resuscitate if her condition worsens?'
Some of the staff clearly are excellent but will more money/equipment alone sort out the issues?
If I had CoV-19 (Coronavirus) I would want to stay well clear of hospital unless I was extremely ill, because of the likelihood of secondary infection by bacterial pneumonia. Or any 'superbug' so-called!
The Spanish flu of 1918 spread rapidly among the troops in huge army camps, but the main cause of death was not the virus, it was a pneumonia associated with the flu in a time when antibiotics hadn't been discovered.

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seahermit
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby seahermit » Sat Mar 21, 2020 3:58 am

My misadventure was a big enough blow, lost me two weeks during which I was mostly unable even to make a cup of tea without extreme difficulty. But equally traumatic was that, once back from the hospital, I was completely ignored and forgotten - no nurse or doctor visits, no checks to see if I was still alive, not even a phone call and no aftercare whatsoever put in place. To arrange careworkers would (from experience) have involved complicated bureaucracy, taken a week or two to set up and would have been all at my own expense.

This is a pretty terrible way of operating for those elderly patients who are frail, with other health issues, isolated with few friends, on incomes too low to afford careworkers every day. "Just go back to your empty home and sort yourself out".

In this kind of scenario I become very angrily socialist. The politicians and armies of well-paid administrators in the NHS have no idea how, on the frontline, ordinary patients are really affected. I was lucky to have a few friends willing to bale me out - and maybe I know enough to get stroppy and complain if things get really critical. But many vulnerable people are not in that position or even aware what services they are entitled to.

Whilst I was waiting for surgery (in a hospital corridor!), numerous staff were wandering around aimlessly with clipboards. But in the whole night not a single person checked I was ok
(or still there!) and after 6 hours I was finally offered a cup of tea - by a passing char-lady!

As you say, the level of care in hospitals is now very often no more than "basic" and that doubles the stress and trauma for a lot of patients . It is well worth considering whether one can avoid hospital if possible and find alternative ways of getting support and care - but that's only for the wealthy.

Meanwhile, the ones at the very bottom, sleeping outdoors and with countless health issues, are just ignored, moved on by councils and nobody does anything to really tackle the problem. Hence a lot are dying.

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seahermit
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby seahermit » Sat Mar 21, 2020 4:13 am

I suppose I should have tied this together and made the essential point - that if the virus does threaten to overwhelm the NHS capacity to cope with it (which I fear may be the outcome), the reason is that the system was already inefficient and badly managed before and leaving many casualties by the wayside.

It is hard to see how, in a crisis like this, the huge and lumbering NHS can really start delivering fast and efficient service where it is needed. Inevitably there will be many things going wrong.

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Richard
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby Richard » Sat Mar 21, 2020 6:53 am

I was up at the Conquest for a routine outpatient issue and glanced at the waiting-room video screen offering 'information' it also showed two American-style cops with truncheons raised, with a caption 'abuse of staff will not be tolerated'!
Do they intend to beat us up if we complain?
If I have a problem that needs attention I just go straight to A&E which seems clean and bright enough and fairly new, I wait a couple of hours but am seen more immediately first to assess the urgency. Triage?
I have not seen people on stretchers waiting in corridors but perhaps I went at a 'quiet' time of day?

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seahermit
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby seahermit » Sat Mar 21, 2020 12:11 pm

The hospital staff are doing their best and often the nurses are charming and helpful. But there is a general air of aimlessness and disorganization - the A and E unit is newish with it's own separate entrance, but few staff visible.

I went there at 2am, there were only about 6 patients waiting to be assessed, but most of those people were still waiting around several hours later. An old man in a dressing gown was sitting near me in a drafty corridor, on a hard seat, for most of the night. Like myself, he was completely ignored, looked very fed-up and I think someone checked on him just once in the whole night.

I think that responsibility has been so dissipated and spread around that nobody particular seems to be in charge or responsible for watching that a unit/department is working smoothly and staff doing their jobs properly. I also think that creating vast central hospitals instead of smaller local facilities was a wrong direction, but far too late for all that now!

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Richard
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Re: "Over 70's might be told to stay indoors for 4 months"

Postby Richard » Sat Mar 21, 2020 2:27 pm

There is indeed some element of disorganization/incompetence and I will outline this as follow:

I had an eye problem, went to 'Specsavers' and was told it was because of my age, only minor and it did not merit further examination at hospital.
I wasn't happy to leave it at that, as I kept seeing a strange object, centrally in my vision.
I went to my G.P. up at the Station Plaza and asked for a referral to hospital, the G.P. asked me to provide the 'paper-work' from Specsavers, so I left the surgery and went along to the Opticians who told me it was all recorded online now and the G.P. should check his NHS emails, adding that most G.P.'s do not normally do this, or even know of the service.
I went back to the surgery, armed with this information, and told the receptionist who texted the G.P. accordingly, but he seemed unfamiliar with the procedure. A week later the Station Plaza G.P. Surgery phoned me and asked me if I could provide the paperwork, again I told them it was 'online' and that Specsavers do not issue paper work any more, and that I had already informed the G.P. accordingly.
Five weeks have now passed, until today, when a secretary from the Conquest hospital phoned me and asked if I could possibly attend an appointment on Monday 23/March at 10 a.m.
So it looks as if I will get there in the end.

seahermit, your case was more serious for sure, if you are not happy about your experience you can contact the following:

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questi ... n-service/

https://www.patients-association.org.uk ... RCEALw_wcB


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