I worked at the Colchester Vaccination centre today. I was meant to work in the afternoon, but got called in early due to sickness of someone else. Considering that I got home after midnight the night before, I was not too pleased. But the service needs to be provided so that we can hope to make a dent in the plague.
It is scary working in the NHS on the frontline, and vaccinating patients meant that I saw loads of people, a number in a day that I have not seen since the flu clinic last year. I know that these vaccinations are not going to be effective in all, but I also know that this will save lives. Saying that, I told all those I saw to observe the hands face space rule. The only way to find out if the vaccination that someone has got is effective or not is to catch COVID and I strongly recommend that people do the best they can to avoid contracting this terrible plague.
And on this topic, I reported by first YouTube video. I am a firm advocate of free speech, but I found my limit with a person spreading fake news on the internet. I know that there are those who are sceptical about vaccinations, but people spreading, what is in essence either lies or delusions is unacceptable. Due to this, I have made my first report of a post, in this case, a You Tube video.
This video is littered with half truths. The first half truth relates to how COVID was geographically located at 03:10. COVID was geographically located within Spain and Italy, the worst affected areas having much higher rates than other areas of those two countries, this relating to a Champions League game involving Spain and Italy. At 05:40 she discusses how mismanagement of patients was the reason for deaths. This ignores how many people died of COVID in the community who were not admitted, an example being how a COVID-19 outbreak killed many in a nursing home which I am involved in caring for. She talks about how a quiet year with deaths would result in a spike later, but this ignores how influenza killed so many in the winter of 2017/18. At 09:20 she talks about how many die of other causes and just happen to have COVID, describing an example at 09:55 of a patient with heart failure who died after contracting COVID. She is right that this patient may have died soon anyway, but COVID places additional strains on the heart due to the hypoxia it causes. The odds are (I have to say this as I am basing this on my experience with other patients) that COVID was the big shove that pushed them off the cliff edge and resulted in their death. In the UK, such a death would be recorded as 1a- heart failure 1b - ischaemic heart disease 2 - COVID19. She later talks about financial incentives to doctors to record COVID cases. There is no such incentive in the UK and in the US, this is not an incentive, but rather compensation due to the increased costs that caring for someone with COVID brings. At 10:40, she features a doctor talking about the uncertainty with COVID diagnosis. This was a major issue at the beginning of the pandemic when testing was not available but COVID also presents with certain features not normally seen on a chest x-ray making a diagnosis of COVID more likely, an example being patchy bilateral pneumonia and on CT scan, also has a characteristic appearance. In the first lockdown, I treated a fit runner who came down with sudden onset fever and shortness of breath. They did their best to remain at home, but when they got to hospital, it was too late for the PCR tests to pick up COVID. The x-ray and CT findings however confirmed the features of COVID. So on testing they were negative, but based on other investigations and the presentation of this, they had it. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is seen amongst loads of other ducks, the odds are that it is a duck. It just happens that she is selling a book, which I suspect is spreading half truths.
This woman tells the real truth about COVID-19. I disagree with some of the things she is saying (notably about government support considering that there has been a recent change in government in the USA which means it must be given a chance to bring about change). The change about what happened is from 0:55 and at 1:15 she explains why so many celebrities have not died, but so many others have. An issue described so well last year on the BBC.
Locally, our GP surgery is working really hard to vaccinate people. Healthcare workers are working extra hours, in hospital to treat people with this and in the community to continue treating people with other issues as well as preventing illness by vaccinations. So when people like Jimmy Kimmel calls for people to be vaccinated 24/7, he forgets that we need trained people to vaccinate the population of the world and those trained people like me are busy doing our job.
