Wake up, ministers! Top doctor vents fury at ‘slow reaction’ to coronavirus outbreak

Precautions: travellers in London today — but medical staff are running short of masks
Jeremy Selwyn

A leading London doctor today criticised the pace and scale of the UK’s response to coronavirus, saying the Government must “wake up” and heed the advice of frontline staff.

Dr Simon Ashworth, clinical director for critical care at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said schools and universities should be closed, non-emergency operations cancelled and large public events axed.

In a furious online salvo, he railed against the decision not to step up activity immediately in response to the unfolding crisis in Italy, and accused the Government of “squandering the time when we could halt [the] spread”.

Downing Street says it is acting on expert scientific and medical advice and is in the initial “contain” phase of a four-stage response. It is expected to move to “delay” today and will seek to prevent cases overlapping with the end of the flu season.

A sign for a UK coronavirus pod
AFP via Getty Images

Mr Ashworth, who is based at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, said he had been exposed three times in 24 hours to patients known or suspected to have coronavirus, including one who came into A&E. Nurses were at greater risk due to closer contact, he added.

He said test results were taking “a week or more”, and said the classification of Covid-19 as a “high-consequence infectious disease” was unhelpful as it meant masks could not be reused, ­creating a dire shortage.

Mr Ashworth, who oversees 72 intensive care beds, tweeted: “This isn’t a joke — we need the Government to wake up.”

Coronavirus - In pictures

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He told the Standard: “They need to take the advice of senior hospital and medical staff and listen to experts. This means closing schools and universities, stopping mass events, cancelling elective surgery to allow all hospitals to upscale preparations and release staff to train and organise our precautions.

“They need to upscale advice [NHS] 111 are giving to test all people with the compatible symptoms and ramp up testing. We need to have sufficient proper masks to protect our staff. Our staff need support with childcare and accommodation near work.

“We need money to set strategies used by China for diagnostics. We need cash for equipment to help with isolation of suspected patients.” NHS England yesterday announced plans to increase testing capacity from 1,500 to 10,000 a day.

Strategic incident director Professor Keith Willett said he was hoping for a “several-fold increase” in critical care capacity. The NHS has about 3,900 critical care beds, of which 80 per cent were occupied at the start of March.

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