On Monday 30th March, the head of Royal College of Physicians said that one in four NHS worker is either in isolation, sick or off-work amid the coronavirus outbreak.
This comes as the NHS England medical director Prof Stephen Powis warned that “Britain would have done well to keep the number of deaths restricted to 20,000.” The NHS is already facing a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and now the country and the government has fallen short of importing enough coronavirus test kits so that frontline parademics and doctors can be tested if they have contracted the contagion. The UK has already reported of doctors dying owing to the virus.
On 25th March, an organ transplant consultant became the first working NHS surgeon to die in the UK from coronavirus. Adil El Tayar died at the West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth, west London. The 63-year-old had been self-isolating after developing symptoms around mid-March and was admitted to hospital on 20 March. Having tested positive for coronavirus, he spent his final days in intensive care.
On 27th March, Dr Habib Zaidi, 76-year-old died in intensive care at Southend Hospital, Essex, 24 hours after showing “textbook symptoms” of coronavirus. His test results are still awaited, however if they come back positive, they would confirm he had Covid-19 and died as a result.
Dr Zaidi, a GP in Leigh-on-Sea for more than 45 years, had been self-isolating and had not seen patients in person for about a week.
On Sunday, 29th March Consultant Amged El-Hawrani unfortunately died at Leicester Royal Infirmary, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton (UHDB). The 55-year-old doctor has become the first NHS medic on the coronavirus frontline to die after testing positive for Covid-19.
As of Tuesday 31st March, the number of individuals infected with the virus stands over 22,000 with 1,500 reportedly dead.
