My NHS colleagues and I won’t stand by while the government gambles with our lives. We must change our coronavirus strategy

Leaked Public Health England documents suggest up to 80 per cent of the population could be infected, meaning tens of thousands hospital admissions every day. We simply don’t have the beds

Yesterday I did the Covid-19 protective training for NHS staff. The atmosphere was nearly jovial, though the laughter was a little forced. On the way up, I’d been reading about the situation abroad. Ten per cent of Lombardi’s coronavirus cases have been healthcare workers; hundreds of Chinese doctors and nurses have died treating the pandemic. The government is taking an enormous risk with its “herd immunity” strategy – and our lives hang in the balance.

Today, over 1,000 NHS frontline healthcare workers sign a http://independent.co.uk/voices/letters/coronavirus-uk-plan-herd-immunity-work-nhs-health-service-a9404846.htmlhttp://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/coronavirus-uk-plan-herd-immunity-work-nhs-health-service-a9404846.html calling on the government to abandon its “herd immunity” strategy and attempt – as the rest of the international community is doing – to contain the virus.

The crisis has not yet truly hit and already, we are running out of face masks. This week, Public Health England (PHE) downgraded its guidance for those treating coronavirus patients from a full respirator mask to only a surgical mask, unless we are doing an invasive procedure or administering CPR. This isn’t because PHE decided staff were at any less risk than previously thought – simply because it realised the NHS lacks the necessary respirator masks.

Boris Johnson’s coronavirus house of cards is already collapsing. It’s no wonder: it was built on the deeply flawed assumption that allowing the epidemic to spread will produce “herd immunity” in the population, thereby “flattening the curve” of the infection rate. Yet we don’t actually know for certain that Covid-19 can confer immunity; the British Society of Immunology is sceptical that it can.

Furthermore, whatever the epidemic strategy, the NHS has a finite capacity. We don’t, for example, have sufficient ventilators or staff to run them to for the epidemic-size coronavirus outbreak for which we are supposedly planning; as we plough full-steam ahead into the exponential growth phase of the pandemic, plans to manufacture new ventilators are only just being announced. Leaked Public Health England documents suggest we expect up to 80% of the population, or 53 million people, to be infected. Spread out over a year, this would mean tens of thousands hospital admissions every day. We simply don’t have the beds.

If we allow coronavirus to run its course, as the government plans to, the NHS will be overrun within weeks. Instead, the government should be attempting to limit the number of cases as much as possible. This runs the risk of a second peak later in the year – yet by the time this peak comes, we will be better prepared to deal with it.

That is why we are asking the government to immediately escalate its policy and do its utmost to aggressively contain this virus by any means possible. We need time to implement the wholesale changes that it will require to mobilise an army of healthcare professionals to fight the epidemic, and to do so safely – time to manufacture ventilators and protective equipment, to train additional staff and organise our hospitals, to allow treatments such as antivirals and vaccines to become available.

What happens if we continue down this path isn’t a mystery – it’s happening right now in Italy. We need to act immediately to ensure we don’t share their fate.