Covid return on our wards a serious shock to the system

COVID-19 made an abrupt return to our lives on our morning ward round. We had set off to check up on our neurosurgery patients in Beaumont’s high-dependency and intensive-care units.

Usually we have two or three patients recovering there after brain procedures. We make our way there almost on autopilot at this stage. On this morning two weeks ago, our brisk march through the corridors came to an abrupt halt outside the room where our patient had been the day before.

The door was shut and a sign said: “No entry.”

The giveaway was the masking tape that sealed the door.

“Oh. Do we have a Covid-19 patient?”

“Yes,” the nurse said. A couple of suspect cases had been admitted during the night and our neurosurgery patients had been moved to another part of the unit.

Wow. And it was a ‘wow’ moment. Covid-19 couldn’t have been further from my mind at that time.

Beaumont Hospital had not had any Covid-19 admissions for a month or more. We had been wearing face masks and social distancing pretty rigorously, and I had hoped the taped-up doors with “no-entry” signs had been consigned to history. Even the sight of medical teams in full PPE had become a rarity.

As it turned out, that was just the start of it.

Later, a colleague who was on a day off texted me to tell me he had a cold and was feeling breathless.

He texted again the next day at 6.15am.He was waiting for occupational health to report back on his test results. Should he wait at home or come to work?

Doctors are notorious for wanting to come to work when they’re sick. I blame the fact that there’s always so much work to do in a hospital. They feel bad leaving their colleagues to pick up the slack.

I read his text with a sinking feeling. No, don’t come in, I texted back.

As it happened, his swab was negative, but given his symptoms the occupational health department treated his as a clinical case of Covid-19.

Then the contact tracing began, which involved occupational health following in his footsteps when he was last on duty, where he had been, who he had been in contact with.

Anyone who had been within a distance of less than two metres from him for more than two minutes without a face mask was deemed a close contact. I was in the clear as I had not been in close contact, but part of my job as senior registrar is to liaise with non-consultant hospital doctors, and I had to brief the team on monitoring our own symptoms.

I found it pretty surreal, having thought we were through the worst of it, to find myself hammering home to the team the necessity to stop work immediately and go home if they showed the slightest of sniffles.

The seriousness of the situation was underlined by the occupational health teams, who moved like a virus-seeking SWAT team through the hospital.

By afternoon, we discovered the tiny computer room on one of the wards that doctors use as an office space was locked and someone had put up a sign saying: “Closed until further notice.”

As it transpired, our colleague had spent most of his time in there on paperwork — and how lucky that turned out to be. It meant that he had little opportunity to interact with patients while he was in the hospital.

The office was deemed a high-risk space that would be deep-cleaned. But the Perspex screens dividing the desks, the sanitisers and rigorous masking imposed on all of us through Covid-19 — all of it worked.

We are now two weeks on. None of us have shown any symptoms of the virus. But it is alarming to watch the