GP: Covid frontline just like being in a ‘war zone’
A SENIOR Hyndburn GP on the frontline of the Covid-19 crisis has compared it to being “in a war zone” - as positive cases inexorably rise.
Dr Fiona Ford, who chairs the alliance of Primary Care Networks, warned Accrington’s GP practices are “creaking at the seams” in the face of rapidly spiking Covid cases - and they are expecting the second peak to be worse than the first wave in the spring.
It comes as Lancashire’s director of public health Dr Sakthi Karunanithi said he fears ‘a coming tsunami’.
Dr Ford told the BBC’s Today programme on October 12: “I was on a call with our practices in central Accrington this morning and all of them are struggling with the very rapidly rising number of cases of Covid.
“Up til now, in between the two peaks we have had a chance where when people have tested positive, we were notified in the practices and the practices could ring up the patients, see if they needed anything, get support for them, all of that. But we have now come to a situation where one practice, for instance, had 70 cases notified to them in one day.
“We are really creaking at the seams in trying to actually cope with the number of new positives coming in.”
Dr Ford, who was ill for weeks with long-term consequences after contracting Covid-19 in March, has two decades of experience as a GP in the borough. She said during her illness she was worried about two things - the impact on care homes, and “overcrowded” housing in the region.
She said: “I really felt with so many people in East Lancashire working as taxi drivers, so many families in overcrowded accommodation, that you only need to have one person coming into a household where you have got many people basically squashed in a small space, and it is likely that it will rip through the communities and, I think, unfortunately, that’s what’s happening and a lot of that is out of our control.
“In the spring, at its worst, it was probably around the same as it is now but every day at the moment it’s increasing. What our public health advisers have been saying is that this second peak is likely to be higher and to last longer.
“At the moment it feels almost like being in a war zone, without adequate tools to actually affect that. No, we are not overwhelmed, but we may be overwhelmed sometimes emotionally in coping with this when we are getting lists of positive tests every day, they are getting more and more all the time.”
Dr Ford has previously spoken out of her personal experiences of the virus, in a bid to address misinformation and ‘hoax’ claims she says could cost lives.
On the same Radio Four programme, Dr Sakthi said: “I feel like a meerkat looking out to sea with a huge tsunami coming. We are entering into winter. There’s almost a disbelief - or there was - that it isn’t what we used to see because we were seeing cases in younger individuals. I myself have been asked a number of times this is not serious, we are not seeing people come into hospitals, we are not seeing people die.
“I had to pinch myself to say ‘what will make people believe that is back?’”