Trump recovery is bad news in Covid fight

From the President’s brush with virus to the Margaret Ferrier scandal, what have we really learned this week, writes Helen Mcardle

JUST when you think the Covid pandemic can’t deliver anymore shocks, it throws up three in a week. We discovered the US President has about as much compassion as a block of wood when he touted his recovery in a televised address to the American nation (211,000 deaths and counting) by telling them “not to be afraid” of the virus. What a relief.

Meanwhile, SNP MP Margaret Ferrier gambled on a five-hour train ride from London to Glasgow despite knowing she had tested positive for the coronavirus, then shocked her colleagues by defying calls to stand down.

And by Monday we learned that Public Health England had accidentally omitted nearly 16,000 individuals from the daily UK Covid tally because the Excel spreadsheets inexplicably used to keep count had maxed out – meaning those 16,000 people’s potentially infectious contacts had also not been traced in the meantime.

So, a good week all round.

Firstly, let’s address the Donald Trump situation.

When the President was airlifted “out of an abundance of caution” to the Walter Reed military hospital in Maryland on Friday there was frenzied speculation that his condition might be taking a turn for the worst.

We had seen it all before with Boris Johnson: one of the cruellest aspects of this infection is how quickly everything can go downhill. Mr Trump is also 74, clinically obese, and male. We know that men are 43 per cent more likely to die from the virus than women; those in the 75-84 age group (of which he is on the cusp) have accounted for 33% of known Covid deaths; and being obese increases your risk of dying from the virus by 48% compared to people who are a healthy weight.

Luckily for the President he is also white, rich and in a position to be fasttracked to the front of the queue for the best available medical care.

Even with free healthcare in the

UK, people from the poorest households are more than twice as likely to die from Covid as the most affluent, while those from black and other ethnic minority backgrounds are between 10-50% more likely to die than their white counterparts.

The US is plagued by similar wealth and race gaps for Covid survival, but there is also the added stress of treatment costs.

The British Medical Journal reported in August on the case of an Oklahoma woman, Susan Adair, whose 71-year-old husband had died after 16 days in hospital with coronavirus.

Although his care was part-covered by his retired teacher’s insurance plan and Medicare, Mrs Adair was still facing charges for a percentage of his treatment which looked set to total something over $21,000 (£16,000).

Meanwhile, 56-year-old recovered Covid patient Donna Talla, from Virginia, admitted she was “going to have to sell my house” to pay her $150,000 (£114,000) medical bills, despite having health insurance through her employer.

Then there are the pandemicrelated layoffs that have left an extra 5.4 million Americans without health cover and reluctant to be tested or go to A&E, regardless of their symptoms.

None of these are woes facing Mr Trump, who spent three days in the Walter Reed Presidential Suite (complete with its own dining room and office space) where he received an experimental antibody therapy not yet available to the masses alongside the anti-inflammatory steroid Dexamethasone and antiviral Remdesivir.

The last two are widely used, but only if you are “sick enough to be hospitalised”, according to one US medic. If Mr Trump was an ordinary Joe Bloggs, would he really have been admitted to hospital?

But the main problem with the

President bouncing back (in contrast to Boris Johnson being cowed into taking it seriously) is that it will only galvanise the Covid cynics – himself included – to dismiss the virus and push for a disastrous herd immunity approach instead.

Meanwhile, what to make of the UK’S coronavirus dramas?

Firstly, Ms Ferrier undoubtedly put others at risk by going to Parliament and attending church when she knew she had symptoms, then – presumably in a panic – rushing back to Glasgow to self-isolate instead of staying put in London after testing positive.

She also got herself into a guddle by initially trying to mislead the party about her movements.

But she can probably also feel aggrieved that MPS – especially those hundreds of miles from Westminster – had come under pressure from Conservative Commons leader Jacob Rees-mogg to return to the House of Commons at all.

The number of people put at risk by her error of judgment is also a fraction compared to the Excel blunder, which has left contact tracers racing to notify tens of thousands of people that they may have been exposed to the virus and should be self-isolating.

Instead, a penny-pinching decision not to replace PHE’S “legacy system” left these potentially infectious individuals to carry on in blissful ignorance for around a week. Imagine how many extra infections might have been prevented? That’s a real scandal.

If Mr Trump was an ordinary Joe Bloggs, would he really have been admitted to hospital?