‘There is a policy of surrender’: doctor on UK’s Covid-19 failures

Summary

Consultant Mark Gallagher can’t understand why the NHS is not testing its staff for coronavirus.

Mark, in a blog published in the Guardian, describes how he is at home with a temperature of 38 and is pretty certain he has Covid-19. But the NHS will not test him for it. Instead, he has paid for a test kit from a private UK clinic and a colleague in China is sending him another.

Mark has been in and out of his London hospital every day for the last 28 in a row. In the past couple of weeks he saw maybe 70 people in outpatients..

He cannot understand why the NHS will not test him or other healthcare workers who are put at risk by their work and risk infecting other vulnerable patients in turn, as well as their families. “The policy is that I don’t need to be tested and even the people who have been in contact with me aren’t going to be tested,” he said.