COVID-19 Part Three: The Public Health Response
Dr. Ben Rush is an ST5 in Public Health working in Health Promotion when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He also works clinically in Emergency Medicine at the Royal Derby Hospital. We were therefore delighted when he joined the podcast via Zoom to lend his perspective on COVID-19.
This episode was recorded on Sunday 3rd May 2020.
Lets talk about EPRR - Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response
Phases of response
What is a pandemic?
What is a PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern)?
What is the pandemic planning process?
How different/similar is this to ‘flu in terms of its spread and our response to it
What does ‘flatten the curve’ mean?
More a conversation about the approaches taken by different countries
Germany - more testing, younger population affected
Italy - older population group with more co-morbidities
Why are we not contact tracing?
What are expected deaths? What does it mean when we talk about extra deaths?
Should we be testing more? What have the issues been?
Impact on mortality by testing - test more and it drops
Definitions
What is R0?
What is case fatality rate? How is it different to mortality rate?
Why do we use death per million? What does it mean?
What is prevalence? How might it affect our mortality rate?
Looking forward
Might there be any changes to public health as a result of this?
What will the likely vaccine strategy be? How long does it take to roll out a vaccine normally?
Could it be multi-phasic with multiple peaks?
Role of the WHO - is it being listened to? Lessons from Ebola
What about the public wearing face masks - logistics etc