As a doctor, I have always known that a time like this might come. That there might be a national public health emergency of some kind, and that my colleagues and I would be deployed to the front line. We were aware of this risk when we signed up to the profession. We know that we have a moral duty to serve the public and to save the lives of others, even if it comes at great risk to our own.
But what is about to happen is beyond what any of us have imagined. Not because of the scale of the crisis that lies ahead, but because we have been abandoned by our government.
The government’s approach to COVID-19 has diverged dramatically from World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, which call for widespread testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and stringent social distancing policies. We have seen these strategies work elsewhere in the world – in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. As someone who has trained in public health myself, I know that this is the bread and butter of epidemiological intervention. So I am in shock that our government’s “herd immunity” strategy meant that in the crucial first weeks of this crisis it decided to do, effectively, nothing.
