Since the #coronavirus outbreak is worrying everyone, and there’s a spotlight on public health measures and isolation, here’s a short thread on my experience of mandatory self isolation and being quarantined at work (1/) #CoronavirusOutbreak
First of all, this isn’t a criticism of public health England at all. They’ve got a difficult job to do applying a pragmatic evidence based approach in often difficult and underfunded circumstances (2/)
When the Ebola outbreak happened in West Africa, I volunteered to be deployed to Kerrytown in Sierra Leone as it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time (3/)
The deployment was five weeks long with three weeks self isolation at the end. The deployment itself was emotionally difficult but not really problematic from an personal infection control point of view. I’ve got a wife and kids so never did anything particularly off piste (4/)
When we got back to London we were checked at the airport but it did seem a bit weird as we’d just been on a commercial flight back from Sierra Leone and had had a stopover in Casablanca for a while (5/)
It seemed inconsistent being told to self isolate but then getting on another commercial flight back from Heathrow to Edinburgh. Because I’ve got young kids I decided to stay away from them in the Highlands for the isolation period as couldn’t risk hugs etc. (6/)
That all went fine but then a couple of months later when I was back at work I got this weird rash. I thought it was probably viral but it looked vasculitic so better see the GP. He checked my BP and it was proper high (like 200/100 or something) so referred to renal (7/)
At the end of the consultation he asked about history of foreign travel and I said I’d been in Sierra Leone but a good couple of months ago and well beyond the 21 days incubation period. He told me to go to the assessment unit in the hospital I worked at so I did (8/)
The assessment unit was full when I got there so they told me to go to ED. I waited for a bit in the waiting room then a nurse took me in to do an ECG. She’d just started putting the stickers on when my phone rang (9/)
It was the local ID consultant. He said my GP had spoken to him after I left and under no circumstances should I go to hospital. Just tell him where I was and they could arrange for me to be taken to the infectious disease department in a hospital across town (10/)
So I explained I was already at hospital, had gone to a couple of departments already and had sat in the waiting room for a while in both places. And I was currently in a cubicle getting an ECG. He asked to speak to the nurse who quickly left the cubicle with my phone (11/)
I sat there for what seemed like ages until someone pulled the curtains across from the outside. A few minutes later someone kicked my phone back to me under the curtains and said I had a call (12/)
It was ID saying they’d arranged for someone to come and see me and just sit tight. A few hours later a guy in PPE came in and took bloods and that (13/)
Maybe six hours later or so a cheerful guy came back in, pulled the curtains open and announced “Don’t worry, you’ve not got Ebola” (14/)
I said I know that, but I was supposed to see renal, that’s why I saw the GP. Now it was out of hours. So the guy said “Oh, probably just go back to your GP then”. So I’d spent a day being tested for something I knew I didn’t have and ignoring the problem I came in with (15/)
In the end it just cleared up and my BP came down so who knows what it was but managed to cause pandemonium in the hospital I work at in the process (/end)
