The Plague Pit

Welcome to The Plague Pit In this issue – number 11 – I’m delighted to present this article by Dr John Cullerne, Undermaster at Winchester College, where he teaches Physics and Maths. In September 2014, at the height of the West African Ebola outbreak, my General Studies group (we call this Div here at Winchester College) began reading Don Taylor’s The Roses of Eyam, an extraordinary play about villagers in 1660s Derbyshire, who quarantined themselves when the Black Death arrived…

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Welcome to the Plague Pit – issue number 10. First – a quick update on the possible benefits of PPE. This week sees the publication of a paper on COVID-19 deaths in 119 NHS staff, 98 of them in patient-facing roles. Taking into account the number of people employed in the NHS, this number ‘does not clearly show that healthcare workers are dying at rates proportionately higher than other employed individuals or even the population as a whole’. (1) Two…

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Welcome to the The Plague Pit – issue number 9. I’m delighted that another guest author is paying her first visit today to the site. Rose Morley is an undergraduate studying English Literature. She writes on social issues for The Isis. For this edition of The Plague Pit, she has kindly sent us this article about the impact of COVID-19 on her homeless friends On March 23rd of this year, 27 million people turned on their TVs to watch Boris…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 8 This issue, I’m delighted to welcome another new contributor to the website. Mr Tom Quayle is an English and Div Don at Winchester College and has kindly provided the following account. That the history of language and literature is crosshatched by the history of pandemic, disease and death is a truism that we have been viscerally reminded of over the last four months. I wonder if it is simultaneously too brutal…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 7. There may be a chink of light this week for doctors near me. The South London Adult Critical Care Network (SLACCN) publish a daily update on COVID-19 cases in critical care units in subscribing hospitals. One of my colleagues has recently been posting the graphs to Whatsapp: 15/4/20 19:52   A1: [forwards graph of daily data from 16/3/20 til 15/4/20] 15/4/20 19:53   A2: Is that a plateau I see! [smiley emoji] 16/4/20…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit issue number 6. This is the first of several guest issues I’ll be posting between my own contributions from time to time. There’s a guest issue coming up shortly on ‘Plagues in Literature’ and another on what it’s like to be a homeless person during the pandemic. In issue 6, I’m delighted to introduce my Wall Street correspondent, Mr Fabio Savoldelli, who has kindly sent us this. The Plague Pit is shining a light on…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 5 In his Easter Sunday briefing, the Health Secretary told us that UK deaths in COVID-positive patients had crossed the 10,000 threshold A word about data There are a lot of data about now, so that figure merits a closer look. When doctors submit draft articles to peer-reviewed journals, hoping for publication, editors will usually insist that they give a source for any apparent statements of fact. Here’s Matt Hancock’s source [1]…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 4 In this issue, I’ll be writing about how our COVID-19 patients ‘present’ i.e. what brings them to the hospital. I’ll explain some of the things we do early on to support and treat them once they arrive. I feel a bit rough, Doc…. A month ago, the World Health Organisation published data on the first c100,000 cases of COVID-19. They concluded that in 80% of patients, infections are mild or asymptomatic.[1]…

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Welcome to issue 3 of The Plague Pit. On Thursday evening last week (26/3/20), 3 million people in the UK are said to have come out onto the streets and applauded NHS workers. If you were one of them, thank you. Risky business This issue is about the pandemic and some of the risks it poses to health care staff. A Guardian article last week reported that 39 Italian doctors had died with COVID-19. Yesterday morning brought news of the…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 2. By 09:00 on the morning of 25/03/20, 9,529 people in the UK had tested positive for COVID-19 and 463 COVID-positive people had died. [1]   I arrived at work an hour before this, to attend a ward round in one of our Level 3 critical care wards. Level 3 involves the care of patients who require mechanical ventilation, or need support for two or more organs, e.g. drugs to support blood…

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