Welcome to The Plague Pit. For this issue, number 31, I’m delighted to welcome back Adrian Tsui. Adrian is a sixth former at Winchester College, studying Physics, Chemistry and Biology. He has a place at Downing College, Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, starting in 2020. He’s also a dedicated musician.. Adrian’s two previous articles tackled some chemical aspects of the pandemic, at a time when these were causing a bit of a hullabaloo. Below he takes on the challenge of…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 30. The COVID-19 death rate is falling in the UK and the US, and rising in many other countries. As the pandemic plays out globally, we are learning more and more about the disease. According to one major database of academic literature, 3,406 relevant new papers were published last week alone. That makes more than 23,000 this year. A few of these may go on to influence the way we manage the…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 29 I’m very pleased to welcome a new student contributor to the site, Te Pungpapong. Te is in the sixth form at Winchester College and getting ready to apply for medical schools later this year. In this splendid article, he looks at how different countries across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. The dichotomy of SARS-CoV-2 between high-income countries and developing countries is hard to believe, with the disproportionality of…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit. For this issue, number 28, I’m delighted to present this excellent article from Dr Craig Goldsack. A fellow anaesthetist, his knowledge of operations is exceeded only by his operatic insights. After thirty-five years as a hospital doctor I realise now that I have lived through the end of what has been termed, without irony, the “Golden Age” of medicine. This epoch, beginning in the middle third of the twentieth century, has been a period of…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit –  issue number 27. Yesterday, regular operating lists started at my hospital for the first time in nearly three months. As the newsreaders keep telling us, it’s not over yet. But if a graph can look beautiful, I think this one does. People are still dying, though. A month ago I went to ICU to hear from the hospital’s pathologists. They were presenting the results from our first two COVID-19 post mortems. About twenty people…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 26 Today, I’m delighted to welcome Dr Richard Stanton to The Plague Pit. It’s not the worst place he’s been. Like most doctors, his working life has changed a good deal because of the pandemic. He introduces himself in this excellent article – so I’ll simply add that I met him at medical school and he is one of my oldest friends. I’m a Psychiatrist – a medical doctor who has specialised…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – number 25 For this ‘silver anniversary’ issue, I’m delighted to welcome a new student contributor, Xavier Machado. Xavier is currently in the lower sixth at Winchester College studying maths, further maths, biology and chemistry. He’s also head of the Medical Society and hopes to study medicine at university. He has sent in this fine article about the science behind immunization – and the work in progress towards a COVID-19 vaccine. With countries and nations…

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 24 Most of what I have written in The Plague Pit so far concerns doctors. What we think, what we do, what we wear – and so on. For this issue, I’d like to start instead with some first-hand accounts of the ICU experience from recovered COVID patients. I think these paint a striking picture of how extraordinarily unpleasant intensive care, and its aftermath, can be. I’ve written before about patient confidentiality….

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Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 23. For this issue, I’m very pleased to welcome back Adrian Tsui with the second of his two articles on chemistry and COVID-19. He has thoughtfully provided a glossary at the end of the article for readers (and site editors) who may be a bit rusty on their chemical terminology. Adrian is a sixth former at Winchester College, studying Physics, Chemistry and Biology. He has a place at Downing College, Cambridge to…

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Or: ‘All you need to know about pandemics from the movies’. Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 22. Our guest contributor for this issue is Dr John Goldstone. John is an eminent intensive care specialist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film. In a zombie apocalypse, he’d be the right man to have by your side with the first aid kit. The Covid epidemic has re-introduced all sorts of medical terms which only a few weeks ago we were…

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