The Wilbrahams and COVID 19 Elinor Moore

Our lives in the Wilbrahams have been change with the onset of the Coronavirus COVID19. The residents are involved in many different ways.  This is the first of a series of items with their stories.. First up is Elinor Moore is is very much on the front line at Addenbrookes Hospital

Martin Gienke

As I sit here in this glorious April weather, sneezing away and wondering why my muscles and joints feel so bad, I realise that the thing I have been thinking about day and night since the beginning of the year, has finally arrived on my doorstep – COVID19.

Wind back to Jan 3rd, I was on call at Addenbrookes hospital as an infectious diseases specialist. I recall a colleague telling me there was a patient from Wuhan, China in A&E and asking if we needed to do anything special? At this point I had no idea where Wuhan was and the word coronavirus to me simply meant a common cold. In a very short time the whole world knew both of Wuhan and what a ‘novel coronavirus’ was, and it feels like our lives have been turned upside down in a way that many of us have never experienced before. 

Since January, myself and colleagues at Addenbrookes Hospital have been trying to plan for this event. We started by doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations thinking about the size of the population the hospital serves, the likely attack rate of the infection, the number of hospital beds and ICU beds needed. These numbers felt utterly overwhelming – we were barely able to deal with some extra flu cases every winter so how would we be able to manage this sort of number? There were several weeks where we would all feel paralysed by the enormity of the impending situation, unable to think of any practical ways forward. Many people lost a lot of sleep worrying about what was coming at that time. 

Since then, the large Addenbrookes machine has wound into action and such enormous changes have been enacted to try to create a safe hospital to manage COVID19 patients. So much change that colleagues remark that this kind of change a large organisation would normally take a decade to achieve. All the usual hospital business that can stop has stopped. Staff have been mobilised from non clinical areas to join clinical teams. Teams have been divided up to those who manage the COVID patients and those who don’t. Massive training for staff has been undertaken in the various personal protective measures needed. New clinical guidelines have been written to upskill staff to manage a disease new to us all. Wards have been converted into isolation areas and new ICU areas have been opened up. There is a new back entrance for people entering the hospital with COVID symptoms to keep seperated from the usual business in A&E. Academic colleagues have been working tirelessly on improving the testing and understanding the disease better. It has been extraordinary to be a part of and makes me proud to work with such motivated and good hearted colleagues.

And the result… well the numbers in Cambridgeshire thus far have not been as bad as we feared and the increase has been a slow and steady, rather than the kind of exponential increase we saw in Italy (see Addenbrookes public website for daily update) . The individual patient stories are heart breaking at times, especially the loneliness patients must feel being separated from their loved ones in isolation areas in the hospital. Somehow we have made a good deal of bed space to manage this in quite a controlled way, which I have no doubt means that there are people out there who have made enormous sacrifices to create this hospital space  – people waiting for operations, scans, treatments etc. We should definitely applaud these people. And also those who are patiently managing with the restrictions of lockdown – it really does seem to be making a difference in our local area. 

Elinor Moore

Today, 9th April husband Ian added

I think we are now more or less 100% convinced that Elinor has Coronavirus too. I seem to be totally over it with nothing more than a bit of a runny nose and a couple of days of feeling a bit off form. So far Elinor hasn’t been much worse than that but she has been quite tired. Kids haven’t yet exhibited any symptoms so maybe they’re just going to shrug it off like most kids do or it hasn’t yet hit them. I think we’ll know one way or the other in the next couple of days.