Timothy Birdnow

Wuflu may be on the way out.

This courtesy of Tomer D. Tamarkin

The UK government’s top medical advice panel has announced that COVID-19 is no longer a serious public health hazard. As of March 19th The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) has posted online their EXPERT opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
In January the grave assessment of the ACDP committee prompted unprecedented action in peacetime by a British Prime Minister. Boris Johnson’s government thereafter scaled up the national response on COVID-19 and almost shutdown the economy by imposing ‘house arrest’ of all citizens.
But as events unfolded and the pathogen is now proven to be far less deadly than ACDP predicted, the committee has formally downgraded their original bleak assessment.
The new ACDP statement appears on the UK Government’s official website for anyone to view at

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid

Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.

The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.

The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.

Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. All healthcare workers managing possible and confirmed cases should follow the updated national infection and prevention (IPC) guidance for COVID-19, which supersedes all previous IPC guidance for COVID-19. This guidance includes instructions about different personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles that are appropriate for different clinical scenarios.

Definition of HCID
In the UK, a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) is defined according to the following criteria:

acute infectious disease
typically has a high case-fatality rate
may not have effective prophylaxis or treatment
often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly
ability to spread in the community and within healthcare settings
requires an enhanced individual, population and system response to ensure it is managed effectively, efficiently and safely More on link posted above.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:18 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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