Dr Priyad Ariyaratnam is a Consultant Thoracic Surgeon in Plymouth.
I won’t be joining the consultants who are striking today. Though I fully support the legitimate concerns of my colleagues in the medical and other health professions taking part in industrial action across the NHS, I feel the toll this is taking on patients is unjustifiable. This is not a decision I take lightly. When
Has the coronavirus crackdown gone too far? Some of Boris Johnson’s own MPs certainly think so. This week, Tory MP Edward Leigh accused the government of ‘authoritarianism’ over the decision to impose greater restrictions during this second wave of coronavirus infections. Leigh is right to be concerned: we have seen the rights and privileges that
Much hope is being pinned to a vaccine as our route out of this Covid nightmare. But even if one is developed, would enough of the population be willing to take it? Amidst a growing movement of ‘vaccine scepticism’ online, there are signs that many people would take a lot of convincing to get themselves
The mandatory introduction of face masks in shops and a ban on families and friends from different households meeting in parts of northern England at a time when death rates and critical care admissions with Covid-19 are low, appears, on the surface at least, hard to explain. The original reason for lockdown – to protect the
Doctors have always been political. Medical school is often a cradle of social activism, driven by a syllabus underlining health inequalities and the cultural aspects of disease. Some medics inevitably take up politics: Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and Bashar al-Assad are just a few (notorious) examples. But there are plenty of others, and this crossover
Covid-19 is here to stay. Whether it flickers in wait or rages like wildfire, it will remain part of our lives for the foreseeable future. As the vast majority of people who contract the SARS COV-2 virus recover after mild flu-like symptoms then, the onus should be on finding ways to reduce the mortality in
The world is being held hostage by an organism so small that even the most powerful microscope could miss it. It has taken thousands of lives and brought superpowers to their knees. It has also united us in suffering and opened our eyes to the fragility of our way of life. A proposed panacea is
