Just received the following email from my daughter:
"I’m very happy to be a psychiatrist and not on the frontline of all of this, but also feel guilty that so many of my colleagues are suffering. Three British doctors have died and more than fifty in Italy. There are going to be high rates of PTSD in doctors and nurses who survive the pandemic because they will have witnessed more horror and deaths than at any time in their careers and will not be able to say that they did the best they could to save people, because they will not be able to do their jobs to their usual standards. An Italian nurse has committed suicide. ITU staff in the UK are already having to make difficult decisions about who to treat, only ventilating those “fairly certain to survive”. The rates of secondary deaths are going to be astronomical because nobody will get the hospital treatment they need for non-COVID diseases such as cancers, cardiovascular diseases, etc. We will only know these numbers after the fact. These are dark days."
In a pandemic, medical staff have to "play God" and decide who merits treatment - there are no hard and fast rules, but those over 80 go to the back of the queue when there is competition for medical resources. That is why it is so important that vulnerable groups isolate themselves. My mother is still alive at 92 and my sisters are over 70 - one of my sisters has moved in with my mother and relies on her own sons to deliver food to the doorstep - that is the only responsible way to proceed, even though it means she does not see her own husband, except when he comes to wave through the window when he delivers supplies (for understandable reasons, he did not want to be couped up indefinitely with his mother-in-law :-)).