Covid-19: Less haste, more safety

The World Health Organization has produced guidance on minimum characteristics for a vaccine, including 50% efficacy, temperature stability, potential for rapid scale-up, and proper evaluation against comparators. Proper testing for patient safety is at the heart of a new drive for ergonomic design of medical equipment, writes Jane Feinman.4 Ergonomics, or human factors, means reducing the likelihood of human error, and is especially important for high risk equipment being used in stressful and unfamiliar situations such as those experienced by staff at the height of the pandemic. John Middleton predicts a perfect storm of resurgent covid-19, flu, a backlog of untreated long term conditions, excess cold related mortality, and the effects of economic collapse and a possible no deal Brexit.5 To be ready, he concludes, we will need all the public health interventions that weren’t properly implemented from the start: surveillance, test and trace, physical distancing, quarantine and isolation, and protection of staff and vulnerable groups.