High Consequence Infectious Diseases do sound terribly administrative, don’t they? Not as headline grabbing as PANDEMIC or OUTBREAK but calmly checkboxy and quizzical.

We blogged previously on the novel coronavirus SARS-Cov-2 / COVID19 and promised some thoughts on how we, child health specialists, should respond to this situation.

One thing which keeps being unnerving and troublesome is the idea of approaching children wearing full-on-nuclear-holocaust-PPE kit. The view from the bed was captured elegantly in this Tweet

What do children see when they’re being managed with suspected COVID-19? We ran a sim @SotonChildHosp this week to test the combined processes of our Paeds ED, Paediatrics, isolation ward and PICU. This is what an unwell child sees… @CChaseUk @VanessaStanley7 @FOPICU @UHSFT pic.twitter.com/gXsJqg0ljx

— James Edelman (@jamesedelman) March 6, 2020

So what can we do to make this more bearable?

We’d welcome links/comments/approaches. There’s a lovely set of cartoons explaining the process here, using a ‘paper dolly’ approach to make the healthcare worker still real under all the masks and gowns. And there are a bunch of broad resources for all sorts of aged children at the ‘BUGS’ site.

But what we’d all still love to see, I’m sure, is a Get Well Soon video with catchy tune and the inimitable Dr Ranj singing along in a hood.