I don’t hang out in hospitals for fun. I was referring more to visiting sick relatives. My mum has breast cancer and my relatives are ageing so I’ve had a lot of cause to visit hospitals recently. Quite a few people in my family are doctors, and my sister spends a lot of time complaining to me about stupid people who turn up in the emergency department for minor complaints, so I’m not about to rush in to hospital because I’ve got a cold.

Thanks for the advice, though! Living in a bubble sounds fun. I love the sound of bubble wrap so I might try wrapping myself in it!

And please don’t waste hospital time and resources, not to mention driving up the health insurance premiums for everyone else, by going to the hospital if you don’t have to – why would you? These patients were vulnerable to infection in a way that most healthy people are not. They were in a hospital not by choice, but because they had to be there.

The answer isn’t living in a bubble or healthy people avoiding hospitals – it is providing adequate funding for research to discover new techniques for combating and controlling pathogens and the diseases they cause or are associated with.

UV disinfection seems like the safest, most effective means of control if autoclaving is not an option. Are there ventilator components that are very incompatible with such a treatment (makes some sense since may plastics denature in extreme UV environments), or this is a budgetary/political impasse? Obviously treating patients with UV is not an option, but anything with which they come into contact seems fair game.