It was this summer when Dr Manveer Rahi, 26, first saw a patient about his own age rushed into intensive care.
After more than a year on the front line often treating people with Covid-19, watching that previously healthy individual spiral towards death’s door left him shaken.
“Up until this point I had mostly seen older patients who became really sick,” said Rahi, a junior doctor in southeast Scotland. “When someone as young as that became really unwell it did scare me in some respects because the illusion young people were not at risk was gone.”
He went home contemplating his own mortality and fearing for his peers. “It does scare me to see younger people with severe Covid,” he says. “Just thinking about my young friends and family, it makes me think that they are at risk.”
Rahi has joined other young doctors in signing an open letter calling for people their own age to accept the offer of a vaccine.
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Latest figures show 96 people aged 44 and under have died with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic in Scotland, about one per cent of the victims. In the last four weeks, 63.5 per cent of emergency hospital admissions for unvaccinated patients were for those aged under 40.
In the open letter, organised by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and Faculties in Scotland — known as the Scottish Academy — the doctors said: “Many very sick people are still coming into hospital with Covid-19. There are a mix of ages, including lots of people in their twenties and thirties who have not been vaccinated. As young medics in our twenties and thirties, we are very concerned to witness this happening to people our age. It all seems so unnecessary.”
Rahi, who has looked after teenagers with the virus, said that most of the young patients he has seen in hospital have not had vaccine protection. He also said that while he has treated people in their late eighties, who have been fully immunised, they have recovered on the wards and gone home.
Jonathan Guckian, co-chairman of the trainees group of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, said: “Young people often bounce back quite quickly [from illnesses],” he said. “The first thing I noticed was they did not from Covid-19. Young people seemed very sick, that bounce back ability was not the same.
“What I remember most was how afraid they were. There was so much fear you could feel it. I felt afraid as well.”
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In Scotland, 72 per cent of those aged 18 to 29 have received their first dose and 25 per cent their second. Just over half of people in their thirties have received both shots.
Dr Miles Mack, chairman of the Scottish Academy, said: “Speaking to medical trainees, it struck me that they are troubled and concerned that very sick people in their age group are being admitted, to hospital, with Covid-19.
“However, they know that this is entirely avoidable. The vaccines offer us all protection from Covid-19, and lower the chance of passing the virus on to someone else. That’s why these medics have written an open letter to their own age group. They want to show young people that there’s nothing to fear by being vaccinated. In fact, being vaccinated gives peace of mind.”
