at a gp‘s surgery in stockton on tees, dr david hodges now has to protect himself when seeing patientsght into the corona room.... at the start of the outbreak, people who thought they'd been in contact with coronavirus were offered a test. we isolate them then we get kitted up so we put the masks on, protective apron on, gloves on, hands washed... then as numbers grew testing was focused on hospital patients. and that caused problems for medics on the front line. it's very challenging at the moment. i have no idea if the patients i see have coronavirus or not. are you worried that testing is not going on and particularly for health workers? absolutely. i think we need to know how much coronavirus is in our community. i might be doing all of this and we have very few cases, or actually we might have hundreds of cases we're missing. doctors, nurses, anyone working in health and social care, if they get symptoms, they need rapid testing. so that they can either get back to work or we know that they are definitely needing to self—isolate. while some nhs staff were tested, most were not. i