When did you first realise this was going to be serious? Or actually, not just serious, serious does not nearly do the last 12 months justice. Neither do “major” or “massive”. How about we bring in “epochal” and settle on that? Epochal as in something that happens once or twice every century, and then defines that century. Like the first and second world wars did in the last century.
So, when did you initially clock that the pandemic that has ruled our lives and our conversation for a year was an epochal event? When the first cases started to be reported out of Wuhan last January? When the first UK victim was identified in February? When the first lockdown was imposed last March? Or last April, when the deaths started to multiply? Or in the summer, when it annoyingly failed fully to go away, as most of us (despite what the experts said) secretly and yet confidently assumed it would? Or did it take you until early December, when Christmas got binned?
My own feeling is that realisation of the historical significance of Covid 19 has not come in any one particular lightbulb moment, as it did when JFK got shot or the Twin Towers came down, but has rather been a gradual dawning process that we’re living and dying through something extraordinary. I think that process is still ongoing. That even now, one year in, we haven’t truly begun to appreciate the scale of what has happened.
While a slow gradual assessment might, however, sound familiar to most of us, the NHS workers whose stories are told in the following pages had no such luxury. They knew this was an absolute top grade emergency straight off, from last February onwards, when surgeries and wards and ICUs started to fill with scores and then hundreds and then thousands of desperately ill people struggling to breathe. For frontline workers, give or take a brief respite last summer, the battle to help those stricken patients keep breathing has gone on ever since.
Even as the crisis eases, even as details of the brutally heart-rending nature of the struggle begin to emerge in accounts such as those following, it will be many years before the rest of us fully appreciate the full extent of the sacrifices made.
The comparison to the wars of the last century is justified. It was all going to be over by Christmas. There was a period of phoney war when nothing awful happened. And then, when plenty of awful things happened all at once, mistakes ensued. And there was no end in sight. And on it went. And then, deliverance was at hand. But still it took forever. And even when it was over, it wasn’t quite, because now as in 1918 and 1945, in 2021 we’ll be living with the consequences for a long time.
In some respects, this modern conflict has been even tougher than the nation’s previous titanic struggle of 1939-45. Then, we had a clearly identifiable conspicuously evil enemy. Now, it makes no sense to call an insensate microscopic virus “evil”. It’s hard to whip up a sense of solidarity against a microcosm. Then, the victims of the conflagration and the damage it inflicted were all too visible. Now, the terrible toll lacks a human face, thousands of individual tragedies reduced to statistics in a chart in the newspapers. When the dust settles and normality resumes, the sheer loneliness in their final days of those who succumbed will surely constitute the greatest tragedy. A loneliness only alleviated by the extraordinary human kindness demonstrated by those medics who risked their own lives to offer comfort as the end neared.
If you read accounts of those who served in the second world war, as soldiers or sailors, airmen or air raid wardens, nurses or Normandy veterans, those accounts tend to have one thing in common: what we did, they say, wasn’t anything special. No big deal. It is instructive that many of the interviewees in the following pages are similarly modest. True heroes seem to have a habit of downplaying, even denying, their own courage. They feel themselves part of a bigger collective effort. And so they are. They are also acutely aware of the colleagues and comrades who, equally brave though they were, were not lucky enough to survive.
What is the classic image of a hero of the second world war? A handsome devil-may-care impossibly young man with a pencil moustache in the cockpit of a Spitfire,? A grim-faced Tommy doing his duty in the desert? A lantern-jawed Royal Navy officer in a chunky roll-neck sweater on the bridge of a destroyer in the freezing north Atlantic? Heroes all, for sure. And also, all male, all white, all under the age of 30, all born within the borders of the United Kingdom.
The heroes of the present struggle are vastly different. Many are middle aged. Many were not born in Britain. Many do not have a white skin. And many - indeed a majority - are women. When, back in April and May last year, I joined my family outside our front door clapping for carers, the composite image I had in mind of the person I was applauding was a middle-aged black woman, quite possibly born far from these shores. That image did not spring from nowhere. It came as a natural result of long experience of the NHS. Perhaps, if anything good is to come out of the calamity of 2020-2021, it will be an appreciation, not before time, that British citizens of all backgrounds deserve to take an honoured place in their country’s history.
Rather like the youngsters back in 1940, these contemporary heroes were pitched into battle, against an implacable enemy, with shoddy equipment and muddled leadership. The onslaught had been predicted for ages, yet the funds and preparations were not in place. As we know, and as the forthcoming accounts confirm, front line combatants against Covid last spring had little or none of what they needed either to best perform their duties or to protect themselves from personal disaster. Supplies of protective gear were absent or inadequate. Nurses had to make do with home-made masks. Some resorted to using bin bags in lieu of gowns and scrubs. Some were advised to hold their breath. Eager schoolchildren were pressed into service hacking up old curtains and sheets for their mums to sew up as scrubs.
Policy was equally make do and mend. The first lockdown was not imposed for two weeks after it became blindingly obvious that it had to happen, not just sooner rather than later, but now. In the interim, the Cheltenham race festival plus major international football and rugby matches were allowed to convene. The prime minister went around shaking hands with all and sundry. Flights not only from China, but also Italy and Spain, already identified as virus hotspots, continued as usual. Scandalously, thousands of elderly hospital patients were returned to care homes, where many spread the virus to devastating and deathly effect. Places of what ought to have been relative safety became plague pits. Care home workers were afforded even less personal protection than were their peers in the NHS.
Throughout those early weeks, and ever since, and still, and correctly, the ebb and flow of advice and rules and regulations and laws regarding lockdown and restrictions has been governed by the overriding need for the NHS not to be overwhelmed by the virus. That one concern - of patients dying in corridors for want of beds, ventilators, oxygen, as happened in northern Italy in April - has governed every decision. And fair enough. We all recognised the necessity to manage the pandemic in this way, that delaying the flow of victims was the best way to minimise morbidity.
But consider this: there is more than one way to overwhelm the NHS. A surplus of sufferers is one; a shortage of staff is another. If enough health workers had decided, back in April or more recently this winter, that the risks were simply too great for them to continue to go to work, as well they might, had they been lesser characters, the system would have been swamped from the other side of the equation. And yet they didn’t down tools. Far from it. Retired workers returned to the payroll. Existing workers volunteered for double shifts. Poorly paid porters and receptionists stayed at their posts.
Either a year ago, when it was obvious they were insufficiently protected, and their colleagues were falling ill and in some cases dying, or two months ago when the initial clap for carers drama had long worn off and they were exhausted after months of grinding work, it would not have been unreasonable for those in the frontline to ease off. Pull the odd sickie. Stay at home under the duvet once in a while. Go back to where they were born.
But they didn’t. They haven’t. They stuck with it. Turned up. Day after day, night after night. Kept on keeping on. Therein lies their true heroism. It’s been a sensational effort.
The full story has yet to be told. What follows is, in a modest way, a start.
Robert Crampton