Robert Peston Robert Peston

The contradiction at the heart of ministers’ coronavirus response

Picture by Pippa Fowles / No. 10 Downing Street

The stories I hear from what healthcare workers call ‘the frontline’ – code for those working directly with Covid-19 patients – are traumatising.

‘I am seeing scores of death,’ says one senior doctor. ‘It’s hideous… I’m palliating [giving temporary relief to] people in their 70s to 90s on the wards who were never remotely suitable for intensive care and who are dying horribly quickly, and nastily too, if they don’t get the proper care.

‘The ward staff don’t have the experience and the poor patients don’t have a loved one by their side acting as their advocate’.

This doctor gave me this insight because I could not work out where precisely people were dying, since it was clear from the statistics on use of intensive therapy units (ITUs) or intensive care wards that the majority are not dying there.

As this doctor pointed out, significant numbers of people with Covid-19 ‘are too frail or have too many co-morbidities [life threatening conditions] to withstand ITU, so their ceiling of care is ward based’.

My medical friends are also jealous of the quality and resources of German hospitals

To hear this is not a great surprise, though it is upsetting.

The point is that what we hear about in the media tends to be the shocking deaths of younger people in intensive care. Much less attention is paid to the elderly and frail, who are dying in horrifyingly large numbers, on NHS wards and in care homes.

I am acutely aware of this differentiated treatment because an elderly relative was put on a ward after being diagnosed with Covid-19 and has since died, whereas two younger friends have been in ITU.

So when the Prime Minister says his life was saved by being admitted to intensive care and being ministered to round the clock by two nurses, Jenny from New Zealand and Luis from Portugal, this is compelling but only half the story.

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