The story of the Covid Ward

Subject: The story of the Covid Ward.

 

A truly gripping story of a hospital and staff in Lombardy was broadcast tonight on News Night on the BBC. It portrayed the depths of exhaustion and hopelessness amongst the doctors and nurses dealing with severely ill patients flowing in like an unstoppable wave into the hospital in the worst days of the pandemic. They were helpless to offer much more than palliative care as patient after patient arrived with ruptured lungs, gasping for breath the doctors knowing that there was only so much they could do. For all the technology and training there had never been anything like it on this sort of scale. People desperately ill were treated with what ever there was to hand but the general feeling was that this has overwhelmed us and we can do little good. A doctors training is based on offering care and finding solutions but the virus was out of control and whilst the politicians issued their optimistic sound bites, the reality in the Covid wards was dire.
Doctors refusing to go home and sleeping for weeks in the hospital, they bustled between patients hidden in the folds of their protective gear, names scribbled on the garments to help in the identification of who was who.

It has taken its psychological toll, the unreality of the emergency room, with patients dying one after the other, a few luckily escaping to recuperate slowly from deaths door. You can not stand such unrelenting strain outside a war zone. The reality of the trauma in the hospital and the relative normality of home, a general public clamouring to get back to work regardless of the cost regardless of the pain and strain heaped on these civilian heroes.

As we speak the death toll is falling in Lombardy and the medics draw breath, slowly emerging from a nightmare but filled with apprehension as the public demand their freedom to mix again with the inevitable corollary that the pandemic will gather pace and once again swamp those brave people fighting this uneven battle, until an vaccine can be found but even then, the incidence of death will be  inevitable amongst the weak and the aged.
A simple thing like a virus crossing the threshold between ourselves and the animal kingdom has revealed how precarious our hold on life is and how cavalier we are in not addressing our mortality.