I dealt with the first major outbreak of Covid in the UK. This is what it’s like one year on
Laurie Churchman was among the first reporters to face the coronavirus pandemic as it broke out in Brighton last February. He returns to the streets to find suffering, strength and a strange sense of hope
The voice on the other end of the line sounded frightened. It belonged to a nurse. She was in shock. “I’m so scared,” she said. She had been treating a suspected coronavirus patient at a Brighton hospital before her bosses bundled her into a cab and told her to go home and stay indoors. The driver hadn’t been wearing a mask. She was advised to get her children out of the house, and held back tears as she described being separated from her family.
“What do I do now?” she asked. “I thought there would be a plan in place for something like this.” She was speaking in February last year. Neither of us realised the gravity of her words at the time. She was among the first people in the UK told to self-isolate. It was before the term was widely understood; very little was in those first days of the outbreak in Brighton.
There had been only two Covid cases reported elsewhere in the UK. A university student and his mother, who had flown in from Wuhan, both tested positive in York. The cases were made public on 31 January, and they were said to have been contained. But it was in Brighton that the first major cluster broke out, where the disease first seriously threatened to spread – and where we first found that it might not, as the authorities claimed, be under control.
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