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BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “COVID 19: THE LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 8th
September 2020 2000 - 2040
REPEAT: Sunday 13th
September 2020 1700 - 1740
REPORTER: Jane Deith
PRODUCER: Helen Clifton
EDITOR: Carl Johnston
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6328LH0
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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT
COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING
AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL
SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission: Tuesday 8th
September 2020
Repeat: Sunday 13th
September 2020
Producer: Helen Clifton
Reporter: Jane Deith
Editor: Carl Johnston
MUSIC
DEITH: In the past six months, more than three million people
in the UK have caught coronavirus. More than 130,000 were so ill they had to go into
hospital. The lucky ones survived. Now though, they’re feeling the physical and mental
after-effects.
MITCHELL: I can remember lying in my bed and I was weeping and
saying, I’m worried that you’re mending my body, but by the time I get out of here, I won’t
be the same person.
DEITH: But are they out of danger? People have seemingly
recovered and then suffered fatal side effects like stroke.
PATHAK: One of the doctors had actually said to us that it was
sort of looking more like 95% that he’d be able to come home, but then on the Friday he
passed away.
- 2 -
DEITH: Doctors fear we don’t yet know what this virus is
capable of. So who’s looking out for Covid sufferers who didn’t go to hospital - those told to
stay at home? Tonight we speak to people struggling to get well, who say they’ve been
forgotten by the NHS.
GARNER: I think people need to be believed. The proof is in the
symptoms.
DEITH: And we hear concerns that there aren’t enough rehab
services to help those hit by the first wave of coronavirus, let alone a second one.
TURNER-STOKES: We would hope that the Government would invest
more in rehabilitation services. If you invest all of that time and effort in saving lives, you’ve
got to make sure that those lives are as good as you can possibly make them for the people
who are then surviving.
MUSIC – ALAN MITCHELL SINGING ‘BREATHE’
DEITH: Music is Alan Mitchell’s therapy, while he recovers
from coronavirus. He was a police officer in the Met, now retired in Essex, six feet four with
a shock of white hair on top. Four months ago, he was attached to a ventilator in hospital and
- to put it bluntly – he was expected to die. So he’s grateful to be alive; he’s still got a
twinkle in his eye, but his body is stubbornly weak.
MITCHELL: I’m still left with an awful lot of tiredness and
occasional severe breathlessness. I’ll get up to do some washing or do some vacuuming or
something and suddenly I’ll just, well, not even be halfway through and I’ll have to stop
because a sudden wave of tiredness and breathlessness, and I tend to be sleeping 12 to 14
hours a day at the moment. I just can’t keep my eyes open.
DEITH: Could you go for a walk? Could you go for a bike
ride?
- 3 -
MITCHELL: No, I couldn’t do any of that. I could probably walk to
the end of our close and back, but I couldn’t walk any farther than that because I know I
wouldn’t be able to get back.
DEITH: Unable to do much other than sit, it’s hard not to dwell
on how sick he was. What Alan experienced on the day he was rushed to intensive care is
burned into his memory.
MITCHELL: I was sitting in the chair in the lounge and an absolute
need to get on the floor came over me. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t really
see, and they whisked me off into hospital. Early evening, a consultant came in very, very
grim faced, and he said, ‘Look, you need to phone home because we need to put you on a
ventilator, and I have to tell you that you’ve got a 10% chance of surviving the next few
days.’ I was absolutely shocked to my core, and they were saying, you know, ‘Make the
phone call,’ and I couldn’t talk, I could not say what I wanted to say. I think I croaked out a,
‘I love you guys,’ and then cut the connection. That just haunted me.
DEITH: Is it still haunting you?
MITCHELL: It does, because what I remember is someone jumping
on my chest with a plastic bag, a clear plastic bag. putting it over my face and I couldn’t
breathe. I couldn’t do anything. Now, what I understand they did is that they started to inject
me with things to paralyse me.
DEITH: It saved his life. After six days on the ventilator,
doctors could see Alan was trying to breathe for himself. He was going to make it. But the
world he woke up in was terrifying.
MITCHELL: It’s like Liverpool Street Station at eight o’clock in the
morning. You’ve got dozens of people wandering around, you’ve got machines beeping
normally and then you’ve got alarms going off, and we were fairly crowded in. I had to get
out of that place, the ITU was fracturing my mind. I was weeping and saying, I’m worried
that you’re mending my body, but by the time I get out of here I won’t be the same person.
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DEITH: Alan begged to be moved out of intensive care. The
team decided he could be cared for on a different ward. There, a nurse lent him a phone
charger and he was able to call home. He was desperate to talk to his family - Ed and Laura,
his children, and his wife, Lisa. He wasn’t prepared for what she told him.
MITCHELL: She sort of said, ‘Look, I don’t know how to tell you
this, but while you’ve been sleeping, Ed’s really not well and I think he’s going to be coming
in.’ And within an hour or two, he was in a bed opposite me on the high dependency unit.
DEITH: Alan’s looking at his son, who’s only in his twenties,
and now in real danger of being moved into intensive care. The doctors are giving him
massive amounts of oxygen, hoping to avoid having to ventilate him. Ed has an autistic
spectrum condition and he’s finding the hospital surroundings really frightening.
ED MITCHELL: I listened to a man’s last conversation with his family.
You know, he got brought in off of ITU because he just said, ‘Just let me die,’ you know?
And so I heard him have his last conversation with his family, and I will never go through a
day not reliving hearing that conversation.
DEITH: Do you think you might have PTSD?
MITCHELL: I think the whole family has. I do have flashbacks
during the day where I suddenly have, you know, a waking dream almost. It’s those eyes and
that feeling of not being able to breathe.
MUSIC
DEITH: Dr Colette Coyle is a critical care consultant at the
Royal London Hospital. She follows up with patients who survive, a few months on. She
worries what mark the Covid conditions have left on people.
COYLE: This was an extraordinary time for a patient to be in
hospital, so we were looking after more patients in a bay area than we normally would have
in order to increase our capacity. The added stress for them of not being able to see their
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COYLE cont: family at a time when you’re really frightened for your
life and not being able to see your family and friends, I think must be absolutely terrifying.
They weren’t seeing the faces of the people that were looking after them, you know,
everyone was behind a mask and, you know, seeing patients who may have been there one
day and not the next because they’ve passed away, and I think they will suffer a lot of kind of
long term anxieties and PTSD in relation to that.
DEITH: Are you more worried about people’s psychological
state than almost their physical recovery?
COYLE: I think the psychological impact of this will be huge on
them, and I think in a way that’s almost harder to deal with - physical problems can be treated
with therapies and medications, but getting access to the right kind of psychological therapy
can be a lot harder.
ACTUALITY IN CAR
DEITH: Covid 19 has caused so much heartbreak in such a
short time. Six months ago, doctors faced with this new virus thought it was a respiratory
disease that attacked the lungs. Now we know it can affect almost every other major organ
too – from the heart to the brain – and it’s too soon to know if the damage is temporary or
permanent. I’m heading to Lincolnshire, where 65 year old Rudresh Pathak spent 70 days on
a ventilator in the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, where he worked as a consultant psychiatrist.
Miraculously, in June he made it out of intensive care and was applauded by his colleagues.
ACTUALITY OF APPLAUSE
DEITH: Rudresh’s son, Anish, could start thinking about
getting the house ready for his dad to come home.
PATHAK: I had been guarding myself against too much optimism
throughout the time, his time on the ventilator because of how up and down it was, and so
they were engaging in physio to help build up the strength to take him off the ventilator, and
they then succeeded in doing that. One of the doctors had actually said to us that it was sort
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PATHAK cont: of looking more like 95% that he’d be able to come
home and everything just seemed, you know, like it was heading in the right direction.
DEITH: Rudresh continued with his rehab on a respiratory ward
– the plan was to leave hospital in about ten days.
PATHAK: He complained of some chest pains. They were
worried he’d had some sort of a heart issue, possibly a heart attack, and there’s quite a large
cardiac unit at Lincoln Hospital. We don’t know when exactly it happened, if it was in, you
know, the transport or if it was when he arrived there, something went wrong and he lost
consciousness. They established relatively early on that he hadn’t actually had a heart attack,
but then they weren’t sure what it was, whether it was a stroke or not, or whether he was
having some seizures.
DEITH: But it was confirmed that it was a stroke that he had
suffered?
PATHAK: Yes, yeah, yeah. So the care continued for another
four days after that, but then on the Friday he passed away.
DEITH: Do you feel that the stroke was an effect of the Covid
virus that he had?
PATHAK: I mean, the doctors have told us that, yeah. It’s the fact
he was in the ICU for so long, it takes its toll on the body, and my dad was 65 and relatively
healthy.
DEITH: Sitting across from Anish, I have a view of the garden.
Beneath a cedar tree there’s a floral tribute saying ‘Dad’. On the day of his funeral,
Dr Pathak’s friends applauded him again.
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PATHAK: We followed, you know, the hearse around the hospital
grounds and, you know, so many people had come out to clap for my dad. It was really,
really moving. And, you know, obviously nothing really makes you feel that much better,
but it really shows how much he meant to people.
MUSIC
DEITH: Rudresh Pathak’s cause of death was listed as stroke,
Covid with multi-organ involvement and diabetes – that is a risk factor for stroke. But
Dr Pathak was 65. Most people who suffer strokes are older - in their mid-seventies. It’s
thought coronavirus – or the immune system’s response - might be causing an increase in
blood clotting or inflammation in the brain. We still don’t really know what Covid 19 is
capable of. With the risk of fatal side effects, for survivors the stakes are high.
ACTUALITY OF BEEPING MACHINES
DEITH: Rudresh Pathak had only just begun the rehab he hoped
was the beginning of his recovery. Across the country, tens of thousands of people have
needed intensive rehabilitation simply to stand up again and walk before they could leave
hospital. But they need support after they’ve been discharged too.
PHYSIO: … too short of breath or too fatigued, slowly and
progressively warm you up ….
DEITH: In a room at the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, former
Covid patients are guided through a rehab session by nurses and physiotherapists wearing
masks, ready to help if using the treadmills, bikes and weights feels too much.
PATIENT 1: It’s terrifying, and it’s the feeling of being out of
control, and the more you panic obviously the more breathless as well you get, and you’re
scared to build the stamina and challenge your body because of that awful experience of the
breathlessness.
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DEITH: Most people here have never been seriously ill before.
Normally those with chronic lung problems have time to get used to their condition. Covid
comes out of the blue; people who were fit are suddenly frail. Professor Sally Singh is Head
of Pulmonary and Cardiac Rehabilitation for Leicester’s hospitals.
SINGH: When they come out of ITU, they may find it really
difficult to get up and down stairs, and being breathless and anxious are both scary symptoms
really, so you naturally avoid doing any activity because it makes you more breathless. But
as a consequence of not doing anything, people get less and less fit and more deconditioned,
so it’s really important to help people on that road to recovery.
DEITH: The Leicester patients have in a sense got a golden
ticket – because they were admitted to hospital, they’re firmly on the medical radar for
follow-ups, face to face rehabilitation and monitoring. But there were hundreds of thousands
of people with Covid who weren’t admitted to hospital, although they probably would have
been if we hadn’t been in the middle of a pandemic. Instead they were told to stay at home.
They say they’re struggling with the vicious after-effects of the virus too, but without the
same access to rehabilitation.
MACDONALD: Hi, my name’s Elly MacDonald, I’m 37 years old. I
live in Surbiton, just outside London, and unfortunately I’m now almost at five months of
being ill with Covid.
DEITH: Elly was really fit. She was a rower and she was
training for the London Marathon before she believes she caught coronavirus. 23 weeks on,
she says trying to do any exercise or work leaves her panting for breath.
MACDONALD: I had eight or nine of the typical coronavirus
symptoms. They were very mild and they only lasted about 16 hours. But then a few days
after that, I started getting very short of breath and a few days after that, I started coughing up
mucus from my lungs.
DEITH: When you started to feel really ill, what did you think
you should do? Did you think you should ring 111, go to the doctor, go to hospital?
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MACDONALD: I spoke to a number of different GPs, but nobody really
was able to help me at all. Everybody was just telling me to just stay at home, just keep
hydrated, keep resting and just telling me that it should go very soon. I did call 111 actually
at one point when it got very bad. They told me that I would be told to go home if I went into
hospital.
DEITH: I mean, did that seem reasonable to you?
MACDONALD: No, it didn’t seem reasonable to me, but, I mean, I
didn’t feel like I had many other options. I went to bed that night hoping that I would wake
up the following morning - and I did luckily - but I felt that it was a bit touch and go.
DEITH: Did you go back to the doctor, you know, as this
became weeks and, well, months now, isn’t it?
MACDONALD: I did, yeah. So I actually at week 11 I actually
discovered a few recovery support groups and started actually finding out some useful
information. So, for example, I’d just discovered that I needed to be thinning my blood, so I
immediately started thinning my blood, but I spoke to my GP at the same time just to check
that I wasn’t going to be harming myself in any way. She told me that I shouldn’t bother. At
this point, there were lots and lots of reports in the press about people dying of blood clots,
and actually at that point I changed GP surgeries. Since then, I’ve been receiving really very
good care, so that the surgery I’m with currently, they’ve been excellent, which has helped
not just physically, but that’s actually helped very much mentally as well. Just knowing that I
actually have people who are taking me seriously and proactively trying to help me.
DEITH: Elly had a Covid test, which was negative. But that
was two months after she’s convinced she had the virus. Professor Paul Garner, an expert in
infectious diseases at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, says test or no test, people
need to be taken seriously.
GARNER: I think people need to be believed. I think the proof is
in the symptoms. The tests are in a sense getting in the way of people receiving good care.
- 10 -
DEITH: Professor Garner did have a positive antibody test after
experiencing debilitating symptoms of coronavirus for four months.
GARNER: I actually thought I was actually dying at the time, it
was awful sensation, absolutely awful, with a thumping heart rate and terrible fatigue. Round
about day 80 or 90, the night sweats, the terrific drenching night sweats started becoming
less, but I still wake up feeling absolutely worn out, as though I’ve run a marathon the day
before, and the way to understand what the disease is about is to listen to people that have got
it and believe them in the first instance, because it does give a whole variety of very different
and very bizarre complaints.
DEITH: How do we make sure that the people that get that
personalised support are the right ones, because there’s a risk that the people offering that
help could be deluged by people who perhaps are imagining that they’ve had Covid?
GARDNER: So, this fantasy about imagining Covid has entered the
narrative somewhere and it certainly is not coming from people that have got Covid, because
you know when you’ve had Covid. People had symptoms of the disease that were then being
diagnosed as anxiety. Some people have problems with their heart rates going haywire,
going very fast and then going, sometimes going slow, but they have these palpitations and
they were seeing doctors and hospitals that were diagnosing this as anxiety.
MUSIC
DEITH: The Government abandoned routine testing in March,
so the majority of people can’t prove they’ve had Covid. But millions have been logging
their symptoms after downloading this app designed by a team at Kings College, London. It
asks you about 19 symptoms and whether you’ve been tested for the virus or antibodies to it,
and that data’s then extrapolated to the other users who missed out on tests. And the man
behind the app, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology Tim Spector, has given us the very latest
numbers.
SPECTOR: Most estimates are that around 3 million people in the
UK at least have had symptomatic Covid, and our analysis of our app users’ symptoms shows
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SPECTOR cont: that roughly 10% of infected people have long Covid,
which is to say they’ve had symptoms for more than 30 days, so that adds up to 300,000
people who are ill for longer than a month. And 1% to 2% of affected people are still unwell
for three months or more. That’s 30,000 to 60,000 people with so-called chronic Covid, and
many of these people were missed in the official figures, they were simply told they didn’t
have Covid because they didn’t meet the rather rigid criteria at the time. If you just had
fatigue and loss of smell, even for months or more, you were dismissed by most medical
authorities in the first few months of the epidemic.
DEITH: Are you frustrated that, given the amount of work
you’ve put in and the public has put into this app, that the data has not been more widely
mined?
SPECTOR: Yes, I think it is the answer to that. I think it is time to
start not just talking on the news every day about, you know, the numbers of deaths, number
of hospital admissions, but if we had a ticker on there, on the news feeds to say that around
30,000 to 60,000 people in the country have had symptoms for over three months now, that
would get more notice, and there’s a big danger that these people might up end up otherwise
being forgotten.
DEITH: Tim Spector plans to analyse his data to see if it holds
the clue as to why some people suffer for month after month and others don’t. A cross-party
group of MPs leading the UK’s Coronavirus Inquiry has recently called long Covid sufferers
this pandemic’s ‘forgotten victims’ and says those who haven’t been hospitalised need more
support. Some of the home sufferers we’ve been in touch with said their doctors weren’t
exactly helpful. Professor Martin Marshall is chair of the Royal College of GPs.
MARSHALL: I think the vast majority of GPs will do what we’re
supposed to do, which is take all symptoms seriously. There are exceptions, I accept that, but
I think for the vast majority of patients, they are receiving very good care from their General
Practitioners - sometimes in difficult circumstances, it must be said, because we’re seeing a
growing number of not just post-Covid conditions, but all the conditions that weren’t being
presented to general practice because of the acute crisis are now being presented now.
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DEITH: Do you fear being overwhelmed? I mean, you started
with a trickle. Do you think it will become a flood?
MARSHALL: That is a potential risk. Over 50% of GPs expect post-
Covid and long Covid to be a significant element of their workload over the next few months.
As I said, I don’t know whether long Covid will turn out to be a similar condition to Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome, but if it does then I think we can expect a similar small proportion of
patients with long term disability and that would be dreadful. So we really do need to see a
growing number of post-Covid clinics being established in the same way as I guess before
this Covid crisis we had post viral, ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome type clinics.
ACTUALITY FROM WEBSITE
WOMAN’S VOICE: Your Covid Recovery is a new website designed to
help you recover from the long-term effects of coronavirus.
DEITH: The NHS says many people can go online and work
out their own digital recovery.
WOMAN’S VOICE: If you’re recovering from Covid 19 and are still living
with the impact, this site should be helpful for you to get back to normal.
DEITH: In the four weeks since it launched, 65,000 people have
visited this site. There are pages here on what they can do to help themselves, like eating and
sleeping well and starting exercise again – and it says here people should aim for a daily
walk. But Lynne Turner-Stokes, a consultant at Northwick Park Hospital in London and
Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, worries encouraging this kind of DIY rehab is risky.
TURNER-STOKES: I think the one concern that many of us have in
rehabilitation is that we can’t expect that we just sort of put up a few internet services and
then people will get better by themselves - we have to do much more than that. For one
thing, for people who have never been to hospital, nobody’s looked properly at their lungs,
their hearts and so on, but it’s not safe simply just to say, ‘Go out and do this amount of
exercise,’ without knowing that they have properly been investigated and that it’s safe for
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TURNER-STOKES: them to do that. It would be very useful, I think, if we
had more one-stop services that people could go to hospital and have the various things that
they need to have, and right at this moment, we’re very short of those services.
MUSIC
DEITH: The idea of one-stop clinics – open to anyone who’s
had Covid - has been mentioned more than once. As well as the scheme in Leicester, a
handful of dedicated post-Covid services have got off the ground. A temporary rehab hospital
has opened in Surrey, there’s a clinic in Newcastle, home visits are available in South
Warwickshire and there’s a 6 week exercise class in Buckinghamshire. But some of these are
specifically for Covid patients discharged from hospital. People who suffered at home
probably won’t be first on the list. And it seems like this group was almost overlooked when
NHS England began thinking about online aftercare. Leicester rehab consultant, Professor
Sally Singh, helped develop the Your Covid Recovery website.
SINGH: The focus originally was on people that had been
admitted to hospital, particularly those that had had a stay on ICU, but of course, we’re now
becoming increasingly aware that people that have had Covid managed in the community,
that their symptoms are as prolonged and equivalent - if not more so - than people that have
had a hospital stay. So the site isn’t a standalone digital application; it actually allows
interaction with healthcare professionals and ongoing support.
DEITH: Some rehabilitation experts, while they can see a lot of
good thought has gone into the website, they are concerned that it takes a ‘one size fits all’
approach, and essentially says to people, you can get better by yourself. And they feel that
particularly around exercise, that really we should be saying to people, ‘You need to see your
doctor before doing anything in terms of exercise,’ and there’s no mention of that on the
website.
SINGH: To get access to the site, you will see a healthcare
professional, so this really isn’t a one size fits all. So there’s enormous wealth of knowledge
and expertise that we’ve pulled together to make this site as good as we can. So patients have
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SINGH cont: choice, so they can choose the option that will best suit
them and their lifestyle and how much support they perceive that they really need.
DEITH: And what do you make of this idea, one-stop Covid
follow-up clinics sited in hospitals, but open to everyone?
SINGH: I think there’s some merit in that, in that you have a lot
of expertise that can coalesce in a clinic. And secondly, there’s the opportunity to collect
data in a systematic way, so that we can begin to understand the profile of recovery and
potential interventions that may work for patients post-Covid.
DEITH: On data, I mean, are we properly collecting data on
people and their symptoms and their needs in terms of rehabilitation?
SINGH: Yes, we are. There’s a large study that’s been
coordinated out of Leicester that is doing exactly that. This is particularly focused on
hospitalised patients and not currently community patients.
MUSIC
DEITH: The study Sally Singh mentions will track the long
term physical and mental impact of Covid 19 by following ten thousand people discharged
from hospital across the UK – but not those who fought off the virus at home. Yet doctors
stress there’s not necessarily a correlation between how ill you are with coronavirus and
whether you suffer long-term effects. Some people are rushed to hospital, but recover
relatively quickly; others get a mild dose of the virus and only later develop frightening
symptoms, which go on for months. We wanted to know what’s out there for them. We
asked all 212 Clinical Commissioning Groups and health boards in the UK what services they
have for long Covid sufferers who weren’t hospitalised. 86 replied – but just ten said they
ran services for people who didn’t receive acute care. Another sixteen areas said they were
planning support or were adapting existing rehab facilities. It’s possible other areas might be
helping people via general rehab services, and the UK Government and NHS England told us
they are expanding aftercare and tailored treatment for all patients who need it, including new
and strengthened rehab centres and community services in every part of the country.
- 15 -
DEITH cont: The Welsh Government says it will help people early
in their recovery, but Wales already has community and specialist rehabilitation programmes
and it’s not clear yet there’s a need for separate Covid rehabilitation. The Department of
Health in Northern Ireland says a clinical working group is assessing the needs of Covid 19
patients who’ve left hospital to highlight future work. The Scottish Government told us it has
its own digital healthcare service for people with Covid who are not sick enough to be in
hospital, and it says it will give everyone ongoing help with high quality rehab in different
settings.
MUSIC
DEITH: Across the UK, hospitals are readying themselves in
case coronavirus returns with a vengeance this winter. But we’re still only beginning to
understand the physical and mental impact on those who survived the first wave.
ACTUALITY AT WHITECHAPEL MARKET
DEITH: This is Whitechapel Market in Tower Hamlets. Covid
19 has hit more than a thousand people here. The Royal London Hospital is just behind us.
ACTUALITY OF TEMPERATURE CHECKS, MASKS, ETC
WOMAN: … pop your mask on …
DEITH: This is where Dr Colette Coyle works – the consultant
you heard earlier in the programme, talking about the trauma of the Covid ward.
COYLE: So this floor was turned into a temporary intensive care
unit during the pandemic ….
DEITH: Five months ago, this floor of the hospital was given
over to desperately ill Covid patients - among them Abdus Minto, a minicab driver, married
to Rumana Sultana, with three young sons. He was on a ventilator more than once, close to
- 16 -
DEITH cont: death, for six weeks. When he woke up and was taken
off the machine, he knew the battle wasn’t over. It was only just beginning.
ARCHIVE RECORDING OF INTERVIEW
MAN: Can you tell us how you’re feeling?
MINTO: Not good.
MAN: Not good at all?
MINTO: Oh my God. Oh my God. Too much painful. Too
much painful.
COYLE: I remember him vividly coming into A&E, you know,
incredibly breathless and just knowing that, you know, straightaway we were going to have to
put him onto a ventilator. He was probably one of our sickest patients during the pandemic.
We weren’t sure that he would survive.
DEITH: But Abdus beat the odds. He went home at the end of
May. He’s on Dr Coyle’s list for a follow-up consultation. Covid precautions mean it has to
be a virtual clinic.
ACTUALITY OF CONSULTATION
COYLE: Hi, it’s Dr Coyle, is that Mr Minto?
MINTO: Yes, it is.
COYLE: Hello there. It’s very nice to hear your voice and be
able to hear you at home with your children, having looked after you for so long.
MINTO: I’m so happy and grateful, very.
- 17 -
COYLE: How are you?
MINTO: When I walk too much, I feel so tired.
COYLE: I’m sure you do, yes.
MINTO: My left leg is still not good.
COYLE: What I will suggest to your GP is that it might be
worth you getting seen by someone called the pain team, because we’ve had this pain for
several months now, but also it sounds like you might still need a little bit of input from the
physiotherapist.
DEITH: Listening to Abdus’ hour-long consultation, you realise
just how many rehab specialists have been involved. Hospital physios, speech and language
therapists, a dietician, and he still needs the pain team and more physio.
COYLE: So it’s a long road to recovery after being through
something like that. The vast majority of patients have some form of chronic problem, but
how long that’s going to last and whether that’s going to be permanent, it’s just too early to
tell at the moment, I think.
DEITH: From what he’s told you today, what are the things that
you’re most worried about in terms of his moving forward?
COYLE: I mean, the thing that worries me most and with our
patient population in general here in East London is that a lot of these patients are on very
kind of temporary or zero hours contracts with the work that they were doing, and it’s hard
for him to know when he’s going to be able to do that, given he’s still got some ongoing
health problems. I imagine that there’ll be a lot of patients in a similar situation to him and
really worrying about their financial futures. They’re unable to support their families
financially now.
- 18 -
DEITH: For many people who’ve had coronavirus, anxieties
about their health are compounded by money worries.
ACTUALITY IN MINTO HOME
SULTANA: What do you want?
ISHRAM: I want ice cream.
SULTANA: I want ice cream, okay …
DEITH: I went to see Abdus Minto at home, with his wife and
his three smiling boys, Isfar, Ishraq and Ishram. We sit on the balcony.
MINTO: There I see the London Eye. Behind this building is
Tower Hill and Tower Bridge.
DEITH: Do you like the view?
MINTO: Very nice.
DEITH: What was it like the day your dad came home, Isfar?
ISFAR: We were all excited and then, like, we were getting
ready and making treats for him, because it was almost our Eid celebrations, we made
Shimah and very nice things.
DEITH: And how do you think your dad is now?
ISFAR: Yeah, we can mostly tell that he’s tired, because he
takes more naps than he usually does.
MINTO: I do some work in home with my wife. After ten
minutes I feel tired. This tiredness is too much now.
- 19 -
DEITH: Abdus’ job as a minicab driver probably put him at
more risk of getting Covid than most. He used to make about £600 a week, maybe £800 if he
worked hard, but now he can’t drive and his contract was zero hours - which means zero sick
pay.
MINTO: I cannot pay my rent.
DEITH: What are you going to do?
MINTO: I’m very worried about that situation. My wife is
really tired too. [Crying]
DEITH: She’s tired?
MINTO: What can I do for her?
DEITH: It’s really really tough.
MUSIC
DEITH: Tower Hamlets has offered to help Abdus claim all the
benefits he might be entitled to, and perhaps find a more affordable place to rent. But it
makes you think how many are like him - unable to work and getting no sick pay? The UK
Government told us if people apply for Universal Credit or Personal Independence Payments,
their physical and mental health will be taken into consideration. It said Universal Credit
payments have gone up – part of an extra £9.3 billion that’s gone into welfare during the
pandemic. No wonder Abdus Minto was emotional – he’s worried about being crippled
financially and physically. Everyone seems to agree we need more than a rehab website,
people need to see specialists, from physios to psychologists. Is there the capacity to meet
demand? Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, Lynne Turner-Stokes, says we’re chronically
short of services.
- 20 -
TURNER-STOKES: Rehabilitation has seen surges after each of the sort of
major wars, because there’s an influx of people who are severely injured. And to be honest,
the Covid pandemic is the nearest thing to a war that probably many people have come
across, so we would hope that the Government would invest more in rehabilitation services
and hopefully get them provided ahead of time, so that when we go into the next surge, which
I think is very likely to come, we’re actually in a better position to provide those rehab
services. If you invest all of that time and effort in saving lives, you’ve got to make sure that
those lives are as good as you can possibly make them for the people who are then surviving.
MUSIC
DEITH: In Essex, Alan Mitchell knows the fact he’s here is
down to chance. He’s grateful to be alive. But he also knows his body and his mind are
changed – perhaps forever.
MITCHELL: I’m frustrated. I’m angry to an extent, because I’m in
my fifties, but I feel like I’m in my eighties. This has been a world changing and certainly a
life and body changing event for me that I will never get over.
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