My night in A&E left me worried about the NHS’s coronavirus response

I wish I shared the Prime Minister’s confidence about the ability of the NHS to cope with coronavirus. ‘I have no doubt that with the help of the NHS and its incomparable staff, this country will get through it – and beat it,’ he said on Sunday. Not if my experience in A&E last week is anything to go by.

I wasn’t keen to visit A&E in the midst of the current crisis, obviously, and had it been my own health I was worried about I would have stayed in bed. But it was Sasha’s, my 16-year-old daughter. She was pushed down some stairs at a party (not deliberately) and one of her fake fingernails got bent back, ripping her actual nail off its nail bed. She was complaining about the pain and it looked infected so I called 111 and asked what to do. Answer: take her to A&E. So off we went to Chelsea and Westminster.

We arrived at about 8.30 p.m. on a Sunday and the waiting area was quite crowded so Sasha and I reconciled ourselves to a long stay. At about 10 p.m. a Chinese-looking man walked in, approached the receptionist and said: ‘I think I’ve got coronavirus.’ He said this quite loudly, so everyone in the room could hear, and I exchanged a nervous glance with a middle-aged woman opposite. ‘What makes you think that?’ asked the sceptical receptionist. ‘Have you been in any of the following countries in the past two weeks?’ He then rattled off a list of ‘hot zones’ and, sure enough, this man had been in one of them two days earlier. He was also suffering from a bad cold, judging from how often he sneezed. The receptionist told him to leave, call 111 and follow the advice.

The man left, having spent no more than five minutes in the waiting area, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.