The contradiction at the heart of ministers’ coronavirus response

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’.

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