Thread by @fascinatorfun

“The British government casts its fight in superlatives: the fastest authorization of vaccines, the speediest rollout of inoculations. But there is another, more macabre marker: a higher per capita death toll than any other large country in the world.”

nytimes.com/interactive/20…

The disease’s impact is visible in shuttered shops.

I see it in my own home town, Cheltenham.

The shops were shutting before Covid “thanks” to Brexit.

But, as with humans, Covid has been the nail in the coffin for many more.

“The worst thing was seeing other ps around me die” said Hayward Sal.

“I heard a lot of people beg every kind of God they could think of to survive”.

It isn’t just the dead who suffered. So did those who survived and their friends and families.

And Ward after Ward has been converted to try and provide more ICU beds but that does not provide more staff, save by reallocating them from other more routine work to Covid care.

Despite all that the ICU wards have still been crammed.

And occupation levels are still very high.

For years, British physicians say, they have sought funds for the National Health Service to expand intensive care facilities, only to be “laughed out” of committee rooms, as one of them put it. And so, their charges cling to life in crammed theaters, many in induced comas.

“The ICU is the last place you want to end up. There’s nothing after ICU other than deaths said Mohammed Malik, 53 years old.

One of his five daughters, pregnant, ended up in a coma in ICU, with her baby being delivered by Caesarian section.

They all survived.

The intensive care unit where Dr. Jain works had to expand from 10 patients to 30, nearly all of them on ventilators. “We are very packed in our particular unit,” she said. “It isn’t quite as bad as M.A.S.H., but that’s what comes to mind.”

The fatalities have been especially high among some ethnic minorities.
“Our workload has increased about 10-fold,” said Idris Patel, the founder and Chief Executive of the Muslim Patel Burial Trust/Supporting Humanity, a charitable group.

“We used to bury two to three a week in summer, four to five in winter. Now it’s six a day.”

“We are burying people a lot younger from 40 to 63”

At its peak in January 1820 people were notified as having died within 28 days of a positive test.

“Somewhere, out there, beyond the immediate palisade, the fighting continues. But it has been overtaken by a yearning for normalcy, once implicit in handshakes and embraces, live music concerts and soccer stadiums packed with roaring fans —“

a shoulder-to-shoulder kind of life, a dream of blinking toward the light after a long sequestration.

“I think I feel quite cynical about it,” Dr. Jain said. “I can’t honestly see a time when we’ll free to roam around, go to cafes, the theater, go to concerts,..

..(to be) be all packed in like sardines on the Tube.”

“You’d have to get the whole world vaccinated to get back to that — and make sure the vaccine is effective.”

Meanwhile 17 year old Skye Sunderland, already sick with cancer and needing 14 rounds of chemotherapy which she struggled to cope with.

On 26th December she contracted Covid and in 5th January she died.

Her parents contracted Covid but survived to endure a terrible loss.

Meanwhile Jack O’Malley that started his own funeral business four years ago, expecting to deal with three burials or cremations a week, had to deal with 9 in two days.

Such is the pressure on crematoriums that someone who died on 1st Feb has to wait to 19 March to be cremated

“In December, Mr. Ahmed, of Al Birr Islamic Trust Funeral Service, said his younger brother, Zia Ahmed, had sickened. When the ambulance did not arrive, he bundled him up himself and drove him to the emergency room.”

“And that’s it,” he said, “from there on they said that he had Covid. So I got myself tested and I was positive, too.”

His wife, Nasim, who had lost her mother and a brother-in-law to Covid, also tested positive. Neither of them was hospitalized.

But it was “very hard,” Mr. Ahmed said. “It breaks you from inside.”

On Friday, Feb. 19, Mr. Ahmed said, the hospital authorities told him that, “if my younger brother survives the weekend, it will be a miracle.” On Sunday, Feb. 21, he learned that his brother had died.”

There had been no miracle.

“Covid,” he said, “has turned everything upside down.”