‘What the hell went wrong?’: bereaved hope for answers as UK Covid inquiry begins

When the UK Covid-19 public inquiry begins in earnest on Tuesday, it will be three years and two months since Jean Adamson watched through a window as her father Aldrick sang a hymn as he succumbed to the virus in his Essex care home. It was Easter Sunday 2020.

Locked out, supposedly to prevent infection, and blocked from holding Aldrick, a 93-year-old who had arrived in Britain from Barbados as part of the 1950s Windrush generation, Jean thought the song was him “wanting to say, I’m on my way”.

The next day, as the first wave peaked, Aldrick was one of 1,232 people who died with Covid in the UK. Now, as at least three years of evidence-gathering begins, the death toll stands at more than 227,000.

In the coming six weeks current and former UK cabinet ministers including Matt Hancock, Jeremy Hunt, George Osborne and the former prime minister David Cameron will swear to tell the truth from the witness box as the inquiry asks: was Britain properly prepared and if not, why not?

The people who most want answers are the bereaved.

Adamson recalled the “chaos and confusion” when the virus got into her father’s care home.

“They weren’t getting any of the testing at the time – the tests were being diverted to the NHS or PPE supplies,” said Adamson, a nurse, NHS manager and adviser on regulation. The problem seemed structural.

The manager told her: “You know Jane, we’re very much the poor relation [to the NHS].”

The care home struggled for staff as people were discharged into it from hospital and more agency workers were used.

“They were ill-prepared,” she said. “The infection control practices were inadequate.”

The pandemic “really sharpened the focus” on how social care had been treated less well by the government for years, she said. By the end of 2020, 15 residents at Aldrick’s home were dead from Covid.

[ UK’s Covid-19 inquiry begins in west London ]

Like Adamson, many of the bereaved have a dual perspective on the UK’s preparedness as they also work in health and social care. Several wanted to give evidence but have not been summoned, so they must watch on.

For Dr Saleyha Ahsan – who worked in intensive care during the pandemic and lost her 81-year-old father, Ahsan-ul-Haq Chaudry, to the virus – a key witness is Hunt, now chancellor.

His decision as health secretary to impose a new contract on junior doctors in 2016 dealt a “devastating blow to the morale and to the workforce”, she said.

“The contract has made life that much harder for doctors,” she said. “Even before the pandemic started, you had a workforce that was already demoralised, already exhausted. The impact that has had on recruitment and retention is devastating. Someone needs to join the dots on that.”

The inquiry is freighted with emotion for many. Bereavement for Ahsan has been “different, because it’s been really associated with the search for the truth of what the hell went wrong”. News stories about the inquiry are “re-triggering” and she says that every time she hears the latest twist in the dispute over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages “I’m back in the room with my dad” as he died.

She wanted to testify on the UK’s preparedness based on her pre-pandemic experience in the army medical corps and as an NHS doctor, but has not been called. PPE training for nuclear, chemical and biological attacks was routine in the army but there was nothing similar in the NHS for a pandemic or epidemic. Neither were medics aware of the findings of government pandemic planning exercises. The NHS was “wholly unprepared”, she said.

“We’d had bird flu and we’d had Ebola,” she said. “Surely someone somewhere should have sat there and thought: ‘this is inching closer, we’ve now got to get this into our training,’ but no one did.”

Stuart Tuckwood, a former nurse who went back to help in intensive care in a major hospital in southern England when the pandemic hit, will also follow the inquiry closely. Those months struggling with the sickest patients are an “extremely traumatising time to look back on”, he said.

“I remember one long night in intensive care when I was working with support from the military in a room with three or four extremely sick people with only myself, a volunteer doctor who hadn’t worked in a hospital for a long time, a nurse who had recently arrived from another country who was only just getting used to the NHS and a children’s nurse who had been redeployed,” he said.

“All these issues were there in the run-up to Covid,” he said. “It wasn’t a surprise that we were in such a terrible situation. We had problems with staffing levels and burnout and losing people for years in the run-up to Covid and the government just wasn’t listening.”

[ UK ill-prepared for pandemic, Covid-19 inquiry hears ]

Tuckwood, who now works for the Unison trade union, described “taping up the gowns to the gloves, putting on masks, visors, goggles, doing our best to protect ourselves”. They didn’t want to waste potentially scarce PPE by continually changing it so “we were dehydrating ourselves … to try and get through as long as we could”.

Martina Ferguson will be flying over from Northern Ireland to be in the inquiry room on Tuesday. Twice daily, for eight years, she visited her mother, Ursula Derry, in a Portadown care home. Then came the “unimaginable heartbreak” of lockdown. Continuing the visits at her window was “traumatic”.

“Emotions were deeply disturbed,” she said.

Aghast at the injustice of separation she quickly started lobbying politicians, Northern Ireland’s human rights commissioner and even Johnson, but to no avail.

“Why did we get this wrong, so badly wrong?” she said. “I think there have been lots of failures. Why did we not lock down the borders sooner? What about the track and trace – we spent a huge amount of money and that didn’t work. I think there are failures around the public purse.

“I am representing my mummy every step of the way in this public inquiry and I want to find out: was my mummy treated fairly?” she said. “I don’t believe she was.”