Insight investigation: How elderly paid price of protecting NHS from Covid-19
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2020
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
While ministers delayed lockdown, soaring cases were putting immense pressure on hospitals. An Insight investigation shows officials devised a brutal ‘triage tool’ to keep the elderly and frail away.
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Guests:
Jonathan Calvert, Sunday Times Insight editor.
George Arbuthnott, Sunday Times Insight deputy editor.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Clips used: BBC, Sky.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In late March, as coronavirus infection figures spiralled, the Prime Minister addressed the nation. |
| 0:11.0 | You must stay at home. In the face of a growing threat to the country's health |
| 0:16.0 | system, the government were looking to ease pressure on the NHS. The great fear was that there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope because there won't be enough ventilators, enough intensive care beds, enough doctors and nurses. |
| 0:33.6 | But how did the system stop intensive care from being overwhelmed? |
| 0:39.4 | An investigation by the Sunday Times Insight team has some startling answers. |
| 0:47.2 | You're listening to stories of our times from the Times and the Sunday Times. |
| 0:52.2 | I'm Manveen Rana. Today, the shocking parameters for COVID care. Robin Austin was a 82 year old, he was fit and healthy, was still working, he was a computer analyst. Jonathan Calvert is the Insight Editor for the Sunday |
| 1:15.9 | Times. And on the day that lockdown started he started to feel a bit ill. By the weekend, March the 30th, he was starting to feel very, very |
| 1:26.6 | feverish and very down. So his daughter Vivian Morrison went over to see him and she called the GP and the GP looked to them and said that he was quite serious |
| 1:36.8 | and he should call an ambulance. |
| 1:38.8 | Now this was the time that COVID was starting to hit across the country, but particularly in the southeast. |
| 1:45.1 | And when the ambulance came, the ambulance was quite reluctant to take him in initially |
| 1:50.0 | because what he could see was that Raymond had a fever and he had possibly sepsis, |
| 1:57.0 | but at the time he didn't necessarily know whether he had coronavirus. |
| 2:01.0 | But in the end he thought that the sepsis was so severe that |
| 2:04.7 | Raymond needed to be taken into hospital. So he was taken into East Surrey Hospital in |
| 2:10.8 | Red Hill and sure enough when he got in there they did a test and his |
| 2:16.7 | symptoms were all being caused by COVID-19. He was put on the warden admitted at 82 and he was there for another week. |
| 2:26.0 | It was a difficult time in the hospitals at the time because there was such a fear of everyone getting an infection. |
| 2:32.0 | People weren't allowed to visit so people were left on |
| 2:34.8 | their own in hospital and families would keep in contact by telephone. On the |
| 2:39.5 | 4th of April his daughter received a telephone call from the hospital to say that Raymond was |
... |
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