BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4

TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “COVID 19: THE LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY”

CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP

TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 8th

September 2020 2000 - 2040

REPEAT: Sunday 13th

September 2020 1700 - 1740

REPORTER: Jane Deith

PRODUCER: Helen Clifton

EDITOR: Carl Johnston

PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6328LH0

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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT

COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING

AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL

SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

“FILE ON 4”

Transmission: Tuesday 8th

September 2020

Repeat: Sunday 13th

September 2020

Producer: Helen Clifton

Reporter: Jane Deith

Editor: Carl Johnston

MUSIC

DEITH: In the past six months, more than three million people

in the UK have caught coronavirus. More than 130,000 were so ill they had to go into

hospital. The lucky ones survived. Now though, they’re feeling the physical and mental

after-effects.

MITCHELL: I can remember lying in my bed and I was weeping and

saying, I’m worried that you’re mending my body, but by the time I get out of here, I won’t

be the same person.

DEITH: But are they out of danger? People have seemingly

recovered and then suffered fatal side effects like stroke.

PATHAK: One of the doctors had actually said to us that it was

sort of looking more like 95% that he’d be able to come home, but then on the Friday he

passed away.

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DEITH: Doctors fear we don’t yet know what this virus is

capable of. So who’s looking out for Covid sufferers who didn’t go to hospital - those told to

stay at home? Tonight we speak to people struggling to get well, who say they’ve been

forgotten by the NHS.

GARNER: I think people need to be believed. The proof is in the

symptoms.

DEITH: And we hear concerns that there aren’t enough rehab

services to help those hit by the first wave of coronavirus, let alone a second one.

TURNER-STOKES: We would hope that the Government would invest

more in rehabilitation services. If you invest all of that time and effort in saving lives, you’ve

got to make sure that those lives are as good as you can possibly make them for the people

who are then surviving.

MUSIC – ALAN MITCHELL SINGING ‘BREATHE’

DEITH: Music is Alan Mitchell’s therapy, while he recovers

from coronavirus. He was a police officer in the Met, now retired in Essex, six feet four with

a shock of white hair on top. Four months ago, he was attached to a ventilator in hospital and

- to put it bluntly – he was expected to die. So he’s grateful to be alive; he’s still got a

twinkle in his eye, but his body is stubbornly weak.

MITCHELL: I’m still left with an awful lot of tiredness and

occasional severe breathlessness. I’ll get up to do some washing or do some vacuuming or

something and suddenly I’ll just, well, not even be halfway through and I’ll have to stop

because a sudden wave of tiredness and breathlessness, and I tend to be sleeping 12 to 14

hours a day at the moment. I just can’t keep my eyes open.

DEITH: Could you go for a walk? Could you go for a bike

ride?

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MITCHELL: No, I couldn’t do any of that. I could probably walk to

the end of our close and back, but I couldn’t walk any farther than that because I know I

wouldn’t be able to get back.

DEITH: Unable to do much other than sit, it’s hard not to dwell

on how sick he was. What Alan experienced on the day he was rushed to intensive care is

burned into his memory.

MITCHELL: I was sitting in the chair in the lounge and an absolute

need to get on the floor came over me. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t really

see, and they whisked me off into hospital. Early evening, a consultant came in very, very

grim faced, and he said, ‘Look, you need to phone home because we need to put you on a

ventilator, and I have to tell you that you’ve got a 10% chance of surviving the next few

days.’ I was absolutely shocked to my core, and they were saying, you know, ‘Make the

phone call,’ and I couldn’t talk, I could not say what I wanted to say. I think I croaked out a,

‘I love you guys,’ and then cut the connection. That just haunted me.

DEITH: Is it still haunting you?

MITCHELL: It does, because what I remember is someone jumping

on my chest with a plastic bag, a clear plastic bag. putting it over my face and I couldn’t

breathe. I couldn’t do anything. Now, what I understand they did is that they started to inject

me with things to paralyse me.

DEITH: It saved his life. After six days on the ventilator,

doctors could see Alan was trying to breathe for himself. He was going to make it. But the

world he woke up in was terrifying.

MITCHELL: It’s like Liverpool Street Station at eight o’clock in the

morning. You’ve got dozens of people wandering around, you’ve got machines beeping

normally and then you’ve got alarms going off, and we were fairly crowded in. I had to get

out of that place, the ITU was fracturing my mind. I was weeping and saying, I’m worried

that you’re mending my body, but by the time I get out of here I won’t be the same person.

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DEITH: Alan begged to be moved out of intensive care. The

team decided he could be cared for on a different ward. There, a nurse lent him a phone

charger and he was able to call home. He was desperate to talk to his family - Ed and Laura,

his children, and his wife, Lisa. He wasn’t prepared for what she told him.

MITCHELL: She sort of said, ‘Look, I don’t know how to tell you

this, but while you’ve been sleeping, Ed’s really not well and I think he’s going to be coming

in.’ And within an hour or two, he was in a bed opposite me on the high dependency unit.

DEITH: Alan’s looking at his son, who’s only in his twenties,

and now in real danger of being moved into intensive care. The doctors are giving him

massive amounts of oxygen, hoping to avoid having to ventilate him. Ed has an autistic

spectrum condition and he’s finding the hospital surroundings really frightening.

ED MITCHELL: I listened to a man’s last conversation with his family.

You know, he got brought in off of ITU because he just said, ‘Just let me die,’ you know?

And so I heard him have his last conversation with his family, and I will never go through a

day not reliving hearing that conversation.

DEITH: Do you think you might have PTSD?

MITCHELL: I think the whole family has. I do have flashbacks

during the day where I suddenly have, you know, a waking dream almost. It’s those eyes and

that feeling of not being able to breathe.

MUSIC

DEITH: Dr Colette Coyle is a critical care consultant at the

Royal London Hospital. She follows up with patients who survive, a few months on. She

worries what mark the Covid conditions have left on people.

COYLE: This was an extraordinary time for a patient to be in

hospital, so we were looking after more patients in a bay area than we normally would have

in order to increase our capacity. The added stress for them of not being able to see their

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COYLE cont: family at a time when you’re really frightened for your

life and not being able to see your family and friends, I think must be absolutely terrifying.

They weren’t seeing the faces of the people that were looking after them, you know,

everyone was behind a mask and, you know, seeing patients who may have been there one

day and not the next because they’ve passed away, and I think they will suffer a lot of kind of

long term anxieties and PTSD in relation to that.

DEITH: Are you more worried about people’s psychological

state than almost their physical recovery?

COYLE: I think the psychological impact of this will be huge on

them, and I think in a way that’s almost harder to deal with - physical problems can be treated

with therapies and medications, but getting access to the right kind of psychological therapy

can be a lot harder.

ACTUALITY IN CAR

DEITH: Covid 19 has caused so much heartbreak in such a

short time. Six months ago, doctors faced with this new virus thought it was a respiratory

disease that attacked the lungs. Now we know it can affect almost every other major organ

too – from the heart to the brain – and it’s too soon to know if the damage is temporary or

permanent. I’m heading to Lincolnshire, where 65 year old Rudresh Pathak spent 70 days on

a ventilator in the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, where he worked as a consultant psychiatrist.

Miraculously, in June he made it out of intensive care and was applauded by his colleagues.

ACTUALITY OF APPLAUSE

DEITH: Rudresh’s son, Anish, could start thinking about

getting the house ready for his dad to come home.

PATHAK: I had been guarding myself against too much optimism

throughout the time, his time on the ventilator because of how up and down it was, and so

they were engaging in physio to help build up the strength to take him off the ventilator, and

they then succeeded in doing that. One of the doctors had actually said to us that it was sort

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PATHAK cont: of looking more like 95% that he’d be able to come

home and everything just seemed, you know, like it was heading in the right direction.

DEITH: Rudresh continued with his rehab on a respiratory ward

– the plan was to leave hospital in about ten days.

PATHAK: He complained of some chest pains. They were

worried he’d had some sort of a heart issue, possibly a heart attack, and there’s quite a large

cardiac unit at Lincoln Hospital. We don’t know when exactly it happened, if it was in, you

know, the transport or if it was when he arrived there, something went wrong and he lost

consciousness. They established relatively early on that he hadn’t actually had a heart attack,

but then they weren’t sure what it was, whether it was a stroke or not, or whether he was

having some seizures.

DEITH: But it was confirmed that it was a stroke that he had

suffered?

PATHAK: Yes, yeah, yeah. So the care continued for another

four days after that, but then on the Friday he passed away.

DEITH: Do you feel that the stroke was an effect of the Covid

virus that he had?

PATHAK: I mean, the doctors have told us that, yeah. It’s the fact

he was in the ICU for so long, it takes its toll on the body, and my dad was 65 and relatively

healthy.

DEITH: Sitting across from Anish, I have a view of the garden.

Beneath a cedar tree there’s a floral tribute saying ‘Dad’. On the day of his funeral,

Dr Pathak’s friends applauded him again.

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PATHAK: We followed, you know, the hearse around the hospital

grounds and, you know, so many people had come out to clap for my dad. It was really,

really moving. And, you know, obviously nothing really makes you feel that much better,

but it really shows how much he meant to people.

MUSIC

DEITH: Rudresh Pathak’s cause of death was listed as stroke,

Covid with multi-organ involvement and diabetes – that is a risk factor for stroke. But

Dr Pathak was 65. Most people who suffer strokes are older - in their mid-seventies. It’s

thought coronavirus – or the immune system’s response - might be causing an increase in

blood clotting or inflammation in the brain. We still don’t really know what Covid 19 is

capable of. With the risk of fatal side effects, for survivors the stakes are high.

ACTUALITY OF BEEPING MACHINES

DEITH: Rudresh Pathak had only just begun the rehab he hoped

was the beginning of his recovery. Across the country, tens of thousands of people have

needed intensive rehabilitation simply to stand up again and walk before they could leave

hospital. But they need support after they’ve been discharged too.

PHYSIO: … too short of breath or too fatigued, slowly and

progressively warm you up ….

DEITH: In a room at the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, former

Covid patients are guided through a rehab session by nurses and physiotherapists wearing

masks, ready to help if using the treadmills, bikes and weights feels too much.

PATIENT 1: It’s terrifying, and it’s the feeling of being out of

control, and the more you panic obviously the more breathless as well you get, and you’re

scared to build the stamina and challenge your body because of that awful experience of the

breathlessness.

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DEITH: Most people here have never been seriously ill before.

Normally those with chronic lung problems have time to get used to their condition. Covid

comes out of the blue; people who were fit are suddenly frail. Professor Sally Singh is Head

of Pulmonary and Cardiac Rehabilitation for Leicester’s hospitals.

SINGH: When they come out of ITU, they may find it really

difficult to get up and down stairs, and being breathless and anxious are both scary symptoms

really, so you naturally avoid doing any activity because it makes you more breathless. But

as a consequence of not doing anything, people get less and less fit and more deconditioned,

so it’s really important to help people on that road to recovery.

DEITH: The Leicester patients have in a sense got a golden

ticket – because they were admitted to hospital, they’re firmly on the medical radar for

follow-ups, face to face rehabilitation and monitoring. But there were hundreds of thousands

of people with Covid who weren’t admitted to hospital, although they probably would have

been if we hadn’t been in the middle of a pandemic. Instead they were told to stay at home.

They say they’re struggling with the vicious after-effects of the virus too, but without the

same access to rehabilitation.

MACDONALD: Hi, my name’s Elly MacDonald, I’m 37 years old. I

live in Surbiton, just outside London, and unfortunately I’m now almost at five months of

being ill with Covid.

DEITH: Elly was really fit. She was a rower and she was

training for the London Marathon before she believes she caught coronavirus. 23 weeks on,

she says trying to do any exercise or work leaves her panting for breath.

MACDONALD: I had eight or nine of the typical coronavirus

symptoms. They were very mild and they only lasted about 16 hours. But then a few days

after that, I started getting very short of breath and a few days after that, I started coughing up

mucus from my lungs.

DEITH: When you started to feel really ill, what did you think

you should do? Did you think you should ring 111, go to the doctor, go to hospital?

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MACDONALD: I spoke to a number of different GPs, but nobody really

was able to help me at all. Everybody was just telling me to just stay at home, just keep

hydrated, keep resting and just telling me that it should go very soon. I did call 111 actually

at one point when it got very bad. They told me that I would be told to go home if I went into

hospital.

DEITH: I mean, did that seem reasonable to you?

MACDONALD: No, it didn’t seem reasonable to me, but, I mean, I

didn’t feel like I had many other options. I went to bed that night hoping that I would wake

up the following morning - and I did luckily - but I felt that it was a bit touch and go.

DEITH: Did you go back to the doctor, you know, as this

became weeks and, well, months now, isn’t it?

MACDONALD: I did, yeah. So I actually at week 11 I actually

discovered a few recovery support groups and started actually finding out some useful

information. So, for example, I’d just discovered that I needed to be thinning my blood, so I

immediately started thinning my blood, but I spoke to my GP at the same time just to check

that I wasn’t going to be harming myself in any way. She told me that I shouldn’t bother. At

this point, there were lots and lots of reports in the press about people dying of blood clots,

and actually at that point I changed GP surgeries. Since then, I’ve been receiving really very

good care, so that the surgery I’m with currently, they’ve been excellent, which has helped

not just physically, but that’s actually helped very much mentally as well. Just knowing that I

actually have people who are taking me seriously and proactively trying to help me.

DEITH: Elly had a Covid test, which was negative. But that

was two months after she’s convinced she had the virus. Professor Paul Garner, an expert in

infectious diseases at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, says test or no test, people

need to be taken seriously.

GARNER: I think people need to be believed. I think the proof is

in the symptoms. The tests are in a sense getting in the way of people receiving good care.

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DEITH: Professor Garner did have a positive antibody test after

experiencing debilitating symptoms of coronavirus for four months.

GARNER: I actually thought I was actually dying at the time, it

was awful sensation, absolutely awful, with a thumping heart rate and terrible fatigue. Round

about day 80 or 90, the night sweats, the terrific drenching night sweats started becoming

less, but I still wake up feeling absolutely worn out, as though I’ve run a marathon the day

before, and the way to understand what the disease is about is to listen to people that have got

it and believe them in the first instance, because it does give a whole variety of very different

and very bizarre complaints.

DEITH: How do we make sure that the people that get that

personalised support are the right ones, because there’s a risk that the people offering that

help could be deluged by people who perhaps are imagining that they’ve had Covid?

GARDNER: So, this fantasy about imagining Covid has entered the

narrative somewhere and it certainly is not coming from people that have got Covid, because

you know when you’ve had Covid. People had symptoms of the disease that were then being

diagnosed as anxiety. Some people have problems with their heart rates going haywire,

going very fast and then going, sometimes going slow, but they have these palpitations and

they were seeing doctors and hospitals that were diagnosing this as anxiety.

MUSIC

DEITH: The Government abandoned routine testing in March,

so the majority of people can’t prove they’ve had Covid. But millions have been logging

their symptoms after downloading this app designed by a team at Kings College, London. It

asks you about 19 symptoms and whether you’ve been tested for the virus or antibodies to it,

and that data’s then extrapolated to the other users who missed out on tests. And the man

behind the app, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology Tim Spector, has given us the very latest

numbers.

SPECTOR: Most estimates are that around 3 million people in the

UK at least have had symptomatic Covid, and our analysis of our app users’ symptoms shows

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SPECTOR cont: that roughly 10% of infected people have long Covid,

which is to say they’ve had symptoms for more than 30 days, so that adds up to 300,000

people who are ill for longer than a month. And 1% to 2% of affected people are still unwell

for three months or more. That’s 30,000 to 60,000 people with so-called chronic Covid, and

many of these people were missed in the official figures, they were simply told they didn’t

have Covid because they didn’t meet the rather rigid criteria at the time. If you just had

fatigue and loss of smell, even for months or more, you were dismissed by most medical

authorities in the first few months of the epidemic.

DEITH: Are you frustrated that, given the amount of work

you’ve put in and the public has put into this app, that the data has not been more widely

mined?

SPECTOR: Yes, I think it is the answer to that. I think it is time to

start not just talking on the news every day about, you know, the numbers of deaths, number

of hospital admissions, but if we had a ticker on there, on the news feeds to say that around

30,000 to 60,000 people in the country have had symptoms for over three months now, that

would get more notice, and there’s a big danger that these people might up end up otherwise

being forgotten.

DEITH: Tim Spector plans to analyse his data to see if it holds

the clue as to why some people suffer for month after month and others don’t. A cross-party

group of MPs leading the UK’s Coronavirus Inquiry has recently called long Covid sufferers

this pandemic’s ‘forgotten victims’ and says those who haven’t been hospitalised need more

support. Some of the home sufferers we’ve been in touch with said their doctors weren’t

exactly helpful. Professor Martin Marshall is chair of the Royal College of GPs.

MARSHALL: I think the vast majority of GPs will do what we’re

supposed to do, which is take all symptoms seriously. There are exceptions, I accept that, but

I think for the vast majority of patients, they are receiving very good care from their General

Practitioners - sometimes in difficult circumstances, it must be said, because we’re seeing a

growing number of not just post-Covid conditions, but all the conditions that weren’t being

presented to general practice because of the acute crisis are now being presented now.

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DEITH: Do you fear being overwhelmed? I mean, you started

with a trickle. Do you think it will become a flood?

MARSHALL: That is a potential risk. Over 50% of GPs expect post-

Covid and long Covid to be a significant element of their workload over the next few months.

As I said, I don’t know whether long Covid will turn out to be a similar condition to Chronic

Fatigue Syndrome, but if it does then I think we can expect a similar small proportion of

patients with long term disability and that would be dreadful. So we really do need to see a

growing number of post-Covid clinics being established in the same way as I guess before

this Covid crisis we had post viral, ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome type clinics.

ACTUALITY FROM WEBSITE

WOMAN’S VOICE: Your Covid Recovery is a new website designed to

help you recover from the long-term effects of coronavirus.

DEITH: The NHS says many people can go online and work

out their own digital recovery.

WOMAN’S VOICE: If you’re recovering from Covid 19 and are still living

with the impact, this site should be helpful for you to get back to normal.

DEITH: In the four weeks since it launched, 65,000 people have

visited this site. There are pages here on what they can do to help themselves, like eating and

sleeping well and starting exercise again – and it says here people should aim for a daily

walk. But Lynne Turner-Stokes, a consultant at Northwick Park Hospital in London and

Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, worries encouraging this kind of DIY rehab is risky.

TURNER-STOKES: I think the one concern that many of us have in

rehabilitation is that we can’t expect that we just sort of put up a few internet services and

then people will get better by themselves - we have to do much more than that. For one

thing, for people who have never been to hospital, nobody’s looked properly at their lungs,

their hearts and so on, but it’s not safe simply just to say, ‘Go out and do this amount of

exercise,’ without knowing that they have properly been investigated and that it’s safe for

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TURNER-STOKES: them to do that. It would be very useful, I think, if we

had more one-stop services that people could go to hospital and have the various things that

they need to have, and right at this moment, we’re very short of those services.

MUSIC

DEITH: The idea of one-stop clinics – open to anyone who’s

had Covid - has been mentioned more than once. As well as the scheme in Leicester, a

handful of dedicated post-Covid services have got off the ground. A temporary rehab hospital

has opened in Surrey, there’s a clinic in Newcastle, home visits are available in South

Warwickshire and there’s a 6 week exercise class in Buckinghamshire. But some of these are

specifically for Covid patients discharged from hospital. People who suffered at home

probably won’t be first on the list. And it seems like this group was almost overlooked when

NHS England began thinking about online aftercare. Leicester rehab consultant, Professor

Sally Singh, helped develop the Your Covid Recovery website.

SINGH: The focus originally was on people that had been

admitted to hospital, particularly those that had had a stay on ICU, but of course, we’re now

becoming increasingly aware that people that have had Covid managed in the community,

that their symptoms are as prolonged and equivalent - if not more so - than people that have

had a hospital stay. So the site isn’t a standalone digital application; it actually allows

interaction with healthcare professionals and ongoing support.

DEITH: Some rehabilitation experts, while they can see a lot of

good thought has gone into the website, they are concerned that it takes a ‘one size fits all’

approach, and essentially says to people, you can get better by yourself. And they feel that

particularly around exercise, that really we should be saying to people, ‘You need to see your

doctor before doing anything in terms of exercise,’ and there’s no mention of that on the

website.

SINGH: To get access to the site, you will see a healthcare

professional, so this really isn’t a one size fits all. So there’s enormous wealth of knowledge

and expertise that we’ve pulled together to make this site as good as we can. So patients have

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SINGH cont: choice, so they can choose the option that will best suit

them and their lifestyle and how much support they perceive that they really need.

DEITH: And what do you make of this idea, one-stop Covid

follow-up clinics sited in hospitals, but open to everyone?

SINGH: I think there’s some merit in that, in that you have a lot

of expertise that can coalesce in a clinic. And secondly, there’s the opportunity to collect

data in a systematic way, so that we can begin to understand the profile of recovery and

potential interventions that may work for patients post-Covid.

DEITH: On data, I mean, are we properly collecting data on

people and their symptoms and their needs in terms of rehabilitation?

SINGH: Yes, we are. There’s a large study that’s been

coordinated out of Leicester that is doing exactly that. This is particularly focused on

hospitalised patients and not currently community patients.

MUSIC

DEITH: The study Sally Singh mentions will track the long

term physical and mental impact of Covid 19 by following ten thousand people discharged

from hospital across the UK – but not those who fought off the virus at home. Yet doctors

stress there’s not necessarily a correlation between how ill you are with coronavirus and

whether you suffer long-term effects. Some people are rushed to hospital, but recover

relatively quickly; others get a mild dose of the virus and only later develop frightening

symptoms, which go on for months. We wanted to know what’s out there for them. We

asked all 212 Clinical Commissioning Groups and health boards in the UK what services they

have for long Covid sufferers who weren’t hospitalised. 86 replied – but just ten said they

ran services for people who didn’t receive acute care. Another sixteen areas said they were

planning support or were adapting existing rehab facilities. It’s possible other areas might be

helping people via general rehab services, and the UK Government and NHS England told us

they are expanding aftercare and tailored treatment for all patients who need it, including new

and strengthened rehab centres and community services in every part of the country.

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DEITH cont: The Welsh Government says it will help people early

in their recovery, but Wales already has community and specialist rehabilitation programmes

and it’s not clear yet there’s a need for separate Covid rehabilitation. The Department of

Health in Northern Ireland says a clinical working group is assessing the needs of Covid 19

patients who’ve left hospital to highlight future work. The Scottish Government told us it has

its own digital healthcare service for people with Covid who are not sick enough to be in

hospital, and it says it will give everyone ongoing help with high quality rehab in different

settings.

MUSIC

DEITH: Across the UK, hospitals are readying themselves in

case coronavirus returns with a vengeance this winter. But we’re still only beginning to

understand the physical and mental impact on those who survived the first wave.

ACTUALITY AT WHITECHAPEL MARKET

DEITH: This is Whitechapel Market in Tower Hamlets. Covid

19 has hit more than a thousand people here. The Royal London Hospital is just behind us.

ACTUALITY OF TEMPERATURE CHECKS, MASKS, ETC

WOMAN: … pop your mask on …

DEITH: This is where Dr Colette Coyle works – the consultant

you heard earlier in the programme, talking about the trauma of the Covid ward.

COYLE: So this floor was turned into a temporary intensive care

unit during the pandemic ….

DEITH: Five months ago, this floor of the hospital was given

over to desperately ill Covid patients - among them Abdus Minto, a minicab driver, married

to Rumana Sultana, with three young sons. He was on a ventilator more than once, close to

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DEITH cont: death, for six weeks. When he woke up and was taken

off the machine, he knew the battle wasn’t over. It was only just beginning.

ARCHIVE RECORDING OF INTERVIEW

MAN: Can you tell us how you’re feeling?

MINTO: Not good.

MAN: Not good at all?

MINTO: Oh my God. Oh my God. Too much painful. Too

much painful.

COYLE: I remember him vividly coming into A&E, you know,

incredibly breathless and just knowing that, you know, straightaway we were going to have to

put him onto a ventilator. He was probably one of our sickest patients during the pandemic.

We weren’t sure that he would survive.

DEITH: But Abdus beat the odds. He went home at the end of

May. He’s on Dr Coyle’s list for a follow-up consultation. Covid precautions mean it has to

be a virtual clinic.

ACTUALITY OF CONSULTATION

COYLE: Hi, it’s Dr Coyle, is that Mr Minto?

MINTO: Yes, it is.

COYLE: Hello there. It’s very nice to hear your voice and be

able to hear you at home with your children, having looked after you for so long.

MINTO: I’m so happy and grateful, very.

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COYLE: How are you?

MINTO: When I walk too much, I feel so tired.

COYLE: I’m sure you do, yes.

MINTO: My left leg is still not good.

COYLE: What I will suggest to your GP is that it might be

worth you getting seen by someone called the pain team, because we’ve had this pain for

several months now, but also it sounds like you might still need a little bit of input from the

physiotherapist.

DEITH: Listening to Abdus’ hour-long consultation, you realise

just how many rehab specialists have been involved. Hospital physios, speech and language

therapists, a dietician, and he still needs the pain team and more physio.

COYLE: So it’s a long road to recovery after being through

something like that. The vast majority of patients have some form of chronic problem, but

how long that’s going to last and whether that’s going to be permanent, it’s just too early to

tell at the moment, I think.

DEITH: From what he’s told you today, what are the things that

you’re most worried about in terms of his moving forward?

COYLE: I mean, the thing that worries me most and with our

patient population in general here in East London is that a lot of these patients are on very

kind of temporary or zero hours contracts with the work that they were doing, and it’s hard

for him to know when he’s going to be able to do that, given he’s still got some ongoing

health problems. I imagine that there’ll be a lot of patients in a similar situation to him and

really worrying about their financial futures. They’re unable to support their families

financially now.

- 18 -

DEITH: For many people who’ve had coronavirus, anxieties

about their health are compounded by money worries.

ACTUALITY IN MINTO HOME

SULTANA: What do you want?

ISHRAM: I want ice cream.

SULTANA: I want ice cream, okay …

DEITH: I went to see Abdus Minto at home, with his wife and

his three smiling boys, Isfar, Ishraq and Ishram. We sit on the balcony.

MINTO: There I see the London Eye. Behind this building is

Tower Hill and Tower Bridge.

DEITH: Do you like the view?

MINTO: Very nice.

DEITH: What was it like the day your dad came home, Isfar?

ISFAR: We were all excited and then, like, we were getting

ready and making treats for him, because it was almost our Eid celebrations, we made

Shimah and very nice things.

DEITH: And how do you think your dad is now?

ISFAR: Yeah, we can mostly tell that he’s tired, because he

takes more naps than he usually does.

MINTO: I do some work in home with my wife. After ten

minutes I feel tired. This tiredness is too much now.

- 19 -

DEITH: Abdus’ job as a minicab driver probably put him at

more risk of getting Covid than most. He used to make about £600 a week, maybe £800 if he

worked hard, but now he can’t drive and his contract was zero hours - which means zero sick

pay.

MINTO: I cannot pay my rent.

DEITH: What are you going to do?

MINTO: I’m very worried about that situation. My wife is

really tired too. [Crying]

DEITH: She’s tired?

MINTO: What can I do for her?

DEITH: It’s really really tough.

MUSIC

DEITH: Tower Hamlets has offered to help Abdus claim all the

benefits he might be entitled to, and perhaps find a more affordable place to rent. But it

makes you think how many are like him - unable to work and getting no sick pay? The UK

Government told us if people apply for Universal Credit or Personal Independence Payments,

their physical and mental health will be taken into consideration. It said Universal Credit

payments have gone up – part of an extra £9.3 billion that’s gone into welfare during the

pandemic. No wonder Abdus Minto was emotional – he’s worried about being crippled

financially and physically. Everyone seems to agree we need more than a rehab website,

people need to see specialists, from physios to psychologists. Is there the capacity to meet

demand? Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, Lynne Turner-Stokes, says we’re chronically

short of services.

- 20 -

TURNER-STOKES: Rehabilitation has seen surges after each of the sort of

major wars, because there’s an influx of people who are severely injured. And to be honest,

the Covid pandemic is the nearest thing to a war that probably many people have come

across, so we would hope that the Government would invest more in rehabilitation services

and hopefully get them provided ahead of time, so that when we go into the next surge, which

I think is very likely to come, we’re actually in a better position to provide those rehab

services. If you invest all of that time and effort in saving lives, you’ve got to make sure that

those lives are as good as you can possibly make them for the people who are then surviving.

MUSIC

DEITH: In Essex, Alan Mitchell knows the fact he’s here is

down to chance. He’s grateful to be alive. But he also knows his body and his mind are

changed – perhaps forever.

MITCHELL: I’m frustrated. I’m angry to an extent, because I’m in

my fifties, but I feel like I’m in my eighties. This has been a world changing and certainly a

life and body changing event for me that I will never get over.