LONDON (AP) – When the UK surpassed 100,000 dead coronaviruses this week, it was much more than just a number for Justin Fleming.
Lying in a hospital bed with COVID-19, he knew how easily he could have become one of them, had it not been for the doctors and other staff who worked to save his life.
“I didn’t think I could see my partner again, my mother – be a dead friend, be just a statistic,” said Fleming, 47, who was rushed to King’s College Hospital in mid-January with difficulty breathing. Her condition improved after two weeks of receiving oxygen in an intensive care ward.
The scale of the coronavirus outbreak in Britain can seem overwhelming, with tens of thousands of new infections and more than 1,000 deaths added each day. But in the hospitals’ COVID-19 wards, the pandemic seems epic and intimate, as the team fights the virus one patient at a time, with no end in sight.
Fleming says he was surprised by the diversity of the “incredible” team – including newly qualified doctors, a newly arrived nurse from the Philippines and staff recruited from dental wards and brain injury teams – who eased his isolation and saved him from joining the hospital. list of the dead.
“Because you have to be isolated (with COVID-19), you feel like you just disappeared,” he said. “It’s almost like you can become a non-person in a week.”
Fleming is one of more than 37,000 coronavirus patients being treated in hospitals in Britain, almost double the number of the spring outbreak. King’s College Hospital, located in a diverse and densely populated area of South London, had nearly 800 patients with COVID-19 earlier this winter. A new national blockade saw the number drop to a still challenging 630.
Intensive care consultant Dr. Jenny Townsend works in a 16-bed intensive care ward that currently has 30 patients, with two beds squeezed into each stall designed for one. In normal times, an intensive nurse takes care of a patient. The ratio is now one to four.
“We all feel overwhelmed and we all strive to help each other in each of the required roles,” said Townsend.
“We are doing the best we can and in very difficult circumstances. We try to deliver as close as we normally do, but occasionally, due to the number of patients, we have to prioritize what we can and cannot do, ”she said.
This is especially difficult because treating the coronavirus is laborious. It takes a lot of people and skills to treat each seriously ill patient.
A recent day in the infirmary, Townsend supervised a tracheostomy, inserting a small tube into a patient’s trachea to help him breathe without a ventilator – a small step towards possible recovery. At the end of the corridor, the family liaison officer, Berenice Page, was making a video call to relatives by a patient’s bed. More than half a dozen employees worked to “tilt” another patient, carefully turning him face down to help him breathe more easily.
Like others, this hospital had to adapt quickly when COVID-19 was first launched in early 2020, finding space for more patients and relocating medical staff to work in unusual roles. The wards were converted, employees were recruited from other departments for COVID’s new wards and expanded intensive care units.
Then, after a summer truce, when cases plummeted, the hospital had to do it all over again when the virus came back in full force in the fall. Many employees find the fight more difficult the second time around.
“In the first wave, people’s energy levels were better because we were dealing with the unknown and we learned as we went along,” said Felicia Kwaku, associate director of nursing at the hospital. “This second wave is worse, because the patients are much sicker, the numbers are higher, the wave seems to be longer.”
Coronavirus patient Fleming, having seen the pandemic up close, says overworked British doctors “need credit now – and help and support”.
“This is a significant historic moment and they protected the country,” he said.
While the number of patients admitted to London hospitals with COVID-19 is gradually decreasing, pressure on doctors will only slowly decrease because of the time lag between infections, hospitalizations and – for the most ill patients – transfers to intensive care.
That means constant challenges for the team, like the liaison officer with the Page family. Every day, she calls patients’ relatives to update them on their conditions, then takes a tablet across the ward so that family members, prevented from visiting them, can at least see their loved ones unconscious.
“I think it’s a real privilege to be able to talk to them,” said Page, whose usual job is as a resuscitation coordinator.
“You have a glimpse into the patient’s life when you are making video calls and see (relatives) sitting in their homes and some of them have young children. And yes, I feel your despair. But I also know the difference it makes, ”she said.
“We often talk to people whose relatives are going to die. It is a very difficult situation. (…) I think when they talk to us. I can say that they find some, there is a little peace for them, ”he added.
Kwaku said the pace of hospitalization for patients remains “relentless” and begged Britons tired of isolation to continue to follow the rules of social detachment.
She said hospital staff are excited about the rapid launch of coronavirus vaccines in the UK. More than 7 million people received the first of two doses.
Kwaku says that the team also receives an incentive from patients who recover and go home, and receive some comfort from those to whom they offer “a good death”, free from struggle and fear.
“You take each shift as it comes, take each day as it comes,” she said. “You can fall and get up. You can feel down, you get up. You can cry. … But we are here to care for patients and care for each other. “
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