We’d been watching statistics on television night after night,
whether they were true or not is for history to decide.
What I wanted to tell was the story of what it was like
for people going through this.
I felt this was a story that needed to be told.
[Developing News]
Hello.
My name’s Stuart Franklin.
I’m going to talk about the series that I did
during the COVID pandemic.
I had applied, with my wife, who’s a doctor in this hospital in London,
to document the pandemic
at what we consider to be the eye of the storm,
the epicentre of the crisis.
And I was able to go in there and work.
This photograph here
is the photograph that was on the cover of T
And in the picture, you’ve got a patient, suspected COVID,
who’s got an oxygen bag on his face.
You can see there’s an ambulance and [wrist] band they’d brought him in.
And there’s a consultant on the left
who’s discussing the patient’s case with the nurse.
I mean, these resuscitation rooms are the sort of frontline in a way,
it’s where the most severe patients are brought in
in a kind of life and death situation.
I don’t think he made it, if I recall correctly.
More than half of the people that went in with
kind of chronic coronavirus symptoms
didn’t go home.
An awful lot of people died for a whole range of reasons.
And sadly, an awful lot of them were,
you know, Afro Caribbean or Middle Eastern, Asian.
They were particularly susceptible to COVID.
This lady here, Jasmine, had contracted coronavirus,
and I think this was her first day back.
She was still a little breathless.
You know, she was really struggling.
And at the same time, you know, able,
because she’s a consummate professional,
to manage the patients that she was seeing at the time.
This is Felix Soriano, he’s, I think, about 50.
He was working in A&E in the hospital
and he contracted coronavirus.
And he got it really badly,
and he was taken to ICU
and given a CPAP mask.
And he really struggled with it.
He didn't really think he would make it.
And he was recalling the fact that he was afraid to go to sleep,
in case, you know, he’d wake up and not be with us.
He was absolutely terrified.
He felt like he permanently had to keep focused on breathing
and nothing else.
So the mask he’s wearing now is what’s called, I think,
a venturi mask.
So he's able to function without oxygen,
but sometimes he needs a bit of a top up, so he’s using this mask.
But I think two days after I took that photograph, he went home.
He's over the worst of it.
But, you know, he’s still traumatized,
if I’m honest with you, by what he’s been through,
as many of the patients were.
It’s awfully traumatic to be in a situation where
you’re struggling to breathe, it’s awful.
There were people who would just
take their mask off in the middle of the night,
and the doctors would do the morning ward round
and just find a body in the bed.
That happened several times.
It was an awful time.
Awful, awful time.
Here we are in the ICU department,
and as you can see, everybody’s got full PPE equipment on.
So this gentleman’s sedated,
he’s on a ventilator.
There are a group of maybe eight people around the bed
getting ready to turn the patient over.
It’s much easier to breathe when you’re lying on your front
than it is when you’re lying on your back.
If I recall, the ICU department was full,
so there were 30 patients, most of them on ventilators.
The chances of coming off a ventilator and surviving
weren’t huge.
You know, perhaps 30 percent came off a ventilator and survived.
But I've got a strange feeling he didn't make it.
A lot of people died alone.
And for the reason that, you know, for a large period of time,
families weren't allowed into the hospital.
And as well as the fact that, you know,
many hospitals were suffering from staff shortages because of
the numbers of staff that had COVID.
There weren’t doctors to certify the deaths.
There weren’t porters to move the bodies.
You know, there weren’t enough of them,
so there would be, you know, people lying dead for hours,
waiting to be moved to the temporary mortuary in the car park.
Were you ever worried about your own safety?
No.
Not really.
What makes you not worried about it?
Look, you know, it’s a lottery, you...
you’re lucky or you’re unlucky,
but I knew I wanted to do this story.
I mean, I should have probably been more worried
when I did the Ebola story,
but again, I wanted to do it.
I mean, there were some incredible stories
that came out of the Ebola event,
like, you know, there was a Catholic mission.
Many of the nuns died because they wanted...
to be with their patients at the end.
These things are sad.
Yeah, it’s very sad.
You have to travel with all of this baggage,
you know, when you go into...
these kinds of stories.
I feel actually honored that I was given the opportunity to document...
the reality of the situation, you know,
to try and tell the story of what people are going through.
People like Felix, you know, the nurse, and so on.
If I hadn’t been there, his story wouldn’t be told.
And I think it’s important that it was.
I think that’s what journalism is about.
It’s about telling people’s stories.