My uncle left a message on our answering machine on 14 March 2020. It was a Saturday evening. “I’m not well, I’m in the hospital, they said it’s Covid.” My dad listened to it the following morning and immediately started getting ready. As he was about to leave, the hospital phoned, saying he needed to come urgently. By the time my dad arrived, my uncle Roy had died.
Roy was the eldest of four brothers, born in Clapham, south London in 1938. My father was the youngest. “It was always good when it was my birthday, because I got a present from them all,” recalls my dad. The brothers were decorators, often working together and mixing in the same social circles. In his final years, Roy moved into a residential care home. He was always out and about in the local shopping centre, never without his daily paper. He and my dad were close, and Roy would often come round for his favourite meals: spaghetti bolognese or a fried egg sandwich.
His death from Covid-19 shocked us. But what I also found shocking was the way so much about his dying and the aftermath was mishandled. The hospital staff had no protective equipment, and invited my dad to go in and say goodbye to Roy in the hospital room, which could have risked him contracting the virus. They gave my dad Roy’s belongings in a plastic bag, only for us to later realise that they were not Roy’s, but another person’s. When I went back to the hospital to collect Roy’s actual belongings, several of his personal effects were missing.
I don’t blame the healthcare staff as individuals. It was the government’s fundamental lack of pandemic preparedness, compounded by 10 years of austerity that has decimated Britain’s NHS, that led to a complete inability to respond effectively to this crisis.
The first module of the Covid-19 public inquiry, which concluded this week, was at last meant to hold these failures up to the light – to show how far back they stretched. Those responsible did their best to squirm away from accountability: Matt Hancock offered the inquiry superficial apologies and shifted responsibility on to local councils; George Osborne laughably claimed that his austerity measures had a “positive effect” on the UK’s pandemic response, rather than the reality that cuts led to the woeful unpreparedness of Britain’s health and social care systems. And Boris Johnson continues to concoct excuses to avoid handing over his phone to the inquiry.
Yet despite the failings of politicians to properly respect the inquiry process, it is now unequivocally clear that pandemic preparedness was entirely lacking in March 2020. It has been vindicating for bereaved families like my own, who have long felt that so much could have been done differently, and have felt rage at the various scandals that have poured out of Westminster since.
“We, as the bereaved, are experts in the cost of Covid,” says Brenda Doherty, a co-lead of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Northern Ireland, who gave evidence at the inquiry earlier this week. She describes her mother, Ruth Burke, as a “5-ft-2-in force to be reckoned with … a powerhouse who showed us the meaning of life”. Ruth died after contracting Covid in hospital in March 2020. Much like my family’s experience, Brenda was unable to give her mother the burial and wake that she wanted. “I feel so robbed of not being able to give the eulogy for Mummy, to not have that celebration of her life and the person she was.”
For Brenda, the opportunity to share her story at the inquiry was empowering and important, but there is so much more work still to be done. “To what degree they actually listen to families depends on future modules and the recommendations,” she says. “The proof in the pudding will be to hear from more families and more experiences.” While Brenda and three other bereaved people representing campaign groups from each of the four nations gave evidence to the inquiry, no further witnesses from a list of 20 people that the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice provided were called up for the first module.
As the inquiry slowly rumbles on, the existence of these groups has brought many of us a huge amount of comfort. The pandemic and the colossal loss of life that ensued brought up many feelings of grief for me, both about Roy’s passing and delayed grief from my childhood. In May 2020, signed off from work and struggling with my mental health, I joined an online support group for people who had lost loved ones to Covid-19, organised by The Loss Foundation. There was palpable anger in the Zoom room. Jo Goodman was there, and had recently lost her father, Stuart. She went on to co-found Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, which pushed for the public inquiry to be held.
”My dad was someone with really strong principles, and someone who cared about others,” Jo says now. “I just found it really, really galling to lose him in a way that felt so preventable, and like his life had been treated really carelessly and almost flippantly as if it hadn’t been valued. I found it very difficult to properly grieve who my dad was, because I just didn’t feel like he should have died. My initial feeling was anger, and I think it did quite energise me.”
It’s been a long and emotional road to get here. What does justice look like for her? “A clear idea of what went wrong and who was responsible, and then the main motivation has always been making sure this doesn’t happen again.”
More than 228,600 lives have been lost to Covid in the UK. But neither Roy Haynes, nor Ruth Burke, nor Stuart Goodman were statistics. Their lives were not disposable, nor to be treated as though they did not matter. The future of the inquiry is an opportunity to ensure their stories are treated with the respect they deserve.
Suyin Haynes is a freelance journalist and former editor-in-chief of gal-dem
