A nurse in a coronavirus ward has said patients told her they did not believe the virus was real.
Senior charge nurse Rosario Walshe leads the team at Ward A31 at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, near Falkirk, and said there has been a “huge spike” in cases recently.
The 32-bed Covid-19 ward has every bed taken up as hospital referrals have doubled since the first wave.
Rosario believes a combination of family gatherings at Christmas, people ignoring guidelines and the rapidly-spreading variant is behind the rise. But she was also stunned to find some patients thought Covid was a hoax.
She said: “I’ve had patients say to me, ‘I wish I had listened, I didn’t listen. I didn’t really believe it was real,’ so that was quite an eye opener.
“The last few weeks have been extremely busy and challenging. It’s definitely different to the first wave.
“We’ve seen a lot more admissions with Covid-related symptoms – we’ve seen lots of groups of family members admitted with Covid, a lot of young people, which you didn’t see so much in the first wave.”
Juliette Murray, deputy medical director for acute services at NHS Forth Valley, said staff have been “amazing”.
But she is optimistic that a corner is being turned, saying: “We’re very much hoping that this is us, we’re right at the peak, and we won’t see more admissions than we are just now because, obviously, the effect of the lockdown is starting to happen.”
It comes as a further 1,003 Covid cases were confirmed in Scotland overnight.
There was also been six more deaths reported, with 143 people now being treated with coronavirus in intensive care units - up one person from yesterday.
1,941 people in Scotland are also currently in hospital with recently confirmed COVID-19.
In total, 566,269 people have received the first dose of the Covid vaccination and 7,794 have received their second dose.
Of the 14,163 new tests for COVID-19 that reported results, 8.1 per cent of these were positive.
