Boris Johnson is today urged by three bereaved families and the Trades Union Congress to name a date for a public inquiry into Britain's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Grieving relatives told the Mirror a probe was vital to learn lessons from the pandemic – amid ongoing questions about whether borders should have been closed earlier, why the UK did not have enough personal protective equipment for frontline NHS and care staff, and whether social distancing rules were tough enough and could have been imposed earlier.
The Prime Minister has said an inquiry will take place – but refused to set a timetable.
Today, on International Workers' Memorial Day and with the UK's official death toll standing at 152,205 – including more than 11,000 of working-age, TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady writes in the Mirror saying: “We’ll forever be in the debt of the key workers who have died during this pandemic – nurses, carers, bus drivers and so many more.
“They died looking after our loved ones and keeping our country running in the hardest of times.
“Today, as we remember them, the Government must name a date for holding a public inquiry into the response to the pandemic.
“Victims and bereaved families should know when they will get answers to their questions.”
Families and workers' leaders will hold a vigil at the at “National Covid Memorial Wall” opposite Parliament at lunchtime, including observing a minute's silence.
Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice co-founder Jo Goodman said: “Many of our loved ones lost their life after catching Covid-19 in their workplaces.
“From working in the factories that produced PPE for the NHS to the nurses and doctors who didn't have enough PPE at the start of the pandemic, they kept the country going and paid the ultimate price.
“An independent, judge-led statutory public inquiry is vital to making sure we learn lessons and save lives during the pandemic and for any future waves.
“The stories of our loved ones hold the answers to preventing more grief for other families.”
RUDY Silva held his only grandchild just once before self-isolating.
Days later, the snooker-loving bus driver was dead – one of dozens of public transport workers claimed by Covid-19.
His son Rodrick told how Rudy loved his job of 33 years, ferrying passengers around South London.
Rodrick also believes it killed him.
“We only have speculation as to how he caught it, but we felt it was on the job,” said Rodrick, 33.
“On March 24 he fell ill. He called in sick, did what he needed to do – the 14-day self-isolation.
“The first week he had all the symptoms – the cough, temperature, headaches and diarrhoea.
“He recovered on the seventh day, he started to get better but then on day nine or 10 he started to feel very ill, his energy levels just went down.
“The night he passed away – April 3 – I started to notice his oxygen levels weren't very good, he was breathing quite heavily.”
But Rudy, 58, was reluctant to go to hospital and decided to rest at home.
His condition deteriorated until he was “wheezing and hyperventilating”.
Rodrick called NHS 111 at 1am, and Rudy was told to take paracetamol.
A nurse rang back at about 3am; Rodrick answered.
“I went into the room, I tried to pass the phone to my dad – that was when I found him unconscious in bed,” he recalled.
“We realised at that point he was gone.
“I was doing CPR for 20 minutes, the ambulance service came, they took over and did CPR for about 40 minutes and that was it, they said he's not going to be revived.
“It was an awful shock, I don't think we will ever come to terms with it.
“I don't know how we are going to deal with it, but we are taking our days very slowly, just reflecting on my father's life.
“We never in a million years thought he would pass away so young.”
Rudy had diabetes and high blood pressure, but Rodrick said the conditions were controlled and believed that if his father caught coronavirus “he was fit enough to recover”.
Switching between describing his dad in the present and past tenses, Rodrick believes Rudy contracted Covid-19 at the bus depot or while driving.
“I tried to prevent him from working because at that point the cases were going up, people were dying,” he said.
“But because of the way he is, he just said, 'A job's a job, I need to continue'.
“Unfortunately, his life was taken because of it.
“He never goes out, he's just literally work, home, work, home.
“Everyone in the household was working from home so there was no other way he could have caught this.”
Rudy never received a shielding letter and Rodrick wonders if he should have.
He also questions Whitehall's pandemic preparations and believes hygiene measures and social distancing rules should have been imposed earlier.
“I think they were very slow handling this, not a lot of guidance and inconsistent messaging,” said Rodrick, a fragrance product development manager.
“A public inquiry is very important – they need to provide answers.”
Rodrick wants to know if tougher measures brought in sooner could have prevented his father's death – and given Rudy precious time with the grandchild he craved.
“My son Matteo was born a week before my dad passed away. He held him once and then the next day he self-isolated,” said Rodrick.
He is “frustrated” the family has been denied “that satisfaction of my father having that experience of seeing him grow-up and have that time together”.
He added: “Me and my father were very close and I wanted him to continue that relationship with his grandson.
“He was very excited for that moment. It's just a shame he's not here now to see that.”
DRIVING his 92 bus to and from West London's Ealing Hospital at the height of last spring's coronavirus outbreak, Ranjith Chandrapala was less than six months away from retirement.
Admitted to the same hospital after contracting Covid-19, the 64-year-old never got to retire – another life lost to the pandemic.
His daughter Leshie, 41, wants to know how transport chiefs planned for the pandemic, what nationwide precautions were in place, and what public health scientists advised ministers – and when.
“Dad signed up to drive a bus but he didn't sign up to give his life. There are some very live questions to be asked,” said Leshie, an office manager.
“He was really quite fit, he had an amazing diet, he drank fresh juices, he was the poster boy for health in your 60s – he had the skin of an 18-year-old, he glowed.
“He loved being a bus driver, he loved his colleagues – they were like a band of brothers.”
It was mid-April last year when Ranjith fell ill with Covid-19.
“He called me to say he wasn't feeling well, we called NHS 111 and he was advised to self-isolate so that's what he did,” said Leshie.
“He called his employer, he stayed off work – this was around April 24.
“The following week he was deteriorating, he was coughing up spots so we called his GP and they advised an ambulance.
“His oxygen levels were really low, he was admitted on April 30 to a regular Covid ward and later the following day his oxygen levels were still quite low so they decided to put him into ICU so they could put him on a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure – a non-invasive ventilator) machine so he could get more air into his lungs.
“They proned him and did all sorts but he was still losing oxygen.
“On Saturday, May 2 they put him on a full ventilator and in an induced coma – they did say he was very sick.”
The next day Leshie had a phone call asking if she would like to speak to her father on Facetime.
“I knew then that he wasn't going to make it, that was really difficult,” she said.
“We Facetimed him and he did look really beautiful and like he was asleep.
'I said, 'If you can, dad, just keep trying to take in more oxygen' – I pleaded with him but in my heart I knew he might not make it.
“I think he was shutting down.
“On the Sunday night, I got a call at about 10.30pm to say he'd passed away.
“It was so awful because I can't even explain how wonderful he was – just so magical, such a great father and husband and friend.
“We still miss him so much, every day.
“He was just the best, so sweet and loving and committed to people – he was really connected to everyone, he just had this great quality where he could be with a prince or a pauper and connect with that person.
“He was comfortable in his own skin, and that's a very hard thing to achieve as a human being.
“He was really funny and daft and always cracking jokes, playing guitar and he wrote little poems.
“That's what we miss – the joy and the fun times.”
Backing the call for a public inquiry, Leshie said: “Bus driver deaths are just a small part of the bigger picture.
“There are so many questions we all have about what happened – in care homes, security guards, NHS workers, questions around PPE – and that's why we need a public inquiry, because I think a lot of things did go wrong.
“During the course of the pandemic, a lot of political decisions overtook scientific advice – these are the questions that we want answered and I don't think anything other than a public inquiry will satisfy those questions completely.
“It's all about preservation of life, that should have been key from the outset and that's why we need to learn lessons so that it doesn't happen again, because I don't want to see any of my dad's colleagues on a ventilator.”
SHAUN Brady worked as a food processor at a Heinz factory for 34 years.
On April 2 last year, nine days into the first nationwide lockdown, he was sent home at 2am because he was struggling to breathe.
The 55-year-old called an ambulance to his home in Wigan, Gtr Manchester, and was admitted to the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary.
He had coronavirus. Despite periodically showing signs of recovery – sparking hope in his devoted daughters Hannah, 25, and Tasha, 23 – he died on May 16.
Last spring, as Britain was gripped by fear of the pandemic sweeping globe, Hannah drew up a mental list of family and friends she believed were at risk.
It included grandparents and people with underlying health conditions – but not Shaun, who went to the gym four times a week and coached primary school football teams.
“Dad was never on that list because he was fit and well, he had no underlying health conditions,” said Hannah.
“In my head – in many people's heads still – he wouldn't have caught Covid and he wouldn't have died.
“Once we had protected the older people in the family, we weren't particularly worried about anybody else.”
But tragedy hit when Shaun fell ill.
“He started displaying non-typical Covid symptoms a couple of days before the national lockdown but because he wasn't having the breathlessness, a temperature, he hadn't lost his sense of taste or smell he carried on going into work.
“I believe he got it on his way to work.
“He used three different types of public transport to get to work and back – he caught the train and a bus and then either caught or a train home a taxi back – and obviously masks weren't mandated on public transport until early July.”
“He rang us on April 2 to say he had been sent home from work because he couldn't breathe.
“He called an ambulance and was taken to hospital and he stayed in hospital on a ventilator, in a coma, for the next 45 days until he died on May 16.
“It just completely destroyed our lives and the lives we thought we'd have in the future.
“We'd spent 42 days calling the hospital four times a day for an update, begging to Facetime dad even though he was in a coma, holding onto the smallest bit of hope that we could.
“He was up and down throughout his stay.
“At one point we thought he would get better so we started preparing the house for him to come home and then we got the call to say we needed to come up to A&E to watch his ventilator be switched off and him die.
“The lasting effects of such a long period of hope and stress, only to go up and watch your dad breathe his last breath is something that will impact me and my sister forever.
“He didn't get to be a granddad, it was probably the one thing he was looking forward to in his life.
“He was great with kids, he worked a lot in youth football.”
Hannah, a paralegal in Manchester, hopes a public inquiry will provide explanations for decisions the Government took – and choices it ducked.
“The right time for a public inquiry to start was probably May or June 2020 .... We were asking for a rapid review phase which meant it wouldn't take years and years to complete the initial stage, it would take about 12 weeks to look at what went wrong in the immediate first couple of months of the pandemic, and what we could change in our approach to the coming winter,” she said.
“The Government refused and we went into winter completely under-prepared, completely underestimating the impact the virus would have.
“Now is the right time to launch the full public, independent, statutory, judge-led inquiry because, thankfully, the vaccination programme seems to be working.
“Politicians like Boris Johnson, like Matt Hancock can hopefully now start to breathe a sigh of relief and get some space.
“But they need to use that space to address what went wrong with this pandemic to prevent loss of life in the next one.
“They owe the victims a hell of a lot more, but that is the least they owe them.”
She is baffled why the Government seemed slow to issue public health advice as the virus began to grip Britain when Heinz was able to introduce health protection measures in February.
“When dad passed away we asked Heinz what they had done to protect their workers in the pandemic, because we hadn't heard of anybody else really getting ill in his factory, which was odd because male factory workers have the highest mortality rate for Covid-19 of any job,” she said.
“They sent us quite a long list of things they have done.
“It's really concerning that a company like Heinz can take it upon themselves to start preparing for a pandemic – mid-February they started introducing things like hand sanitising, bubbles for work, a pandemic committee – but the Government couldn't really respond until mid-March.”
THE TUC posed five key questions it wants a public inquiry to address:
- How prepared were our NHS and social care services for the Covid-19 pandemic after a decade of cuts?
- What was the impact of PPE shortages in health and social care at the beginning of the pandemic?
- Why has the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on BME workers and those in insecure work?
- What are the consequences of the Government’s decision not to provide adequate sick pay to every worker who had to self-isolate?
- Why were Government contracts awarded to handpicked private companies?
"Victims and bereaved families should know when they will get answers to their questions."
Trades Union Congress general secretary Frances O'Grady writes exclusively for the Mirror.
Covid has touched so many lives in Britain and around the world.
Today on International Workers’ Memorial Day, the nation will pause to remember all those who have died at work during the pandemic.
More than 11,000 working-age people in the UK have lost their lives since the crisis began – and too many of them will have got the virus at work.
That’s thousands of mums, dads, grown-up kids, aunts, uncles and grandparents whose lives have been cut short well before their time.
We’ll forever be in the debt of the key workers who have died during this pandemic – nurses, carers, bus drivers and so many more.
They died looking after our loved ones and keeping our country running in the hardest of times.
Today, as we remember them, the Government must name a date for holding a public inquiry into the response to the pandemic.
Victims and bereaved families should know when they will get answers to their questions.
The public inquiry must look at why workers were put at risk – too many working with wholly inadequate PPE.
And why the Government still hasn’t fixed sick pay so every worker can afford to self-isolate if they need to.
And it needs to ask difficult questions: like why Covid has hit certain groups of workers harder, with mortality rates disproportionately higher for BME workers and those in insecure work.
It’s clear to everyone that a decade of public spending cuts hit the NHS, social care and other public services hard – and meant they were less prepared when the pandemic hit.
This isn’t about settling political scores. It’s about getting answers and learning the lessons from the pandemic to save lives in future.
On International Workers’ Memorial Day, we remember those who have died, and pledge ourselves to fight for safe workplaces for everyone.
