‘I grieve for the person I was before Covid’

Covid patients have been admitted to hospital more than a million times in the UK since the virus first emerged in 2020, while countless others have had care for other conditions disrupted as the NHS struggled to cope. On Monday, the public inquiry into the pandemic will start 10 weeks of hearings looking at the impact on patients, healthcare workers and the wider NHS. As part of that, the stories of more than 30,000 people will form part of the material entered into evidence.

BBC News has spoken to some of them. “It was absolutely horrendous. We were really struggling, having to scrounge around for masks and gloves,“ says Mandi Masters, a community midwife from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

At that early stage the NHS was, she says, “working in the dark” as the virus spread from China to Italy and then to the UK. Later Mandi caught Covid herself – she is convinced at work – and ended up in hospital on oxygen for three weeks. “My husband took me to A&E but had to leave me there, turn around and walk away,” she says.

“The news was coming out on how many health professionals were dying of Covid, but I was just too poorly to care at that point,” she says. “Looking back, I have to admit, it was extremely frightening.” Mandi, 62, has now returned to work part-time, but still struggles to catch her breath after a short walk.

Every cold or chest infection “wipes her out” and she “grieves for the person I was before Covid”. The third section of the Cov.