Covid up close
BRAVE schoolgirl Kalisha is the oldest of three sisters and is doing her best to comfort her siblings while her dad lies in a coma. But the middle one cries out for her daddy every night, while the littlest sleeps with her mum.
“The teachers are telling us about the virus,” says ten-yearold Kalisha.
“They said that some people die from it and some people survive.
“I get to see my dad on a video call but it makes me sad because it makes my mum cry.”
Her dad is 52-year-old Sama, a psychiatric nurse who has been put into an induced coma because he could no longer breathe on his own.
He’s just one of so many Covid-19 patients who have remained in intensive care wards for many months.
This moving film tells the stories of four patients, including Sama, who are being treated in the ICU at King’s College Hospital in London. David, a 62-year-old builder, had only just been given the all-clear after a year-long battle with cancer when Covid-19 hit.
His wife of 42 years, Gill, says: “We are confident and positive that he’s
going to come through it.”
Elsewhere Tobi, 52, has suffered multiple strokes, three cardiac arrests and kidney failure due to the virus. And Joaquin, a 61-year-old hotel cleaner originally from Honduras, has been on a ventilator for 110 days when this film opens.
Following the patients, their families and their doctors over six months, it captures whether or not they will survive, and if they do, what kind of future awaits them.