So how many patients have died after catching virus in hospital?

That’s the question grieving families are asking after relatives who went in for standard treatments never came home. Yes, NHS staff have been heroic, but how many of those deaths could have been avoided?

Asimple act of human kindness in an NHs ward cruelly ended the life of Amanda strudwick. While in hospital being treated for cancer, she put out her hand to guide a confused elderly woman who was suffering from the virus back to her bed — and caught the deadly disease herself.

Her daughter Tiffany says today: ‘she was tested for Covid-19 when she went in and was all clear. Then she caught the virus in the hospital that was meant to be helping her.

‘We feel she was failed by the doctors dealing with her. Why put my mother, a high-risk patient, in a ward with other people knowing that if she got Covid-19 she would not survive?’

For her family in lincolnshire, the loss of Amanda at the height of the coronavirus crisis has been devastating. Her death at Boston’s pilgrim Hospital was marked with articles in local papers as though it was an unfortunate one-off tragedy.

Yet this seems far from the truth. Amanda, 52, who was herself a former nurse, is one of many patients believed to have caught coronavirus in the very places they went to for help: NHs hospitals and hospices.

in the weeks before the national lockdown began on march 23, after which hospitals started segregating Covid-19 patients from those with other ailments, the lethal virus is feared to have struck at the very heart of our health system.

The mail has talked to families who lost loved ones to Covid-19 and who believe that their deaths were avoidable. One of those who died is lorraine Duncan, a mother who celebrated her 48th birthday in December when she was given the all-clear for breast cancer.

This February, just as coronavirus reached the UK, lorraine found the cancer had returned. she was referred to st Thomas’ Hospital in london, where doctors told her she had one or two years to live. it should have been precious time spent with her family.

BUT lorraine, a secondary school mentor, was transferred for ‘pain management’ to a south london hospice financed by the NHs. Her eldest daughter, Venicia lloyd, 32, says it was there that she fell ill and was killed by the virus.

‘she was dead within weeks, on April 20,’ says Venicia. ‘she contracted Covid-19 in the hospice. We have family members who work there. They caught it there, too, and didn’t have any protective gear. my mother went into the hospice to sort out her pain and never walked out.’

Of course, with death comes anguish and, amid those throes, some memories and impressions may be false. However, we have examined the role of the NHs in this pandemic and uncovered the real probability that our hospitals have helped spread the deadly virus on their wards.

This is not to say that people who are ill shouldn’t go to hospital or other NHs outlets.

Quite the reverse: it is essential that they do so. As the lockdown went on, hospitals began to segregate patients. Today, Covid-19 wards are cut off from other wards and it is hoped that the risk of infection is minimal.

But several weeks ago the situation was different, and the first indication that our health service might be a virus-hotspot emerged in scotland, where the NHs is the biggest employer.

On April 14, the Glasgow Times ran a front-page investigation revealing that unwitting patients at half of scotland’s 14 health boards (the equivalent of england and Wales’s NHs trusts) had contracted coronavirus while in hospital for other conditions.

The newspaper urged the scottish Government to tell the public exactly how many had caught the virus on NHs wards, revealing that nine people at Glasgow’s flagship Queen elizabeth University Hospital had picked it up there.

There was a resounding silence from the scottish Government, which has still not released the data the newspaper asked for.

But during the brouhaha that followed, scotland’s interim chief medical officer, Dr Gregor smith, said: ‘The virus loves institutions, and of course the hospital is an environment where, if we are not careful, it can spread very, very easily.’

He added, pertinently as it now turns out: ‘We need to understand the lessons that have been learned from other countries … to try to combat that.’

Dr smith may have been referring to terrifying statistics on hospital-acquired coronavirus from nations that faced the pandemic before Britain.

in a report by researchers in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic first emerged, 41 per cent of 138 Covid-19 patients monitored in one hospital in January caught the virus from a single man who had been admitted with abdominal pain.

There is other evidence that hospitals have become dangerous corona infection hotspots. in Tokyo, one in five of all new virus cases have been linked to hospital patients and staff.

And earlier this year, one of europe’s most eminent virology experts, professor Giorgio palu, warned how coronavirus could quickly spread through UK and european health systems.

He warned: ‘One mistake made in italy (where cases began in January) was clogging up hospitals with Covid and non-Covid patients. To reduce transmissions, other european countries should keep viruspositive people in their homes as much as possible. Otherwise, hospitals will clog up and become a boiling point for the spread.’

SO HAs that hospital ‘boiling point’ become a feature of transmission here? in the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, Wales, an 80-year-old woman is thought to have been the first patient in the UK to die of the virus she caught on a ward.

Just after pensioner marita edwards was admitted for a routine gallbladder operation on February 28, about half of the A&e doctors and nurses at the flagship hospital tested positive for coronavirus. Three weeks later, mrs edwards tested positive and died the following day.

Her son stuart loud said of his mother’s death: ‘if she had not been in hospital, she would still be alive. Clearly there was a coronavirus infection in the hospital which claimed her life.’

A telling survey by YouGov, the polling organisation, published early last month, revealed that in march nearly half of all