MORNING SERIAL
OPERATION “flatten the curve” was now fully under way across the UK. In a statement the same day Public Health Wales officials said the virus was now circulating in “every part of Wales”.
Cardiff and Vale Health board put out temporary job adverts for what seemed like, every job imaginable. Housekeeping, catering, hospital portering, health care support workers, administration and clerical staff, drivers, allied health professionals and clinical scientists, doctors, nurses and IT experts were all called upon to sign up.
A tough task given that there was hardly a surplus of nurses and doctors before the crisis.
Suddenly sport stadia were no longer cauldrons of competitive atmosphere.
Whereas just days before we had been debating whether it was the best move to bring 70,000 rugby fans into the Principality with a closed roof (screw you Eddie Jones, we will shut it if we want), on March 27, less than a week later, plans were announced to turn the iconic pitch into a huge 2,000-bed hospital.
It wasn’t just the Millennium, sorry Principality, that was seeing changes. Llanelli Scarlets handed over the Parc y Scarlets to the Welsh NHS to become a 250-bed field hospital, named Ysbyty Enfys Scarlets with Enfys (rainbow), a reflection of the symbol of hope chosen for the pandemic which was now showing up in windows across the country.
From a Welsh perspective, one of the biggest stories of the first lockdown period was not just how many cases there were, but where they were located.
New case figures released on the 23rd confirmed that Gwent was the epicentre of Covid-19 in Wales and had the highest UK rates of the disease outside London.
Of the 418 confirmed cases in Wales that day 220 of them were within the Aneurin Bevan Health Board.
Eighty-year-old Marita Edwards was among them. A retired cleaner and keen golfer, she had gone into Newport’s Royal Gwent hospital for a routine gallbladder operation at the end of February.
> Lockdown Wales by Will Hayward £9.99 www.serenbooks.com/ productdisplay/lockdown-wales ISBN 9781781726013
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