MORNING SERIAL

IT was not just the lack of PPE that was the issue for many but the way the problem was not fully acknowledged by the Welsh Government.

One Cardiff surgeon told me that the lack of PPE “represents a failure at a local level and at the Welsh Government level” and that there had “been a lack of honesty and transparency over these shortages, with rationing disguised as policy”.

On March 25, we saw the very real risks that staff were exposing themselves to when Dr Habib Zaid, 74, died at Southend Hospital in Essex. He is believed to be the first practicing doctor to die from the virus.

So PPE is essential.

With a deadly virus the public must be careful, act prudently and most importantly, be responsible. Contracting the virus was a risk to the individual, and to those who might become infected through contact. It was also a pressure on the NHS, where resources, including care beds and ventilators were like gold dust in the first week of lockdown.

And yet the Prime Minister didn’t seem to get the memo (or apparently the dozens of scientific papers prepared for him for the last three months). At 11.15am Boris Johnson posted on Twitter a video in which he said he’d tested positive for coronavirus. I saw it pop up immediately while I was in an interview with hospital workers. I’d have felt like such a swine to end an interview while someone was pouring their heart out, so I scrambled to send it to newsdesk while also trying to shorthand what the interviewee was saying.

Some of the predictable disasters resulting from coronavirus take a bit of digging and analysis to unpick. However the fact the PM would contract coronavirus was an event that was obviously going to happen. Earlier in the month he had excitedly, in the blasé style of a Big Brother contestant turning on the Christmas lights in Neath, told a press conference that he ‘shook hands with everybody’ at a hospital including coronavirus patients.

CONTINUES MONDAY