How do we cope with 500 deaths each day?
LEADERS IN North Yorkshire have reflected on efforts made across the county to fight the pandemic as the anniversary of the first lockdown is marked.
Some 1,100 people in the county have died of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
At a North Yorkshire County Council meeting of its health and wellbeing board yesterday, leaders recounted their most sobering moments of the Covid-19 crisis.
Amanda Bloor, inset, the accountable officer at North Yorkshire’s clinical commissioning groups, said: “One of the moments that will stay with me forever was going to the Nightingale Hospital in Harrogate and the dawning realisation of how many people may have needed an intensive-care bed.”
Harrogate’s Nightingale hospital was opened by the late Sir Captain Tom Moore but ultimately the facility did not treat any Covid-19 patients.
However, members of the board discussed how at the beginning of the pandemic they readied themselves for up to 500 people in North Yorkshire to die every day, according to the worstcase scenario modelling.
Richard Webb, the corporate director of health at the council, said: “It is humbling and poignant to think about where we’ve all been as individuals and as agencies. In a time where we’ve been so apart, in some ways never have we been so together. It’s easy to forget where we were in March and April.
“It was one of the most difficult conversations I had in my career with faith and community leaders with how we would cope with up to 500 deaths a day. Fortunately we’re in a much better position today.” The board heard how 110,000 volunteer hours had been put in by people across Yorkshire as part of mutual aid groups and of contributors to the vaccination effort. Some 269,000 first doses of the vaccine have now been given across the county.
Cases of the virus first peaked in North Yorkshire on April 30 last year and again on November 12. In its most deadly wave this winter it peaked on January 4, with at least 28,000 people in the county having had coronavirus in the past year.