DR SALEYHA AHSAN, 50, is an emergency medicine doctor in North Wales and a broadcast journalist

My dad suffered from asthma and in the past few years he’d started an amazing treatment that gave him his life back.

He was super-careful and strict but on December 19 or 20, he began to display Covid symptoms.

I’m one of his registered carers so I was given permission to stay with him when he was taken to hospital.

I knew things were bad when he struggled to breathe without his CPAP mask. It was a long, drawn-out death, I feel so bad about how long it took and the agony of watching it.

There was one day where he said, “Just let me die”, which was heartbreaking.

I handled all my dad’s healthcare and last night I got a phone call from the GP practice inviting him for the vaccine. It was like a bullet to the chest. I had to say:

“I’m sorry, he died of Covid last week.” My dad encouraged me and supported me in my ambition to join the Army at a time when there were really no other examples I could see of people like me – a British Muslim woman. I went for selection to go to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and passed.

My dad was really proud and spoke often to his friends about it.

I did end up becoming the first British Muslim woman to go to Sandhurst and become commissioned into the Army.

The tributes about my father have been incredible – reading about his life as a teacher from former students. The one comfort we have is our faith. We’re Muslim and we all believe that everyone has got their time.

It was a drawn-out death and one day he said, ‘just let me die’

When the pandemic began I was living with my dad but with him needing to shield, I moved out and practically lived in my car at first.

I worked at urgent care centres during the day and in the evenings I’d do shifts at the 111 centre, where patients call up.

They found it difficult to speak to their GPs. They felt really neglected and scared.

Triaging on the phone was shocking because every single patient that called up was breathless.

They were patients of all ages, as young as their late 20s.

You’d drive home late from your shift and all you’d see were ambulances bluelighting. For the patients we called the ambulances for, there was a fear they wouldn’t come out. I wanted to stay at home and spend time with my dad during the second wave because we were still coming to terms with our mother not being around so I stuck to telephone triaging and teaching my medical students online. We’d do really nice things like cook together. He was in such good health and was planning to move to Canada in the future.

I went on social media briefly yesterday and was quite surprised by the number of controversial posts about how Covid isn’t real. My dad was fine and Covid somehow crept in. It came out of nowhere and killed him.

My dad was fine.. Covid came out of nowhere and killed him

DR SHOAIB AHSAN, 32, is a doctor in acute medicine in London

I’ve been working on and off in the pandemic due to my medical background, which makes me at high risk to Covid.

I was working in London when it began and I caught Covid straight away. When I felt sluggish, I put it down to being in lockdown and it was only when I had a shower and couldn’t stand up that I realised something was wrong.

The next two or three weeks was a blur. It’s a weird, drawn-out disease, not like the flu that you get for four or five days.

After I had recovered I went back to work in

Devon where there was a lower instance of Covid.

Even there, I’d be finishing at 9pm instead of 5pm because the number of people to treat had gone up.

I lived at home with my dad and I’d have a chat with him every morning. He was a friend who was always there.

When he fell ill we thought it was a urine infection at first. Then, when medication wasn’t working, we thought it was a chest infection. Then there came a point when we thought we should call an ambulance – there was a wait so we ended up taking him into hospital by car.

When my mum died last year, he took the mantle of being both mum and dad. Even though he was elderly, he would always do things for you.