Town's Covid-19 garden a place to 'sit and reflect'

A memorial to those who lost their lives during the Covid-19 pandemic has been unveiled in Oldham.

It is also dedicated to the healthcare workers and other professionals who died "fighting for the survival of others".

The commemorative area, created at Alexandra Park, was unveiled by the Mayor of Oldham Dr Zahid Chauhan OBE, a Labour councillor and GP who helped lead the town's response to the pandemic.

This included running a clinic offering vaccines to the homeless.

Chauhan said he was "personally very keen" to arrange the memorial to honour those who lost their lives and "those who worked tirelessly and made sacrifices".

The memorial garden includes a commemorative stone and bench, and was designed as an area to "sit and reflect," the mayor said.

He said the pandemic had shown "how fragile" life is, but also how "resilient" communities came together to look after the vulnerable.

"Unfortunately we lost people. We lost family members and we lost our neighbours, and history has documented that many of us didn't have the opportunity to say goodbye," the mayor added.

The GP was Oldham Council's cabinet member for health and social care during the pandemic.

He worked to put homeless people in the same priority group for vaccines as those aged over-80, in one instances delivering jabs to a couple who had been living in a tent in a disused building following eviction.

The mayor said the garden made him also reflect on health care workers "including some of my very close friends, who fought for the survival of others".

He said: "They did not care about their own personal wellbeing. They took the risk and some of them even lost their lives."

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