Hospital director recalls 'surreal' Covid lockdown

A hospital director has reflected on the "surreal" experience of working in a near-empty hospital during the UK's first Covid lockdown, five years on from the beginning of the pandemic.

Chris Pallot, who in 2020 was a director at Northampton General Hospital and led the Covid vaccination programme across Northamptonshire, described how life at the hospital changed overnight.

On 23 March 2020, then prime minister Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown in the UK and ordered people to "stay at home"

Mr Pallot said: "None of us knew how bad it would be or how long it would last. Overnight [the hospital] emptied. You would only see one or two members of staff. It was surreal."

The rollout of coronavirus vaccines began in the UK on 9 December 2020, when the world's first Pfizer dose was administered to 90-year-old Margaret Keenan in Coventry.

Since then, nearly 176 million Covid vaccines have been administered in various stages up to May 2023.

Mr Pallot told BBC Northamptonshire: "Northampton was actually at the forefront of the most vaccines given and that was down to how much our primary care colleagues started to sprint at it.

"There was a lot of pressure centrally... and a lot of self-generated pressure, because we wanted to get it right."

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), more than 44 million people in the UK were estimated to have contracted the virus between April 2020 and February 2022.

Official records show that nearly 227,000 people in the UK had Covid-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate.

The highest peaks in Covid-related deaths occurred during the first two years of the pandemic, with nearly 13,000 excess deaths recorded in mid-April 2020, of which around 9,500 were attributed to the virus.

Dr Jamie Green, from Delapre Medical Centre in Northampton, said: "It felt so unusual and so hard... It was so different from anything we were trained to do.

"One of the things we learned in this pandemic was the things we thought we knew about the way viruses transfer didn't apply to coronavirus in the same way. The world has changed."

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