Covid fifth anniversary: Grandson remains 'scarred' by her final hours

BBC News

23-03-2025

The grandson of a care home resident who died of Covid has said his family remains "scarred" by the memories of her final moments.When Shelia Lamb, from Liverpool, moved to a care home in March 2020, the 94-year-old thought it was only for a trial period to see if she liked it there.But she contracted coronavirus and became one of approximately 46,000 care home residents to ultimately die from the disease.Mrs Lamb's grandson Amos Waldman, from Stockport in Greater Manchester, said: "If you go through what we did, what so many other families did, you can't just move on and say it is time to move on."
'You're supposed to get closure'
Mr Waldman is part of the Liverpool-based Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group which fought for a public inquiry into how the authorities prepared for and responded to the pandemic.Remembering his grandmother, he told the BBC he "will never forget" her final moments or the heavy restrictions that were placed upon funerals at the time."Those moments you have at the end of someone's life... A funeral by Zoom?" he asked, rhetorically. "You're supposed to get closure - it is supposed to be a solemn experience. We didn't have that."Mr Waldman told the BBC that when Mrs Lamb first fell ill, the family were told she had a water infection. Later they were told it was a chest infection.He said: "She was screaming out in pain."The last phone call I had with her about two days before she died was really harrowing."I won't forget it because she was delusional."
Just under 227,000 people died in the UK from Covid between March 2020 and May 2023, when the World Health Organization said the "global health emergency" was over.The ongoing public inquiry was launched by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June 2022, more than a year after he promised that the government's actions would be put "under the microscope".The inquiry's first report, published in July 2024, said flawed pandemic preparations had led to more deaths and greater economic damage than should have been the case.Mr Waldman said: "Given the death tolls here were so much higher than other countries, unfortunately people who were supposed to be leading us through that didn't do it as well as they should have done."We just want to do everything we possibly can to make sure we are better prepared next time."The government said it welcomed the inquiry's findings so far and accepted that lessons should always be learned from past events.
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