In memory of Covid’s D-Day

Five years after Covid hit and lockdown began, Dr Paul O’Reilly reflects on the best day of his GP career

Goodness! Is it really five years now since Covid? That bizarre time when the entire country shut down, there was tumbleweed on Regent Street, epidemiologists became household names and Boris ‘followed the science’. Maybe I’m just getting a bit middle-aged and maudlin, but it takes me back to the best day of my (medical) life. It was one glorious Saturday, 12 December 2020 – the day our PCN started vaccinating. 

Preparations the previous week had taken up the resources of the whole local health system. We were provided with 975 vaccinations primarily for mobile elderly people above the age of 80. And the trouble began with the initial administration. Getting 975 octogenarians, however allegedly mobile, to one place at the right time over a tightly coordinated sequence is a difficult matter.

We had to phone them, arrange the procedure, enable them to understand the rationale, obtain consent, ensure the absence of contra-indications, yada yada yada. It was a long job and everyone took a hand in making the phone calls required. But we discovered that there was a quality to the phone calls that nobody expected – and that was hope! 

We were talking to people who had been innocently confined to nine months of penal solitude with no prospect of release. Now to them, it seemed like we had turned up with a key to release them from their confinement, and so this was not a chance to be missed. People who had not been out of their own houses for years pronounced themselves fitter than James Milner and available for selection at any vaccination centre in London. When asked how they would get there, they said that if necessary they would walk it – in a determined voice which few of us had the courage to question further. This, we reminded ourselves, was a generation which had fought a war and knew what it was to make do.

The phone calls inviting them in for their Covid vaccination were notably lengthy too. It seemed that very few of these patients had much opportunity for conversation in the previous nine months. A lot of them could not fathom that we were interested solely in their medical history, and not requiring a more complete account of their life and times. Those phone calls, we came later to realise, should have been our warning.

When the day came, not one of them was on time. This we had expected; most of us have previous experience of what happens to appointment times with the combination of octogenarian memories, British winter weather and London public transport. 

But, what we had not expected was that they would all be early – and I mean every single person was more than 15 minutes early to their appointment. The terror of missing this chance through unpunctuality had seized the entire population – failure was not an option. The sight of them pushing their Zimmer frames or leaning on the arms of relatives brought a certain dew to the eyes of several of us. 

They were all polite, understanding and exquisitely grateful, often pathetically so. There is a certain unforgettable look that comes into the eyes of a little old lady whom you have just informed that, 28 days from today, and for the first time in a small eternity, she will be able to hug her grandchildren. 

One man put it most elegantly: ‘This is my passport to freedom and future hope.’ But my favourite was a Scottish gentleman of military bearing whom I took particular care to remind that full protection was only obtained seven days after the second dose – a full four weeks from that day. He stood, considered for a moment and said with quiet resolution: ‘Well, Christmas may still be cancelled… and Hogmanay… but Burns Night is on!’

Not everyone had thought it right that we should rush out this vaccination program on the first properly wet weekend in December, and with exactly the same level of foresight, planning and skilled centralised-government command-and-control as the little boats that brought off the British Army from the beaches of Dunkirk. But the analogy is still a fair one: in times of crisis, when what needs doing is as clearly visible as the white cliffs of Dover, the best response is simply to have good, intelligent and courageous people of goodwill working together and getting it done. 

This was the generation which did that in their time and it was an honour and a privilege to do this for them. And it made me proud to be a GP.

Dr Paul O’Reilly is a GP partner in London who works for homeless people