AT LEAST 100 health and social care workers have now died of coronavirus including a nurse whose family say she would have lived if she had been given the correct protective clothing.
The grim tally revealed yesterday by the publication NursingNotes is more than double the official estimate for fatalities of NHS staff.
And workers warned many more could die due to the lack of personal protective equipment, with a shipment from Turkey delayed again yesterday.
The latest victims include Margaret Tapley, 84, a dedicated nurse who still worked three nights a week at Oxford’s Witney Hospital.
Another was cleaning manager Joanna Klenczon, 34, who worked for ten years at Northampton General Hospital.
And Josiane Zauma Ebonja Ekoli, 55, a mum-of-five from Leeds, died after telling her family the PPE she had been given was ‘poor’ but she had to carry on working so she could pay the bills.
Her son Keanan told ITV News: ‘A week before the lockdown properly started, I told her, I don’t think you should go to work, with everything that’s going on.
There were already talks at the beginning about lack of PPE, so I was like, you shouldn’t go, but she said, “If I don’t go who will pay the house? Who will buy the food?” She always put us before herself.
‘She was also going to work to help other people because we always spoke about how she wanted to help other people, that was her aim.’
The virus death toll in hospitals has risen by 449 — the smallest daily increase for a fortnight and down from 596 the previous day.
And there was another sign the crisis may have peaked as the number of infected patients in hospital in worst-hit London fell for a seventh day.
But concerns about the lack of PPE persisted as the NHS Confederation warned the confusion over the Turkey flight was ‘making a difficult situation worse’.
READ ALSO Breaking: Lagos reports 2 COVID-19 deaths
An RAF plane took off from Britain last night to fetch an instalment of the promised 84-ton batch, which was supposed to be ready on Sunday.
The order is supposed to include 400,000 surgical gowns. But experts pointed out that the NHS typically uses 150,000 in a single day as they have to be disposed of to protect health.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.