MAN: There are a continual flow of new viruses that emerge.
Viruses reproduce many thousands of times
and many millions of times each day.
And when there's such rapid evolution of a virus,
there's the opportunity for it to change and shift.
That is the nature of these coronaviruses
that have been circulating within animals for millennia.
WOMAN:
What is very rare
is for one of these viruses to actually take hold in humans.
MALE NEWSREADER: China has reported the first death
from a mystery illness,
believed to be a new strain of the coronavirus
which also causes SARS.
CATHY NEWMAN: Are we gonna see, at some point in the future,
London being locked down? Is that possible?
MAN 2: This will be the new normal - until a vaccine is developed.
MALE NEWSREADER: Having just passed the grim milestone
of half a million deaths,
no part of humanity is immune or safe.
BORIS JOHNSON: This country is going to get through coronavirus,
no doubt, and get through it in good shape.
We are ready, we are ready. Totally ready.
BIRDSONG
NARRATOR: Decades ago,
a new virus probably evolved in a bat cave like this one.
That virus would soon multiply,
killing more than two million people and counting.
BAT CHITTERS
We know it today as COVID-19.
BAT SQUEAKS
The closest genetic match yet found to COVID-19
comes from a virus in a horseshoe bat caught in southern China.
COVID-19 could have been passed directly to a human by a bat -
or had some help.
BAT CHITTERS
In many parts of China, there's always these transmissions going on
of many different viruses,
particularly in environments
where animals and humans are in close proximity.
BATS SQUEAK
In the case of COVID, of course,
we're thinking about the wet markets
where live animals are sold.
Officially, there are 44,000 so-called wet markets across China.
They sell seafood, but also exotic live wild animals.
Millions shop in them.
Live animals being handled by humans
is the most likely way in which transmission occurred.
SIR PAUL NURSE: Viruses can't grow, they can't reproduce
unless they are inside a cell.
They hijack the machinery of the cell
to make more copies of themselves.
The cell will break down
and then those viruses can infect yet more cells,
but they're completely dependent,
upon growth and making themselves, on being inside another cell.
MAN:
It immediately hit every single nerve of me.
A world expert on controlling infectious outbreaks,
Dr Lo was terrified early that morning
by messages on social media posted by doctors in Wuhan,
central China.
They spoke of a type of severe respiratory virus - SARS.
The most important message was, there was outbreak in Wuhan.
Seven cases were laboratory confirmed with SARS virus.
The first SARS virus, killing hundreds,
had badly impacted Taiwan,
after being spread from nearby China almost two decades ago.
The doctors from Wuhan now revealed
that a new form of SARS coronavirus
had taken hold in humans.
This very important information
was not reported or provided by the Chinese government.
Within hours, Dr Lo and his colleagues sent urgent questions
to disease control experts in China.
There were two thoughts. Firstly, what is the degree
to which it is causing severe disease?
And secondly, how transmissible is this?
HORN HONKS
In Wuhan itself, citizen journalists were, by now,
desperately trying to find information.
TRANSLATION
The authorities had closed the city's wet market,
after a number of people sick in hospital were linked to it.
HORNS HONK
TRANSLATION
But others, with no connection to the wet market,
were also becoming ill.
TRANSLATION
The Chinese authorities
were denying the virus could be passed from human to human.
SIREN WAILS
The doctors who first reported it was contagious
were silenced and disciplined.
And state media threatened other potential whistle-blowers.
TRANSLATION
On the 9th of January, this new coronavirus,
later christened COVID-19, claimed its first official victim...
..a Wuhan resident in his 60s.
Many of the viruses that transmit from animals to humans
may indeed cause disease or death.
But if that virus cannot transmit to others,
then, of course, it's a dead end.
For days, medical experts from Taiwan
had been pushing to get to Wuhan.
Dr Yin-Ching Chuang and his team
were desperate for an answer to one key question.
TRANSLATION
Two weeks after the official outbreak,
Dr Chuang and a colleague got permission to travel.
Once in Wuhan,
they were briefed by government officials at a hospital.
TRANSLATION
But after a long meeting,
Dr Chuang says his Chinese hosts finally changed their tune.
TRANSLATION
By now, some two weeks after the outbreak officially began,
human-to-human transmission was still not being publicly admitted.
TRANSLATION
Instead, for 12 crucial days in this period,
not a single new case of the highly contagious coronavirus
was officially reported.
TRANSLATION
Dr Chuang returned to Taiwan
to tell his colleagues that he was convinced
the new coronavirus was spreading.
DR LO: We have been dealing with official information
from the Chinese government for decades.
And we know that a lot of this information can be untrustworthy.
And they can be only partly correct.
Since hearing of the outbreak,
Taiwan had been screening passengers from Wuhan.
Now, a series of additional emergency public health controls
were imposed.
We had to depend on ourselves to protect our people.
So, we cannot trust Chinese information totally.
But in China, it seemed there was still nothing to worry about.
Billions of trips were now being made
ahead of the Chinese New Year holiday.
State-run media kept reassuring people it was safe.
The most worrying thing was that many people were coming together
and then dispersing across China - and across the world.
It was a time of enormous mixing.
WHISTLE TOOTS
Which is just exactly the conditions that are required
for this virus to spread out of control.
CARNIVAL MUSIC PLAYS
But as the festival was in full swing,
the Chinese authorities
put their leading epidemiologist on television
with a damning admission about the virus.
The deadly infectiousness of the new coronavirus in Wuhan
had finally been publicly admitted to the world.
MAN GROANS
PROFESSOR PILLAY: COVID-19 is highly transmissible.
This is the one thing
that determines its spread around the world.
HORNS HONK
SIR PAUL NURSE: It's really quite a nasty one...
because some people are OK, and some people are killed by it,
so it's very difficult to know quite how to manage it.
More than three weeks after the official outbreak,
the Chinese authorities now took extreme action -
locking down Wuhan and the surrounding province - Hubei.
Some 57 million people.
Whilst the streets were empty...
..for the first time, the world had a glimpse of the carnage
the virus would leave in its wake.
But could the pandemic have been prevented,
had the Chinese authorities taken decisive action
to contain the virus...
much earlier?
The citizen journalist who filmed the seafood market in January
has arrived back in Wuhan later in the year to film for us.
PHONE RINGING
We kept in touch through a secret go-between.
TRANSLATION
Human rights groups have reported people being detained,
jailed or simply disappearing after trying to search out the truth.
TRANSLATION
Despite these massive risks,
the citizen journalist agreed to film undercover in Wuhan for us.
These senior medical professionals,
filmed secretly to record their honest opinions,
witnessed some of the first cases.
SIREN
From the beginning of the outbreak,
they were in no doubt how dangerous the virus was.
TRANSLATION
For the first time, doctors in Wuhan are recorded
revealing that they were told by the authorities
not to talk about how easily the virus spread.
TRANSLATION
They say the authorities knew the January New Year celebrations
would accelerate the spread of the virus.
TRANSLATION
The very early outbreak management was just a mess, it's a failure.
I think the pandemic could have been avoided at the beginning
if China was transparent about the outbreak.
And they were quick to provide the necessary information to the world.
Instead, in the weeks before it locked down,
the virus spread quickly from China.
From mid-to-late January, it was detected in 25 countries,
mostly in Asia.
What might have taken two, three, four, five years
to spread a couple of hundred years ago can spread in 24 hours.
It really is like a forest fire in the Australian outback.
A potent viral infection is exactly like that.
REPORTER: It's been confirmed that the coronavirus
that's infected 10,000 people in China has reached the UK.
A week after Wuhan had been locked down,
the virus had officially arrived in the UK.
The first known victims carrying it, two Chinese nationals in York.
A medical team was prepared for them at a specialist unit in Newcastle.
We knew nothing much about coronavirus.
We knew what... that it was a highly infectious disease,
that a lot of patients became very unwell and needed intensive care,
respiratory support, and that patients died.
Dr Matthias Schmid is an infectious diseases specialist
put in charge of the team.
With the patients, everything was under control.
However, we also were aware
that these would not be the last two patients.
We thought right from the beginning that this is
highly likely going to become a serious problem across the world.
By now, the British government was reacting.
The good news was that the UK had developed a COVID test,
which it claimed could be rolled out across the country in weeks.
That was all well and good. What was not contemplated
was the speed with which that test would have to be scaled up,
distributed around the network of laboratories
and the extent to which contact tracing
would be able to be developed.
But the virus was already seeping fast and undetected
from Asia into mainland Europe.
Just one step away from the UK.
If you were to ascribe a consciousness to a virus,
then a clever virus is one that spreads
without you knowing it's being spread.
Exactly a month after China had acknowledged
human-to-human transmission,
a pharmacist in this small Italian town received a surprise call.
We were working here in a pharmacy
when my father got a phone call from the hospital
saying that there had been the first case of COVID-19 here in Vo,
actually, two cases,
and just a few hours later, the first person died from that.
TRANSLATION
It was really surreal.
There was police and military everywhere.
And people, most of all, were scared.
As Europe looked on in shock at its first fatal outbreaks...
PHONE RINGS
..an Italian microbiologist saw a chance to prove something
about the virus that would warn of the pandemic to come.
PHONE RINGS
He wanted to test his theory that it was also being spread
by those not displaying any symptoms.
People who were asymptomatic.
For the first time, we have a community
which is completely closed, nobody can come in,
nobody can go out and everybody's tested.
The test results dramatically proved the professor's theory was right.
On the first survey,
we discovered that about 40% of the people were asymptomatic.
We also showed that an asymptomatic individual
had more or less the same viral load of symptomatic,
so we could demonstrate that they played
an important role in transmission.
Further studies have since suggested those carrying the virus
without symptoms could be as high as 75%.
There's no doubt about it,
asymptomatic spread has been the killer for COVID
because it is the silent spread.
They're out and about.
And they... and no-one knows.
They don't know, you don't know, that there is a risk from them
and that's what makes them dangerous.
Testing continued in Vo.
Those positive were quarantined.
Without fresh hosts, the virus died.
The death toll of three people, I think we were very lucky
to be able to test the whole population,
to isolate even the asymptomatic people,
and after a few weeks, we were virtually COVID-free.
And then we could start again.
The testing programme was expanded across Vo's region, Veneto,
helping to control its outbreak.
Professor Crisanti published his results in Britain.
But the British government did not respond to the emerging evidence
about asymptomatic transmission.
I think there should have been an assumption
of asymptomatic transmission,
because that is such a common occurrence
with a large number of respiratory viruses.
NHS rules were saying people without symptoms don't need to be tested,
when, obviously, they DID need to be tested.
I began to think I was living in Alice In Wonderland
when this became clear.
But by now, Europe was on the brink
of the deadliest pandemic in a century.
By mid-February 2020, the virus was spreading fast,
mainly undetected,
through Italy's wealthiest region, Lombardy,
and its capital, Milan.
Believed to have been brought here by Chinese tourists or workers,
in Lombardy, there was only limited testing.
And only for those with clear symptoms.
TRANSLATION
Salvatore Matsola was living in Bergamo in Lombardy
with his wife Claudia and two children.
No city in Italy would be worse affected.
TRANSLATION
What was so particularly shocking was the knowledge that Lombardy
in particular has a very well-functioning health system.
The images were frankly terrifying.
We were seeing hospitals
failing to cope with the number of patients coming in.
There were patients dying in the corridors.
MACHINES BEEPING
Health workers who were dying.
One of the problems was that the health system in Lombardy
was very much focused on hospitals.
And the community services were much less well-developed.
So patients were going to hospital
and they were spreading it within hospitals.
Two weeks after the Vo lockdown,
the Italian government quarantined 16 million people
across northern Italy...
..including Salvatore and his family in Bergamo.
TRANSLATION
By the middle of March, the virus had officially claimed
more victims in Italy than China.
TRANSLATION
While Salvatore was keeping his business afloat,
his parents were helping to look after the children.
TRANSLATION
One by one, his wife and parents fell ill.
They suspected COVID-19, but no tests were available.
His father, Giuseppe, was in the worst condition.
With no doctors available, Claudia called a helpline.
But Salvatore's father was assessed not to need urgent care.
SIREN
Eventually, they borrowed an oxygen meter.
Salvatore's father's levels were dangerously low.
Finally, they were able to get an ambulance.
The Italian health system was clearly overwhelmed.
I guess it was at that point I thought,
"This could really get nasty."
We, in the UK, and the rest of the world,
were going to have a very serious problem on our hands.
In the UK, the government in London was confident
it could manage the virus.
And I have no doubt at all, with our ability to test
and to survey the spread of the disease,
that this country is going to get through coronavirus.
No doubt at all. And get through it in good shape.
The Prime Minister and his government were unaware
of how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country.
Half-term travel and skiing had done much of the damage.
They had something like
1,300 separate seeding events all across the UK.
And that was driven by half-term travel.
And not just in Britain, but across Europe, a lot of half-term travel
and skiing and stuff. Once you have that,
then containment becomes extremely difficult.
On March 12th, a day after the global pandemic was declared,
the British government officially stopped trying
to track the outbreak across the country,
to focus the 1,500 daily available tests on hospitals.
Community testing of individuals, which hadn't been very successful,
and the contact tracing was stopped,
because we didn't have the capacity to do that.
We were then flying blind.
And you had no idea where it was spreading fastest
and how it was spreading fastest.
And then, just under a week before the first UK lockdown,
the London government ordered the discharge of patients
from hospitals to protect the NHS.
Within a month,
25,000 patients were discharged into care homes.
There was no mandatory testing.
If we had been learning the lessons from Italy,
one of them would have been the risk to people in care homes.
What's called institutional amplifiers.
Situations in which,
once the disease gets into a community, it spreads rapidly
and then spreads both within those communities and outside.
Most vulnerable to this disease are the elderly in care homes.
The care home element of our plan is incredibly important.
The most important task
will be to protect our elderly and most vulnerable people
during the peak weeks.
Finally, on March 23rd,
the UK became the last of the European nations
facing a major outbreak to lock down.
The government at the time were telling us we'll be OK.
We're British, we've got the NHS.
They're ready for this and we'll be OK.
Charlie Williams was following the developing COVID crisis,
whilst keeping an eye on family close by.
My father was in a care home at the time.
Therefore...
you and me have this moment forever.
And it didn't really strike me that my father would be at risk.
Ever again.
If anything, I thought my father would be probably even more safe,
in his care home.
But, as we know, erm...
things spiralled very much out of control.
CHARLIE BEHIND CAMERA: Sing me a next one.
What is it, Nat King Cole, is it? Yeah.
Yeah. Sing me another one.
My father was very happy-go-lucky.
Never walked past anyone without saying hello.
Came over as part of the Windrush generation.
My father was a manager at a plastics firm
and this was one of their events that they'd done.
On 2nd April, Public Health England issued guidance
for care homes taking in patients,
making clear negative COVID tests were not required beforehand.
In mid-April, Charlie learned his father was ill.
I asked the care home,
"Is there anyone with COVID-19 in my father's care home?"
And they said no.
But they've transformed the first floor
into an isolation unit,
and they're receiving patients from a local hospital,
to come to their care home to isolate for 14 days.
Well, of course, we were absolutely shocked.
I knew one of the staff members there.
And she said she was scared for her life, basically.
Erm... cos they didn't have no PPE.
And they're cross-contaminating, mixing the isolation staff
and the regular staff.
Which, you know, I was just totally shocked by.
A doctor then went to see his father.
This is the audio that I recorded, erm...
when I called up the doctor
after she'd been to see my father in the care home.
'If my dad passes tonight, for example,
'what would be put on his death certificate?'
'I'm just struggling to see the solid connection to the virus.'
'Well, it's based on symptoms, and the symptoms are there.
'And, unfortunately, I don't know if you know,
'they have patients with the virus in the home.'
That was the first time I had concrete confirmation
that there are in fact COVID-19 patients in my father's care home.
Just...
knocked me off my feet. I couldn't believe what she told me.
Charlie's father died shortly afterwards.
SCATTERED APPLAUSE
He couldn't get a COVID test when he was alive,
but did test positive during the postmortem.
Complete neglect by this government, of the highest order.
It's devastating to lose my father
under these circumstances.
If it wasn't for these absolutely shameless orders
from our government, to introduce patients
into his care home, my father would still be alive today.
The care home says it followed all COVID guidelines
and the isolation unit was set up for residents
who developed COVID symptoms, not for recovering hospital patients.
It says all steps were taken to avoid cross-infection
and families were notified
about the possibility of COVID in the home,
following the GP's visit.
Globally, hundreds of thousands of care home residents would die,
including an estimated 5% of those in Britain,
during the virus' first wave.
But by now, COVID-19 had also found more fertile ground
across the Atlantic.
We are ready. We are ready. Totally ready.
CHEERING
But I say... So, let's get this right.
A virus starts in China,
bleeds its way into various countries all around the world.
Doesn't spread widely at all in the United States,
because of the early actions that myself and my administration took.
Could have been a whole different story.
SIREN
It did, indeed, turn out to be a whole different story.
MAN BEHIND CAMERA: This is for real.
This is... Look at the hospital,
they're putting bodies in the back of a freezer truck, y'all.
TEARFULLY: This is for real, y'all!
SIREN
Most Chinese nationals were barred from the US,
but not Europeans, who ended up bringing the virus to New York.
Less than a month after President Trump's boast,
the city locked down, its morgues overwhelmed.
But the virus was also spreading fast,
again, largely undetected, elsewhere in the US.
Nowhere more than here, in Louisiana.
JAZZY MUSIC, HE SINGS
Then, the growth rate in this state, terrifyingly,
became the fastest in the world.
Glen David Andrews is a renowned New Orleans jazz musician.
When the music venues closed down, he found work elsewhere,
thanks to the pandemic.
I did about 22 funerals.
Look how sad this is. This man in the hearse.
Nobody, nothing.
And the hearse is just gonna pull off by itself.
TROMBONE PLAYS
When you would normally have 500 people dancing,
sending him off to upstairs, downstairs,
wherever the hell he's going, he's going somewhere!
TROMBONE PLAYS
And I'm the only musician sending this man off.
So far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus
in the United States.
CHEERING
Nobody.
Just before President Trump was on the campaign trail,
the seeds of New Orleans's fate had been sown.
The city had just finished hosting one of the biggest
and longest parties in the world.
You've got half a million people who live here
and they spread it.
And all those people didn't go just through America,
they went back all over the world.
The Mardi Gras was the perfect spread.
It was like free publicity for a germ.
I remember the crowds were really big
in Mardi Gras this past year.
The weather was nice.
The streets were packed.
It was a time
when there was abundant opportunity for transmission
without people ever realising it's happened.
# It's Mardi Gras time. #
The reason Mardi Gras functioned as a super-spreader event
is that there are opportunities for multiple people present
who were infected with coronavirus
to be interacting with hundreds of people one day,
and different hundreds of people another day.
And yet another different hundreds of people the subsequent day.
It just provides an incredibly efficient way
for this virus to spread.
Research has shown that super-spreader events
have played a huge role in the global spread of COVID-19.
It goes through air, Bob.
You just breathe the air, that's how it's passed.
So that's a very tricky one.
It later transpired that before Mardi Gras,
President Trump received a warning from his national security adviser
that COVID-19 was the greatest threat of his presidency.
It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.
This is deadly stuff.
The president knew far more than he acknowledged
from the very earliest days.
We would not have had Mardi Gras, I am confident,
if that had been known and communicated
the way it should have been,
or would normally have been, communicated.
DIXIE MUSIC PLAYS
Many of Glen's friends, including Kazanda Millon,
attended some of the Mardi Gras celebrations.
Kazanda, she's a cool person. Like, overall, solid.
Kazanda went to a traditional Mardi Gras parade
with her mother, Nelda.
Mardi Gras was one of her favourite holidays
because we were born and raised in the culture of Mardi Gras.
TRUMPET SOLO
We were walking around and nobody has masks on
because we wasn't warned of anything.
Not us, not New Orleans, we was not warned at all.
New Orleans locked down on the 20th of March.
Kazanda's mother, Nelda,
who worked in a government welfare office, was already sick.
The colour of her skin could have contributed to her fate.
African Americans often don't have the same access
to primary medical care and are more likely to be in jobs
that disproportionately expose them to the virus.
I do think that she was let down or she slipped through the cracks.
She was lively. She was up. She was...
..probably more lively than me and I'm 28 years old.
So when you first brought her to urgent care... Yes.
..um, she was just diagnosed with pneumonia,
was told to go back home.
And after she went there, she started kind of declining.
If she would have been admitted sooner,
I feel like the outcome would have been different.
Kazanda's mother was admitted to a hospital
nine days after first seeking medical treatment.
If she was not African American,
I think she would have got better services
throughout wherever she would have went.
Black Americans are dying of COVID
at a rate three times that of white Americans.
One of the saddest parts of COVID-19 is that the pandemic
has really affected the disadvantaged
in whatever environment it is, whichever country it is.
By early April, New Orleans' coronavirus death rate
was nearly three times that of New York,
with a population 20 times smaller.
To be honest with you... Sure, I want you to be.
..I wanted to always play it down.
I still like playing it down. Yes.
Because I don't want to create a panic.
MUSIC PLAYS
In April, Wuhan was released from a strict 76-day lockdown.
It is almost ironic that China, where this disease started in Wuhan,
has had far fewer deaths
than many other countries, particularly in the West.
By the spring, new outbreaks in China
were being ruthlessly dealt with.
Suddenly, there is one million or ten million tests, even,
to find out what's going on, isolate it and subdue it.
And the consequence of that is less deaths
and the opening up of the economy more rapidly.
Having covered up the truth back in January,
China was now being praised for helping scientists worldwide
respond to the pandemic.
The fact that Chinese scientists
had sequenced the genome
and made that available early on was a statement of collaboration.
And, in fact, allowed diagnostic tests to be developed,
allowed vaccines to be developed and that's to be applauded.
TRANSLATION
'Welcome to Wuhan space crowd.'
# Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-ba-ba-baa. #
Three, two, one, go!
DANCE MUSIC PLAYS
As China opened up, and its economy roared back to life,
and as the search for a vaccine progressed around the world,
the virus was finding new places to thrive.
TRANSLATION
The death toll started rising dramatically,
doubling in two months
as it reached some of the most vulnerable on the planet.
Nobody is immune from this disease.
The political and the economic elite have been affected, too.
But they are often
moving it from one country to another.
And then spreading to the poor in their countries.
By the summer of 2020,
the virus was spreading most rapidly in South America...
..in a way not fully understood before.
There has been this debate
about the degree to which virus can be airborne -
"I will breathe it out and infect you" -
versus "it is on surfaces".
The research has started to suggest
that airborne spread is more important.
In South America, as in some other parts of the world,
you've got people living on top of each other,
often with poor ventilation indoors.
This is just the perfect situation
for rapid transmission of the infection.
Though Brazil says it spent £9 billion
on its COVID health response, targeting care in poor areas,
like Trump,
the country's president has been undermining health campaigns.
TRANSLATION
Michelle has lived in this favela,
a poor neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro,
for the past three decades.
TRANSLATION
Aged 42, Michelle's husband, Fabio,
had to keep working as a truck driver to support his family.
# Just to hear you breathing. #
In April, Fabio left the favela in Rio on a job.
TRANSLATION
He struggled home
and was taken to an ill-equipped, overcrowded hospital.
TRANSLATION
Michelle trained as a nurse
and thinks he might have got better care at home.
Fabio's mother was on a different floor in the same hospital
when she, too, died from COVID-19 days earlier.
His uncle was also a victim of the virus.
By June, as the death toll was rising in South America,
the UK and Europe
were gradually easing restrictions after the first lockdowns.
The hope was that this would help stem the effect
of an unprecedented economic slump.
A growing confidence
that we will have a test, track and trace operation
that will be world-beating,
and, yes, it will be in place, it will be in place
by June 1st.
I can announce today that for the month of August,
we will give everyone in the country
an Eat Out To Help Out discount.
We could rephrase that,
"Eat Out To Help Out The Virus", actually.
That Eat Out To Help Out campaign led to further spread.
Europe, and including Britain,
opened its gates and said, let's travel.
They tried to recover the economy.
Let's get what we can out of the summer. Everyone started travelling.
It's frustrating, cos we did get down to pretty low levels.
And if we had just been a bit slower...
We could, maybe, have got down, you know, really, really low.
At the time of the end of lockdown, in July 2020,
we needed an environment
and an infrastructure that would keep infections down.
And the Test and Trace system was completely failing.
I have thousands of photos. These are when we went to Poland.
I was having an eye on all of the lifeguards,
so he decided to climb up and show me what I was missing.
But it really tells you who this man was.
Bob Pape, a 53-year-old lawyer,
had been together with Amanda for 11 years.
As you can see from that photo there,
always wearing a Hawaiian shirt every day,
except when he was in court.
In court was probably when he was happiest,
but second to that was probably when he was in nature.
'Bob, it is really going to break, you muppet.'
AMANDA LAUGHS
Bob and Amanda loved to travel.
But when the first lockdown ended,
they decided to take a break in England.
Not overseas.
Bob said that the government wouldn't allow us to travel
if it wasn't safe.
I really thought it was way too soon to let people do things.
I thought it was nuts.
It was Bob who desperately wanted to go away.
They took a trip to the West Midlands.
I should have turned round to Bob before we went,
and I should have said, "We're not going."
You want a cup of tea, Jazzy?
No, I'm fine, thank you. Good.
Amanda's daughter Yasmine, Bob's stepdaughter,
was also on the trip.
We did participate in the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
Erm...
I think that may have contributed to the spread of coronavirus.
This bit's not cooked. Yes.
Not nice if it's not cooked.
Then shortly after returning home, they all fell sick.
That's ready.
They tested positive, and expected Track and Trace to get in touch.
Track and Trace, if it was efficiently executed...
..it could have prevented Bob from getting infected,
and... I can imagine it could have prevented
many people from getting infected.
Track and Trace didn't call
until nine days after they had tested positive.
Bob never even got traced at all.
He could have been going out spreading it everywhere.
Bob was admitted to hospital,
but discharged when a doctor thought it was safe to do so.
But he was still sick.
I tried to speak to him and tell him how much I loved him,
and that I would make him proud with my uni.
And he was just saying that he would always be proud.
And then I left the room and...
never got to speak to him again.
Bob was taken back into the hospital and put on a ventilator.
This is the video of just before they turned off Bob's life support.
He fought so hard and for so long.
Bob died in late September,
just as the virus was creating many new victims across the UK.
When September came and all of these extra risk factors came in,
of universities, schools, going back to work
and colder weather, we broke our testing system.
I mean, we're blind.
We can't see where it's spreading, we can't tell who's getting it,
we can't tell how fast it's going.
SIRENS
Not surprisingly, a few weeks later,
those infections in young adults spread to the elderly,
leading to more admissions into hospital.
All of this was predictable.
Britain wasn't alone.
Ten months into the outbreak,
less then a quarter of countries were succeeding in beating COVID-19.
By the year's end,
the virus across much of the Western world was reigniting.
And in some places, mutating into even more infectious strains.
We're now in 2021,
a year after the first identification of this virus.
It has infected many millions of people worldwide.
High mortality.
SIRENS
The point of viruses is to replicate themselves,
to keep surviving.
As it replicates more, it can develop more mutations,
continuing to evolve,
to transmit even better and better in humans.
If we had an effective way
of really, significantly, reducing transmission,
as has been done in many countries in the world,
then, of course, immediately,
we reduce the risks of these mutants emerging.
Across the world,
around 10,000 a day are now dying from the virus,
the overwhelming majority in the Western world.
What we perhaps learnt is that there can be a conflict
between the individual versus your responsibility to society.
And the ability for the East
to have dealt better than the West may be related to that.
And the conflict between individual and society
is so well-illustrated in the United States.
The virus continues to kill thousands each day
in the world's richest nation.
One victim made a heartfelt plea to fellow Americans.
Never in my life did I ever think that I...
would be fighting for my breath.
Put your masks on!
Don't go out if you don't have to.
But despite the evidence of the virus's continuing devastation,
many are still in denial.
In our church, people vote with their feet,
that's why this crowd keeps growing every Sunday morning.
It keeps growing every Sunday morning.
We're gonna stand with the church that never closed.
Pastor Tony Spell has kept his church open throughout the pandemic,
holding huge gatherings in defiance of public health restrictions.
So the civil liberties that are being taken from us
is people's livelihoods.
Business owners in my church have lost their businesses.
Breadwinners in our church have lost their jobs.
I will fill my church and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it!
Masks dehumanise people.
Show me the science.
After six months of no masking in our church,
why aren't we all dead?
Why isn't this Death Tabernacle, instead of Life Tabernacle?
I hear you.
It's not gone well in the United States.
Failure in leadership and the cult of the individual.
The disease became a political statement.
We weren't actually seeing analysis
of what you should do based on science, knowledge and medicine,
it was based on politics.
The response to a pandemic
is based around trust and a collective will.
Those countries that have done best have been where people understand
how they can act to stop the virus spreading.
Taiwan has really been the standout success story in the pandemic.
It was monitoring what was happening in China,
it closed its borders,
it had a central control centre that had been set up after SARS
that could spring into action very quickly.
Taiwan has essentially been planning for this pandemic
for the last 20 years, at least.
This is what we wanted to spend our retirement doing,
walking and visiting.
Losing him at 53... it's not right.
I can't even come here any more and enjoy it.
Too many memories. Much too raw.
Not while people are still dying.
We have vaccines coming down the track.
That's a great success.
However, it comes with challenges.
As long as there is COVID-19 circulating widely
in any part of the world, then we all remain at risk.
Mutations develop when a virus replicates,
so we've got to limit ongoing transmission.
It is unclear whether the vaccines, as they stand,
will be sufficient to develop herd immunity.
It's looking like we will be with this virus
for a long, long time.
The World Health Organisation has launched an investigation
into the origins of the virus.
The link between animals and humans will be key.
China now denies that the Wuhan seafood market,
or a nearby government laboratory, was the source of the outbreak,
and suggests the virus could have originated in another country.
The way in which this coronavirus became COVID-19,
transmission from animals to humans is going on all the time.
Live animal trading around the world that fosters this is continuing.
And therefore, we've got to expect...
..that this will happen again.
BATS SQUEAK
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