From story to reality

Just over 3 months ago, we celebrated the start of 2020. We made resolutions and had dreams and expectations of what this year would hold. What would define this particular year for us? Brexit was still the word on everyone's lips, but now we can hardly remember it. It's been replaced by COVID-19 and a host of phrases that had not even been invented in January. The most vivid imagination could not have dreamed up the extraordinary changes each one of us has experienced in our daily lives.

During my second-year placement in February, stories of COVID-19 came from a country thousands of miles away. If a patient had a cough, we began to ask if they had travelled abroad recently, but we asked lightly, with no anxiety or premonition about a desperate outcome if the cough was a symptom of COVID-19. During my last placement, news began to spread about the first few UK patients with COVID-19 needing hospital admission. Like many others, I wasn't particularly fearful or even concerned. Journalists were most likely making a mountain out of a molehill.