The air in here is alive, vibrating, the omnipresent hiss of highflow 02 and whirring HVAC.
Overlay onto this constant voices: muttered conversations, shouted orders and questions, bitching, complaining.
Punctuate with phones ringing, monitors beeping, alarms sounding, crying, screaming, cursing.

It smells of chlorine and alcohol, subtle notes of ozone and ammonia.

It’s hot in here, hotter still under all of our equipment.
The scrubs are comfortable enough, they’re baby blue and come in two sizes: too small and too large.
They show sweat straight away and stink by the end of the shift, for some reason they only have the one massive pocket.

The gloves aren’t too bad, they make your hands stink and a film of sweat soon forms under them that drives me mad but they don’t get in the way.
The masks cut into my face and behind my ears, I will have faint welts on my cheeks for days, but that can be dealt with.
The face shield is the worst, a cheap piece of grubby plastic, like viewing the world through a playhouse window.
It never sits properly, it fogs easily, it makes communication even harder than it is already.
Thankfully I can usually get away without it.

All that said, I like my job (and I like having a job) and I know I don’t have it all that bad, really my only difficult duty is talking to relatives.

The medics have it worse than me, as do the cleaners, the nurses worse still; twenty, thirty, forty times a day, plastic apron on, new mask, gloves, shield, into a room, out, strip, repeat.

For aerosolised rooms there are overgowns and special, individually fitted respirators, worn for long enough these will saw down into the bridges of noses and the soft flesh beneath the cheekbones leaving wet, red bruises, ritual scars.

I work on one monitor and watch the other, sats and pulse rates and other information I don’t really understand.
One of my informal duties; keep watch on these hieroglyphics and call over someone that actually knows things if something feels wrong.

Glance, grunt, all OK; room 14 is dying, for the third day in a row.
As a rule our patients do not go quickly, though there are exceptions.
I make a note to check the next of kin’s name before visiting hours, not that it matters, the nurses will know it anyway.
We can’t let in many visitors, but we try to when we can.

In the room behind me one of our patients is moaning softly into the highflow mask crushing his face.
His lungs did not form properly so he’s been a regular from birth, off and on before the pandemic, four times during it so far.
Physically he is a few years older than me, mentally he is about 5.
He cannot read and struggles to do simple tasks unaided; he is a very good boy.
Actual children could get used to this, he cannot.
Everyday is as bad as the first.
It’s quite likely that he will die in here, sooner rather than later.

Most of our patients will not die, probably three quarters make it, ours aren’t that sick, there’s worse downstairs.

I get up, stretch, and leave the ward.
A perk of my particular job, most of my colleagues rarely get to go anywhere.
I’m not going far, just to the other side of the unit. We’re split in two, Covid patients in one side and patients with other, less topical problems in the other.
We’re running flat out without enough staff to properly cover either side. I and a colleague cover both, periodically visiting the clean side to do their bits and pieces.

There isn’t really all that much difference between the two sides, the clean half has more variety, less kit, it’s a bit less pressurised, a little more convivial, some of these patients have the strength to get out of bed and do patienty things; ask for tea, wander where they aren’t supposed to, lock themselves in the toilet, escape for a smoke.

There is really nothing unique about Covid, the patients are just better behaved.

Chitchat and coffee and stale sandwiches from the cafe downstairs and trying not to listen to the crash alarm sounding through the floor for lunch then back to work.

Returning from pharmacy to the dirty side, I learn that Room 10 has died.
He was on track to get out of here.
There is blood on the walls and ceiling, bits of crash kit and bed linen piled on the floor. The body in the bed looks like a thing beaten down, broken, spent, dead.
Forget all that shit about just sleeping, corpses always look like corpses.

I couldn’t have been gone more than 20 minutes.

Grunt, roll eyes, go back to my desk, reach for the phone, get the ball rolling on pick up. I’ve seen this one before, nothing unique about covid, same as it ever was, nihil nova suba sol something something look at me pretentious twat making minimum wage watching people choke to death for 12 hours a day.

There is nothing unique about Covid apart from the constant death and the fact that we are all going mad. Turn the dial up on a song you don’t like until it sounds like hell splitting open.

I suppose there was one thing truly unique to Covid: we treated dead people like shit.

The next of kin may or may not learn of their loved one’s death before they’re wheeled away down to the basement. They are almost never there when their family member dies, being in the room presenting an infection risk. They will not be allowed in to view the corpse, not allowed to hold their hand, comb their hair, kiss their forehead.

When one of our Covid patients die the following happens:

The patient is examined and legally pronounced dead by the responsible medical officer.
The corpse is disconnected from any monitors and drivers hooked into it, all lines are pulled, and the room is shut.
Sometimes the nurses will remove jewellery that the family have specifically asked to be saved, they are not meant to do this.

Then the body lies there, for three, four, five hours, until someone is available to come and collect it.
When the collecting porters arrive the body is handed over by the nursing staff.
I withdraw a bodybag, pass it to the porters, make a mark on the box (so I’ll know when to order more), and formally discharge the patient from hospital.
The bags are a little over two metres long, white polyethylene, watertight; glorified bin bags, not the things you’re picturing off the TV.
The corpse is removed, the bed and room are stripped down and sterilised, and we receive a new patient.
We have a long list of prospective patients waiting in corridors and ambulances downstairs.

The family will be informed by telephone.
Generally they know the call is coming, though not this time, this is one of those exceptions.

I talk to relatives every day, but thankfully this is the one call I never make.
This one will come from someone important; the family will have questions I’m not capable of answering.

They’ll get whatever didn’t go with the body back a few days later, wrapped in a bin bag, taped shut.

A phone call, a bag of tat, a mumbled apology, a warning to sterilise everything, and directions to the exit.
Talk about compassionate care.

And the knife hasn’t stopped twisting yet; when the body is finally released from the hospital mortuary it will be to go directly to the undertaker’s then onto the funeral.
There will be no wake, no chance to grieve, no goodbye.

If you are from a country that does not wake its dead it’s hard to explain the disruption this represents.

Ordinarily when someone dies here the body is brought home for a few days, put up in their bedroom or living room, visited by almost everyone that knew the person in life and the family and friends of the bereaved, in Covid this does not happen.

A wake is a kind of communal grieving process, a rallying around those in pain. It gives the family of the deceased something to do while they work their way through the shock, provides them with a framework through which to receive emotional and practical support from friends and extended family, and most importantly it gives them time to understand that their loved one is dead.

When the body leaves the house for the Funeral the family are ready; the burial feels like the end of the first chapter of grief.

Now there is often no real funeral to speak of: a socially distanced service, a handful of people gathered around a grave, no reception afterwards, no community.
A body gets wrapped in a bag, the bag goes into a box, the box goes into a hole, you go home, sit down and try and imagine what your father or daughter or husband looked like when at last their lungs gave out.

Death stripped of anything resembling dignity, reduced to bare mechanics.

That dignity never came back, not wholly.
Eyes made hard never soften, some things cannot be undone.
I think Covid did permanent damage to the way we handle death, changed the contract of grief.

I used to think about those white bags a lot, especially on the way home.
How long would they last in the ground? Would they fall apart, end up as shards of plastic lodged between mud and shale?
Would they hold up down the years, keeping their contents safe, cling film gone tacky over rotten food?
In a few hundred years time someone will get to find out, some curious or careless interloper will lift the veil and see the end of the whole sorry story, there in the ground.

Of course by that time I will be long dead and in it myself. I hope when I die someone will be there, that I will be afforded a wake, that my body will be allowed to return to the earth, that I will not be entombed in plastic to the end of time.

With thanks to Tracy Durnell for her extensive feedback and advice