Grieving families united in call for Covid inquiry demand 'tell us why they died'

Grieving families have joined forces to demand Boris Johnson sets a date for a public inquiry into the government's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than 206,000 people have so far signed a petition calling for an immediate examination of the decisions which led the UK amassing one of the highest death tolls in the world.

It comes after Labour leader Keir Starmer this week said we owe grieving families answers, as the nation marked a year since the first lockdown.

Piling pressure on the government, he said: "We owe both the NHS staff and the families of those who have died to have an inquiry and to learn what went wrong."

However the Prime Minister has so far refused to set a date, adding: "There will be a moment to properly review, to learn lessons for future pandemics."

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© House of Commons/PAKeir Star said we owe grieving families answers

Campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice now represents more than 3000 people who have lost loved ones to Covid-19.

Their calls for a rapid review following the first wave last summer were denied.

They believe an early examination of the handling of the first wave of infections could have saved precious lives and prevented mistakes from being repeated.

Instead the second wave proved even more deadly, and families believe the government was once again too slow to lockdown or impose border controls.

Jo Goodman, co-founder of Covid-10 Bereaved Families for Justice, told the Mirror: "It's hard to believe it was nine months ago - last June - when we were calling on the government to hold a rapid review of their handling the pandemic so that lessons could be learnt to prepare us for the winter.

"Unfortunately they refused and we watched as the second wave death toll dwarfed that of the first, and thousands of new members joined our group.

Each with their own tragic stories of loved ones lost to the Covid-19.

"The lessons from an inquiry last summer might have meant those families would instead be celebrating together, as the country begins to open. The government simply cannot risk this happening again by pushing an inquiry back even further.

"But an inquiry isn't just about learning lessons that could save lives.

"For many bereaved families it's also likely to be the only way they can find answers to what happened to their loved ones. An official, evidence-based account of what did and did not happen, independent of political influence, can help provide closure for many of those in mourning.

"The prime minister has promised an inquiry, and if he can tell us when the pubs will reopen, it's time he told us when it will start."

Grieving families told the Mirror how loved ones were told to isolate at home with paracetamol, while others were denied the chance to say goodbye due to Covid-19 restrictions.

Others have been forced to grieve in isolation and believe their loved-ones deaths could have been prevented.

Grieving Lobby Akinnola, 30, demanded an immediate inquiry to help give families closure to hold those in power to account.

He said it felt "like the world collapsed around me" when he received a call from his mum, who discovered his dad Olufemi, 60, had died at home on his final day of self-isolation.

He told the Mirror: "That was easily the worst day of my life and to imagine that that has happened 125,000 times. I can't comprehend it."

Alison Saunders, who lost her partner of 19 years James Yeats, 58, said the "whole system failed".

Recalling the last time she saw him, she added: "When he walked out into the ambulance he said "well I'll see you when I see you then", and he fully expected to come home and I expected him to come home."

Sadly, he died within the week.

At hospital, he was immediately placed in an induced coma and Alison could not visit or speak to him again, until a nurse called and put a phone to his ear for her to say her goodbyes.

"I don't know if he heard anything I said," she added.

Victim: James Yates, 58

Alison Saunders, 64, said the lack of preparedness left people at home to die alone - with only a telephone helpline to save them.

Her partner of 19 years James Yeats, 58, who had no underlying health conditions but was mildly asthmatic, called NHS 24 - the Scottish equivalent of NHS 111 - two days before he was admitted to hospital.

But a call handler told him to continue treatment at home - despite him explaining that he was struggling to fill his lungs.

When he was finally admitted two days later on April 4, 2020 his organs had already begun to fail.

She told the Mirror: "When he walked out into the ambulance he said 'well I'll see you when I see you then', and he fully expected to come home and I expected him to come home."

Sadly, he died within the week.

Alison, of Whitburn, West Lothian, believes that James, who had undergone major bowel surgery months before, should have been on the shielding list.

She also believes better telephone medical advice for those recovering from Covid at home could have saved the grandfather-of-four.

She added: "They were just leaving you to die basically.

"The recording of the phone call with NHS 24 is heartbreaking. Here's a guy trying to tell someone how ill he was and there's a girl at the other end going tick, tick, tick off a list."

She said the "whole system failed", adding that many lives could have been saved if we had closed borders earlier, locked down quicker and had a better back-up plan in place for health emergencies.

Victim: Tony Clay, 60

Kathryn de Prudhoe's father Tony Clay caught Covid-19 before Britain entered the first lockdown in March last year.

She said government messaging at the start of the pandemic led her father, a fit and healthy 60-year-old, to believe that he was not at high risk, while advice from NHS 111 was "completely inadequate".

He flew back to Leeds, West Yorkshire, from his retirement home in France on March 13 and fell ill with Covid symptoms within days.

Others in his household started to recover after two weeks, but Tony didn't.

Kathryn told the Mirror: "My mum called NHS 111 and he was told to stay at home and take paracetamol. But 36 hours later he collapsed.

"By the time he got into hospital he had already suffered a heart attack and a bleed on the brain and he died alone. We weren't allowed to visit him."

Kathryn, a counsellor and psychotherapist, said she thinks mistakes made in the first wave were repeated in the second wave - in which her uncle, 57, also lost his life.

Calling for an immediate inquiry, she added: "The fact that the summer was squandered while the Prime Minister went on a camping holiday when we should have been battening down the hatches and preparing for the second wave - that I can't forgive."

Victim: Obufemi Akinnola

Lobby Akinnola, 30, said it felt "like the world collapsed around me" when he received a call from his mum, who discovered her husband had died at home on his final day of self-isolation.

Lobby's dad Olufemi, 60, had called NHS 111 three times and spoken to his GP during his three-week battle with Covid-19 and followed advice to continue treatment at home.

His family felt he had turned a corner in his fight against the virus until he suddenly passed away on April 26.

Recalling the moment he received the call, he told the Mirror: "I fell to the ground and I just screamed. I have never felt so weak and I have never felt so overwhelmed.

"That was easily the worst day of my life and to imagine that that has happened 125,000 times. I can't comprehend it."

Lobby is demanding for an immediate public inquiry into the government's handling of the pandemic so lessons can be learned.

The bio-engineering researcher, from Northwood, north west London, believes it will give closure to grieving families and to hold leaders to account.

"It provides closure to the people who have lost loved ones in this pandemic and gives us information to make sure we don't find ourselves in this position again."

He added: "I am trapped in this grief. Every day I wake up and with the same realisation that my dad is gone. It has been almost a year and I am still not used to it and I don't think I'll get used to it.

"Because it really feels like he didn't have to die and it really feels like it wasn't his time."

Victim: Ranjith Chandrapala

Speaking to her dad for the final time via a video call on a nurses smartphone, Leshie Chandrapala begged her dad Ranjith to keep fighting Covid-19.

Leshie said the popular London bus driver, 64, "looked like he was asleep" from his bed in ICU at Ealing Hospital, shortly before he passed away in May last year.

"I said please try and come back to us, but in my heart I just knew," she told the Mirror.

"It was really tough. It was so hard to not be there for him or be by his side."

Leshie, 40, believes her father likely contracted the virus on his regular bus route, which began at the same hospital he died at west London.

She said a public inquiry is urgently needed to address "unanswered questions" about the government's handling of the pandemic - as well as safety concerns and a lack of PPE for bus drivers in the early stages of the pandemic.

She added: "What was Boris Johnson thinking locking down so late not attending Cobra meetings? I think that's unforgivable. If the buck stops with you, you better be prepared to be serious from the start and I don't think Boris Johnson was very serious in the beginning.

"My dad was sitting in a tin can with up to 30 people who could all have been sick at any given time, so why logically that wasn't thought of as a dangerous situation and why drivers weren't given PPE from the outset is just baffling to me."

Victim: Ian Handley, 75

Mike Handley, 53, believes his dad Ian contracted Covid-19 while he was being treated in hospital for an infection in his heart valve.

The retired bus driver, 75, was discharged following a month in hospital on October 19, with notes saying he had tested negative for coronavirus, but started coughing two days later.

Mike subsequently discovered that his father, a popular parish councillor from Chorley, Lancs, was not tested before he left hospital.

Later that month he was readmitted to hospital with Covid-19 and died on November 9, leaving behind a wife of 54 years, two children, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Mike believes that the government failed to learn lessons from the first wave which could have saved his father and countless other lives.

He told the Mirror: "If a public inquiry had been held after the first wave last summer I am sure there would be questions asked and answers given that would have stopped a lot of things that went wrong with my dad.

"I just want lessons to be learned. I am not after revenge because nobody could have foreseen this pandemic that's hit us. But they did have the first wave and they just didn't learn anything from it."

Why Boris Johnson will do every he can do avoid a Coronavirus public inquiry

- analysis, by Jason Beattie, head of politics

The truth and Boris Johnson have always been uneasy bedfellows.

The Prime Minister prefers to dance round facts than ever embrace them.

So it is not surprising he is so reluctant to commit to a public inquiry into the government's handling of Covid.

An investigation would force the Prime Minister to see his true reflection in the mirror.

The image he will see before him is not the mighty Churchillian leader of his imagination but a hesitant, insecure and dishevelled figure whose misjudgements and indecisiveness contributed to the UK's grim death toll.

Perhaps an official inquiry would be too much for the Prime Minister's vanity to bear.

But Johnson is not just scared of confronting his own insecurities.

He is worried about the political consequences of having every detail of how the government performed during the pandemic bagged, tagged and analysed for public inspection.

The story he wants the history books to record is how the, admittedly successful, vaccination programme rescued the country at its darkest hour.

This narrative begins with Margaret Keenan becoming the first person to receive the jab on December 8 2020 and rests on the hope the public will forget all that happened before.

Only a public inquiry can record that more lives have been lost to Covid - at least 126,000 so far - than the 43,000 who died during the Blitz.

It is the only mechanism which can explore why the UK government was not ready for a pandemic despite wargaming such a situation in 2016.

It is how we can shine a light on whether a decade of underfunding had left the NHS too weakened to cope, why those in those in poorest areas were twice as likely to die from Covid and why frontline workers struggled to obtain protective kit.

It would offer a chance to learn why so many patients died in care homes, to find out how the Government could spend millions of pounds on a stuttering test and trace system and why it took so long to protect our borders.

It would establish whether Johnson overruled the scientific advisers and was too slow on two occasions to place the country into lockdown.

And yes, we could learn from the areas the Government got right such as the speed of building the Nightingale Hospitals and the roll out of the vaccination programme.

All those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic deserve to know if those lives could have been saved.

An inquiry would not just allow this government to learn lessons it would help future governments should they face a similar challenge.

The truth will hurt Johnson but the silence will kill.