The NHS did its best, but too many were isolated when they needed connection most, leaving a legacy of deep trauma

• Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor

When the pandemic first struck, I met a patient who described being rushed into hospital as “like being dropped into Hades”. She grimaced as she struggled to convey the trauma of the masked and faceless staff looming over her bed, the mechanical bleeping and human moaning. Blood leaked from her arm where an exhausted doctor had tried and failed – multiple times – to insert a tube into her vein. The other patients looked shell-shocked or moribund. “This is where I’m going to die,” she had thought to herself, “listening to people howling, staring at doctors in masks, with blood all over my hands.”

The most hellish detail, though, was not what was present, but what my patient lacked. No husband, no children, no friends at her bedside. Disorientated and fighting for air, she faced the prospect of dying from Covid entirely cut off from those she loved most. Worse, her experience wasn’t rare but ubiquitous. On stretchers, in care homes, on trolleys, in corridors, tethered to ventilators, blasted by high-flow oxygen, sequestered inside negative pressure rooms, patients in their thousands throughout the last year have confronted death’s proximity alone.