Kate Montague

The day Jack was born, the hospital had begun to disallow visitors to the maternity wards and, in the following week, all face-to-face postnatal health visits and healthcare checks would be cancelled or transferred to online consultations. Covid-19 had been seeding in the UK for weeks already, and by mid-March, the models suggested that infections were doubling every two to four days. Contact tracing and community testing had been abandoned the week that Jack was born because of ‘widespread community transmission.’ Tens of thousands of people were being infected every single day.