Tess Finch-Lees: We're drowning in a wave of Covid, but hospitals ...

Midnight: phone pings. “It’s seven hours since I’ve had food or water, six days since I saw my kids, five days since I slept, two hours since I’ve been lying in my own urine”. That was a message from an Irish hospital inpatient named Gill, a previously healthy young mother.

She went in for a routine procedure and remains indefinitely, having caught SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.