Staff rush towards us clad in white gowns and bubble hoods, pushing a stricken woman on a stretcher. She is hooked up to a ventilator, with a web of wires and tubes attached. “New admission, clear the way,” comes the command.
It is one they have heard all too often. I am inside the busy intensive care unit at University Hospital Southampton, where lead consultant Dr Sanjay Gupta and his team are fighting as hard as they can in the war on Covid.
Here, life or death hangs in the balance and patients lie comatose, unaware of vaccines being rolled out to save the world from a virus that’s killed more than two million worldwide.