The trials and changes seen in Newport after one year in the midst of a pandemic

Published date05 March 2021
Publication titleWalesOnline (Wales)
It came just over a week after a patient who had recently returned from northern Italy became Wales' first confirmed case of the virus on February 28.

One of the new cases was from Neath Port Talbot area. The other was from Newport.

Although more than 300 people in the UK had already tested positive, Wales would be several weeks away from introducing the measures which would come to define our lives for the next year.

After all, the new cases had brought the total number in Wales to only six. At the time, the Six Nations game between Wales and Scotland at Cardiff's Principality Stadium in front of 70,000 people was still going ahead.

Three days later, on March 11, WalesOnline broke the news that an employee working for the Office of National Statistics in Newport had tested positive for the virus.

An ONS spokesperson for the site confirmed it remained open and that "appropriate steps" were being taken to protect staff.

But the muted sense of urgency wouldn't last long, and the gravity of the situation quickly taking hold.

Two weeks later the strategy to, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, "delay and flatten the peak of the epidemic" had resulted in more than 300 UK deaths. The number of cases had skyrocketed to 6,650.

The delays in taking effective action have been debated at length, but the reality for those living in Newport was that all measures came too late to avoid the city becoming the centre of the spread of the virus in its early days.

Within days, the virus would wreak havoc on businesses and hospital wards and would leave a dark cloud over many families in the city forever.

The epicentre of the virus

By March 26, three days after the UK announced its lockdown, almost half of Wales' 738 cases were in the Aneurin Bevan Health Board area.

Despite some reports of large groups continuing to meet in Newport city centre, something had certainly changed in the air.

Vaughan Gething suggests Wales is 'over the worst of second wave' as infection rate continues to fall

Daniel Hicks, a 25-year-old pharmacist at Martin Davies Chemist on Caerleon Road, said at the time: "At the start of last week, there wasn’t a lot of difference in how people were acting. We were still having people come into the shop as normal.

"But then as that progressed into the end of last week and into this week now, we’re noticing people are aware of social distancing and they’re trying to keep two metres apart."

The number of daily cases and rolling rate of infection in Newport since the day of its first case:

Aneurin Bevan University Health Board said at the time that the high numbers were partly due to a higher level of testing in that area.

But that didn't tell the full story of how the virus was ripping through communities.

The virus has hit poorer areas worse than others across Wales, and Newport has been no different. Statistics have shown that areas of lower incomes, higher unemployment and often with a higher BAME community, are disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

In June we spoke to people in Pill, the most ethnically diverse ward in the city, about how people there had been impacted.

"I've known people directly that it [the virus] has killed in Pill. It really has been a dreadful time," said former city councillor Omar Ali at the time.

"Some of the barbers have been closed, some of the food shops have been opened but they've lost a lot of their business... the taxi business has lost a huge amount of trade.

"A lot of those people now, they're older people with limited skills so they'll be forced onto the dole unfortunately."

There is nowhere more important in understanding the impact of the virus than hospitals, where thousands of nurses, consultants and health workers are putting their lives at risk every day to help those most severely affected.

Here too, the reports were worrying.

Dr David Hepburn, an ITU consultant at the Royal Gwent Hospital who would become a familiar source of comfort for his direct reporting on what was really going on inside hospital wards and intensive care units, told WalesOnline how the hospital's ITU had almost become overwhelmed due to the number of cases combined with many staff, including himself, going off sick with the virus.

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