To coincide with the showing of Breathtaking on ITV this evening, Monday 19^th February, supporters of nine different Covid-19 organisations, representing many thousands of members, will be demonstrating outside St Thomas’ Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7EH, at 1pm today, Monday 19 February 2024.

We will be handing out free face masks and leaflets demanding changes to fundamentally flawed infection control guidelines still in place across the NHS, which put us all at risk.

Tonight, ITV will screen its much-anticipated series Breathtaking, a powerful three-part drama showing the reality of what NHS staff and patients went through as the Covid-19 pandemic first hit the UK in March 2020.

We all know, thanks to the Covid-19 Inquiry and the scandals of ‘Partygate’, that the NHS was woefully unprepared after years of austerity, and that we did not have enough PPE to protect staff and patients from the virus.

What is much less known is that to cover up these failures the government and senior medical officials abruptly changed infection prevention and control (IPC) guidance.

They did this by downgrading the status of the SARS-CoV-2 virus on 19th March 2020, removing it from the list of “High Consequence Infectious Diseases”. A detailed review of this decision can be found in evidence submitted to the Health and Social Care Committee in 2021. In addition, all references to the “precautionary principle” were removed from the guidance, which  is a fundamental principle of pandemic management according to official WHO guidelines.

These changes allowed the government to tell the vast majority of staff that airborne protections were not needed against the virus and that “surgical” face masks would suffice for protection of staff, when in reality we needed, and still need, FFP3 masks and good levels of ventilation or air filtration to stay safe.

Despite international scientific consensus being overwhelmingly in favour of airborne transmission and Matt Hancock admitting at the Covid Inquiry that he as Health Minister knew in “early summer 2020… that ventilation [is] much more important for dealing with the transmission of Covid than droplets”, IPC guidance has remained droplet-based and airborne protections have not been implemented. We continue to be told to wash our hands to stay safe from airborne viruses which we obviously breathe in to get infected.

The consequences for the lives and health of NHS workers and patients have been devastating, with tens of thousands dying and hundreds of thousands having, and continuing to get, Long Covid in our hospitals and care homes. Current IPC guidance puts us all at risk of infection when we access healthcare, especially clinically vulnerable people. It has to change.

Dr Jonathan Fluxman of Doctors in Unite speaks for us all when he says: “Enough is enough! We will be outside St Thomas’ Hospital at 1pm on Monday to hand out free FFP3 face masks to staff and patients together with leaflets to highlight these facts and to demand: How much longer are we going to bury our heads in the sand and follow unscientific guidance in infection control? It is way beyond time that we had new guidance which protects patients and staff properly in the UK’s hospitals and health centres.”

Ondine Sherwood, co-founder of Long Covid SOS said: “People with Long Covid are understandably unwilling to risk reinfection, which can set them back months in any recovery. Healthcare settings currently present an unacceptably high risk due to the lack of mitigations against Covid and other airborne pathogens. This needs to change – effective infection control measures must be put in place urgently.”

The following organisations are supporting the demonstration: Covid Action, Doctors in Unite, Covid Pledge Campaign, Clinically Vulnerable Families, UK Hazards Campaign, Greater Manchester Hazards Centre, Long Covid SOS, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, Long Covid Support.