I didn’t believe the virus was real, Covid-19 patients told nurse

A senior nurse in a coronavirus ward has said patients told her they did not believe the virus was real.Senior charge nurse Rosario Walshe leads the team at Ward A31 at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert in the Falkirk Council area and said there has been a “huge spike” in cases recently.The PA news agency was given access to the 32-bed Covid-19 ward where every bed was taken as hospital referrals have doubled since the first wave.Ms Walshe believes a combination of family gatherings at Christmas, people ignoring guidelines and the new rapidly-spreading variant is behind the rise.“I’ve had patients say to me, ‘I wish I had listened, I didn’t listen.

I didn’t really believe it was real,’ so that was quite an eye opener,” she said.“The last few weeks have been extremely busy and challenging.

It’s definitely different to the first wave.“We’ve seen a lot more admissions with Covid-related symptoms – we’ve seen lots of groups of family members admitted with Covid, a lot of young people, which you didn’t see so much in the first wave.“We’ve had some extremely sick people.

Patients discussed with ITU (intensive treatment unit), some transferred to ITU.

It’s definitely been a lot more challenging.”“The reasons for it getting worse I think I can only assume that people weren’t following the guidelines.“We’ve seen a huge spike in our cases, so I think we can all assume that family get-togethers at Christmas are one of the reasons our cases have gone up so much.“It does annoy me slightly, lots of staff members are adhering to the policies and guidelines, trying really hard to socially distance and then you’ve got people who refuse to believe this is real.

We still have the element of people that don’t believe.”