My daughter and I bear cost of poor Covid response

These were the words I found myself saying in the early hours of 30 March 2020, exactly a week after the UK was put into lockdown. Last week, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry found the response by all four UK governments to the pandemic was a case of “too little, too late”. I can’t begin to tell you how incredibly sobering it was to see this in black and white.

I had little doubt that much would be written about the lessons that could be learnt, the actions of those in government, and the lives that could have been saved had there been a different response. Numbers and statistics would be shared. But for me, these findings weren’t political. They were personal.

Because behind every statistic is a life. A family. A story. My husband, Stuart “Charlie” Charlesworth, was 45 when I made that 999 call. After he was tended to by paramedics, he walked down the stairs to the waiting ambulance and was rushed to hospital. Just over two hours later, I learnt over the phone that he had been sedated, ventilated and taken to the intensive care unit. And when I say intensive care unit, it was, in fact, an additional unit that had been created in the hospital’s theatres because the actual unit was full of other patients.

For me and our daughter, Rebekah, so began three of the longest weeks of our lives. Unable to visit him due to lockdown restrictions. Waiting by the phone for any update from the hospital. Setting up WhatsApp groups to provide family and friends with updates on his condition. We were isolated in our own house. Nobody could come in to give us support. No hugs. No cups of tea. Nothing. It was just Rebekah and me clinging to hope.

That hope lasted until 19 April 2020, when the call came to say he wasn’t going to survive. They couldn’t tell me when, but they knew his death was imminent. I was given the chance to go into hospital for the first time to say goodbye — swiftly followed by the acknowledgement that I’d have to go by myself to do so, as they didn’t have enough PPE for Rebekah as well. And that if I did go in alone, I would then need to isolate from her for seven days because there was no way of knowing whether either of us had had Covid-19.

While many would consider this a heartbreaking decision to make, as a mother, it was a no-brainer for me. I simply couldn’t leave her. I knew that Charlie would have understood the rationale for me not to go in and say goodbye. Instead, Rebekah and I said our goodbyes to him via a Skype call on my phone. The most surreal experience to go through. Shortly afterwards, I got a call to say my partner of just over 21 years, the father of my child, was dead. I became a widow at 39. Rebekah became fatherless at just 10 years old. The result of a virus that six months before no one had ever heard of.

Adjusting to our new normal wasn’t easy under lockdown. A few months after Charlie died, I was fortunate to join the charity WAY — Widowed and Young — the only national charity in the UK for men and women aged 50 or under when their partner died. In September this year, I became a trustee. It’s my way of giving back to a charity that is a lifeline for so many. And I’ve also found comfort in writing. Having launched a blog in 2021, November 2025 saw the launch of my book, Is Daddy Going to be OK?

The title is the six words that Rebekah said to me as the ambulance pulled off our driveway. The heartbreakingly innocent question of a child desperate to be reassured that her daddy was, indeed, going to be OK. But I couldn’t give her that reassurance, because I simply didn’t know the answer. All I could offer her was, “I don’t know”. It wasn’t a question that I could have ever prepared myself to answer. To this day, it breaks my heart that her dad couldn’t come home to us. That we couldn’t personally consign the Covid pandemic to the history books, as so many appear to have done.

Instead, we will always be one of the many families still living with the permanent aftermath of the decisions made at the start of 2020. The human cost behind “too little, too late”.

Emma Charlesworth, The Independent