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How major news stories are affecting the lives of people around the world

Bringing together people from around the world to discuss how major news stories are affecting their lives.

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BBC OS Conversations: Covid-19 four years later

Factual

Covid-19 four years later

05/01/2024 GMT

BBC World Service - BBC OS Conversations, Covid-19 four years later

Burnt-out doctors, long Covid sufferers and positive stories from the pandemic

Burnt-out doctors, long Covid sufferers and positive stories from the pandemic.

It’s four years since we reported the first cases of an outbreak of a mysterious viral pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in China. Within months, what become known as Covid-19, had spread around the world affecting most people in some way.

The disease led to the creation of this programme. Since March 2020 – shortly after the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic – we began our first conversations. Four years on, we thought we would take the opportunity to return to Covid-19 and reunite some of the people we have spoken with over the past four years.

Our conversations feature three doctors – in India, Italy and the US – who treated Covid-19 patients in the early days of the pandemic. Two of them, including Dr Tsion Firew in New York, are now stepping back from frontline medicine. “People are leaving critical care after they witnessed those brutal months of Covid,” she tells us. “I’m burnt out, so many of my other colleagues are burnt out, so I’m taking a break for the next few years.”

Host James Reynolds also catches up with three former guests who have long Covid to find out how they are getting on. And we bring together people whose lives have changed for the better as a result of the pandemic. It’s not something they usually talk about openly!

A Boffin Media production in partnership with the OS team.

(Photo: Brooke Young Russell in Maryland in the US with her son and husband Credit: Brooke Young Russell)

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