‘Christmas was awful’: on the Omicron frontline at the Royal Preston hospital

Prof Mohammed Munavvar, a senior respiratory consultant at the Royal Preston hospital in Lancashire. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

After nearly two years on the Covid frontline, there is one image that haunts Prof Mohammed Munavvar. It is of a visit to Preston cemetery, where a friend had been laid to rest.

There he saw a pristine row of gravestones, each planted in the last year. They were all his patients. He knew every single name: “That was terrible, really. It was very traumatic. Even now I think about that image.”