Inside Greater Manchester's busiest hospital two years on from their first Covid patient

When a highly contagious new coronavirus variant began to emerge across the globe, staff at Manchester Royal Infirmary went straight back to disaster response mode.

Their sense of dread was comparable to more deadly strains such as Kent and Delta - which saw hundreds of patients from across the city requiring life-saving treatment.

And thankfully, whilst Omicron didn't turn out to be as 'vicious' as the likes of Delta, it presented a new set of challenges for exhausted medics - most of whom have been battling the virus for nearly two years.

READ MORE FROM OUR 'ON THE COVID FRONTLINE SERIES'

When the Manchester Evening News visited the hospital earlier this month, visitors were still restricted from seeing their loved ones in person, and head-to-toe PPE is still very much a necessity.

We were granted special access to document how life has changed for those working on the Covid frontline, and how brave medics battled a tidal wave of infections at the start of the new year.

In January, Covid infections sky-rocketed across Greater Manchester, as neighbourhoods posted record high case numbers due to the exponential spread of the variant.

Some local areas in the conurbation saw eye-watering infection rates of more than 3,000 cases per 100,000 people following the Christmas period.

This meant that a large proportion of the patients being taken to MRI after the festive period would test positive for coronavirus - even if that wasn't the reason for their admission.

"We had to learn very quickly how to flip everything on its head," says John Bright, an acute consultant and respiratory physician.

He left his job running a hospital in the Middle East and returned home to the UK, when the pandemic hit in early 2020.

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