100,000 Covid deaths: ‘I cursed the sterile white room where Ann died’

Already 100,000 people in the UK have died with Covid, according to the official count. The idea of 100,000 deaths is hard for many of us to comprehend. But each was a human being who lived and loved in their own unique way. This is the story of one of them.

By 3:01am, alone in a hospital room, Ann Fitzgerald reached for her phone. This would be her last chance to contact her husband of four decades, the man she'd raised two children with, her Tony - to Ann, he was always her Tony.

The couple had made a pact. So long as Ann was in hospital with Covid, Tony would spend his nights dozing upright in a chair at their bungalow in Pewfall, Merseyside. That way, he would wake up if there was a message alert.

It wasn't much of a sacrifice, Tony thought, not when the woman he'd loved for 47 years was all by herself and frightened. And besides, each time his phone bleeped Tony would know she was still alive, and silently he'd thank the stars.

And so in the early hours of Tuesday 7 April, Ann's last message arrived. She'd summoned the energy to take a farewell selfie as she lay in bed wearing an oxygen mask. "She must have thought: 'Here's something so you won't forget me,'" says Tony.

Two-and-a-half hours later, Ann was dead. She was 65, a mother, a wife, a neighbour, a colleague and a friend, and one of 999 people in the UK who died that day with the novel coronavirus.