The son of a doctor who died of coronavirus after warning Boris Johnson about a lack of personal protective equipment has confronted the health secretary, Matt Hancock, asking if he regrets not taking his father’s concerns seriously enough.
Intisar Chowdhury, the 18-year-old son of Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a consultant urologist at Homerton hospital in east London who died after contracting Covid-19, also criticised the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis.
Intisar Chowdhury, who earlier called on the government to apologise to the families of healthcare workers who have died, confronted Hancock on the Nick Ferrari radio show on LBC on Tuesday.
He asked why his father’s letter to Johnson was ignored. “When he was unwell he wrote an open letter to the prime minister appealing for more PPE for NHS frontline workers, it was a request that was ignored, two weeks later he passed away and since then over 100 NHS and social care workers have passed away from contracting the virus,” he said.
“Do you regret not taking my dad’s concerns, my 11-year-old sister’s concerns … seriously enough for my dad that we’ve all lost?”
The health secretary told him he was “really sorry” about his father’s death and thought it was brave of him to speak out in public.
“We took very, very seriously what your father said and we’ve been working around the clock to ensure that there’s enough protective equipment,” he said “In the case of anybody who works in the NHS or in social care [who] has died from coronavirus, we look into it in each case to find out the reasons where they might have caught it and what lessons we can learn.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier on Tuesday, Chowdhury said: “I definitely do want a public apology because I feel like the government response in not only handling the PPE crisis but the whole crisis wasn’t the best.”
He added: “I think that we could forgive that as a country, as it’s such an unprecedented thing it’s hard to know what the right thing is to do, but they need to be able to hold themselves accountable for that, make an apology for that, learn from that and then move on so we can trust them more.”
The 18-year-old’s father urged the prime minister to ensure every NHS worker was protected in a direct plea on Facebook last month shortly after being taken ill with Covid-19.
In his Facebook post on 18 March, Abdul Mabud Chowdhury said: “People appreciate us and salute us for our rewarding job which are very inspirational but I would like to say we have to protect ourselves and our families/kids in this global disaster/crisis by using appropriate PPE and remedies.” The 53-year-old died on 8 April.
His son said on Tuesday he was glad that the PPE issue was now getting the attention it needed.
But asked about the government announcement of £60,000 for every family of a healthcare worker who has died as a result of the disease, he said it was a “step in the right direction”, but did not go far enough.
“If I’m being honest rather than the 60k for my family I would rather the efforts go into giving more PPE to NHS,” he said. “ I have family friends and cousins that work in hospitals and they are still having to reuse their equipment and clearly they do not have the adequate equipment right now.”
Hancock said families will receive the payment as part of a “life assurance scheme” and expressed a “deep personal sense of duty” to care for their relatives, as the reported death toll for frontline workers rose to 134.
Relatives of those who have died welcomed the money but said it would not make up for their loss, and warned it should not distract from the need to protect those working alongside coronavirus patients.
“The money itself doesn’t really cover up the fact that the government hasn’t really made a public apology yet,” said Chowdhury. “[The government] have a press conference every single day where they have an opportunity to own up to their mistakes and you know what, as citizens none of us are expecting perfection from the government we are just expecting progression.”
