How the Manchester Evening News covered the pandemic

In the strangest of times, M.E.N journalists covered every detail of Greater Manchester’s pandemic experience. With misinformation running rife and clarity from the government thin on the ground, they were tasked with cutting through the confusion.

It started as a normal day in the office.

Our breaking news reporter was in at 6am. Throughout the morning the rest of the newsroom trickled in. Subs, reporters, editors.

Back in March 2020, we all worked from the Manchester Evening News’ office each day, battling ring road traffic and rain to sit side-by-side. Chatter, keyboard tapping and the hiss of the kettle made up the soundscape. It was the norm.

But in the background, a once-in-a-century event was about to change everything. The newly-named Covid-19 was already ravaging China and Italy and cases in the U.K. were on the rise.

In our newsroom, a tatty whiteboard listed the number of cases we knew about across Greater Manchester – 23. In hindsight, the number seems ludicrously low.

The day wore on and suddenly, one of our reporters got a message from a friend. “Becky’s got Covid,” she said out loud.

In what at the time seemed like a dramatic move, she was sent home immediately. As her desk was vacated, our masked-up cleaning team rushed over to disinfect it.

Everyone shifted uneasily in their seats.

Twenty minutes later another reporter came forward as news broke of a spike in cases following Cheltenham Festival. “I’ve been to Cheltenham and my dad’s got a nasty cough,” he told our editor. “Go home,” she said immediately.

By 3pm that day, the whole newsroom was at home. A day later, Boris Johnson told the country to stop ‘non-essential contact and travel’. At that point we had no idea that working from our sofas, kitchen and spare rooms would last the whole pandemic and change the way we worked forever.

Our first remote morning meeting was fairly farcical as people struggled to get online, turn on their microphones and appeared on camera dressed for the office. But like everyone, we adapted.

Classed as ‘essential workers’, M.E.N. journalists covered every government press conference, spoke to people on the streets of Greater Manchester and visited areas others could not. With misinformation and conspiracy theories running rife and clarity from the government thin on the ground, journalists were tasked with cutting through the confusion.

Our photographers in particular worked to offer a snapshot of Greater Manchester at an unprecedented time. Eerie images of abandoned high streets, office buildings and town centres showed the conurbation as we’d never seen it before.

Staff photographer Sean Hansford worked on the streets documenting the first lockdown when no else was out. “It was like something from a zombie movie,” he says now.

“It was really odd getting up for work and making it into town in 12 minutes because the roads were abandoned. I was pulled over in my car numerous times and had to produce my ID.”

Armed only with a mask, some hand gel and his camera, Sean was sent all over the region to picture the bizarre ‘new normal’.

“There was nowhere to get a drink or something to eat, no toilets were open. You were just out on your own in this derelict environment,” he says.

“Seeing people with masks on for the first time was so alien. And you couldn’t help but worry about your family at home. Nobody had been vaccinated and there was this completely new virus sweeping the world.

Though the pandemic dominated the news agenda, other events still happened.

“We were documenting these quiet streets but there were still crime scenes happening,” says Sean. “I remember one man being taken to the ground by police because he wasn’t adhering to the restrictions and wasn’t wearing a mask.”

Top of our agenda throughout the pandemic was exposing flaws in the national strategy and highlighting problems with the centralised decision-making that ruled the NHS.

Our then political editor Jennifer Williams was in conversation with regional leaders and was able to reveal how the government was failing to pass details of positive tests to local public health teams, how track and trace wasn’t working and the secrecy and spin that surrounded Covid hospital admissions.

She revealed how public health officials had been denied the tools they needed to halt this highly-infectious new disease – a practice they had been well versed in since the Victorian age.

And she also revealed how local leaders were quite literally muted as they tried to discuss the region’s pandemic strategy, as well as the startling moment Health Secretary Matt Hancock locked down Greater Manchester with a tweet.

Meanwhile, our reporters worked diligently to expose the crisis in care homes, the spectre of long covid and the economic and social challenges of our region.

We ran a live, daily Coronavirus blog and streamed every government and mayoral press conference on our Facebook page.

When a major incident was declared because of a spike in cases in Oldham, we published a daily update to inform readers of the very latest Covid case figures for their areas. The pioneering ‘robot reporter’ – the brainchild of AI editor Paul Gallagher – used the government’s official data and automatically updated coronavirus rates each day.

Amy Walker and Andrew Bardsley tracked Covid cases through the Magistrates’ courts – while also tackling outbreaks in the court buildings themselves.

Our What’s On team reported in great detail on how the hospitality sector was hit hard by months of closures. And in the absence of gigs, exhibitions and nights out, they created a ‘Stay In’ section to help keep readers entertained during national lockdowns.

We reported on all the schools that reported Covid cases, using an interactive widget. And thousands of people answered surveys we published asking people how they felt about lockdowns and homeschooling.

We told the life stories of people who have died from Coronavirus through Loved and Lost – an initiative which gave scores of families free, online memorials to their loved ones.

When schools re-opened after the first lockdown, we provided up to the minute information on reports of Covid cases and closures with an interactive widget, complementing our exhaustive coverage of advice to parents.

We raised £70,000 though Covaid, a campaign raising money to support the most vulnerable. And we also backed a campaign which raised £200,000 for laptops for children.

We ran a weekly quiz to entertain readers and put their questions – from the mundane to the bizarre – to a local GP.

Greater Manchester was regularly at the top of the political agenda during the pandemic – not least due to Andy Burnham’s very visible rows with Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson’s government over restrictions and tiers.

We also revealed the drama behind that week when Greater Manchester was in battle with the government. And how fractured the relationship between local and national government really is.

But at the heart of our coverage were the people that make up Greater Manchester. From the businesswoman doing hairdressing demonstrations through windows to the mosques working to bring down cases in a borough teetering on the brink of a local lockdown.

And when Greater Manchester was placed under Tier 3 restrictions, Andrew Bardsley spoke to a woman who had been waiting ten months for an MRI scan and the young man who turned 18 when restrictions were brought in.

We looked at the students penned into their halls of residence and focussed on the heartbreaking testimonies of workers on the frontline in care homes who said they begged for help that never came.

Seamus McDonnell spoke movingly to a couple who lost their jobs thanks to coronavirus, then their home and ended up living in a tent in the woods.

In Salford, where people were hit particularly hard by the pandemic, Damon Wilkinson spoke to a Canon who explained how people at the lower levels of society bore the brunt of Covid-19’s impact. While John Scheerhout spoke to people in Trafford desperate to hug loved ones and furious with ‘that man’ in London.

In an atmosphere of secrecy we described what life is like in our hospitals for medics, other staff and patients. But it was our Covid Frontline series that allowed us to offer the greatest insight into the huge pressures facing the NHS at that time.

With NHS England taking over control of communications across all NHS hospitals, it had become increasingly difficult to get answers about any matters affecting the health service – or speak to medics.

Sir Richard Leese, chair of the NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, says local health chiefs wanted to put out localised messaging but were ‘effectively stopped by the NHS nationally’.

“We wanted people to know what was really happening in hospitals and we’d agreed with the Manchester Evening News for them to have access to hospitals to report accurately what was going on and it took months – months – to get NHS agreement for it,” he says.

Sir Richard firmly believes that getting information out to the public as quickly as possible would have ‘saved lives’.

After months of negotiations, M.E.N. editor Sarah Lester eventually met with the chiefs of several local health trusts and stated the case for journalists entering hospitals.

She explained that some readers were telling us Covid was a ‘hoax’ and it was essential we revealed the reality of the situation on the ground.

In February 2021, we were finally given access to the coronavirus intensive care unit at Royal Oldham Hospital. Reporter Sophie Halle-Richards and photographer Joel Goodman were thoroughly briefed, asked to wear full PPE and allowed into the ward to see how staff are battling to keep the sickest patients alive.

Once the interviews were conducted and photographs taken, our editors were left with a dilemma. With the poorliest patients unable to consent to their photographs being taken, it was essential that they were in no way identifiable. The images were scrutinised for identifying features and, where possible, we had to seek the consent of families to include them in the final story.

The extraordinary image below, showing an unconscious patient lying prone on his bed, is an example of the images we were left with.

Recalling that day, Sophie says: “The hospital was eerily quiet and staff looked exhausted. When we went inside the wards and saw the sheer volume and condition of the patients, it very quickly became apparent why our NHS staff were being lauded as heroes.

“One memory that will always stick out for me was the image of a man who couldn’t have been much older than 50 unconscious and laying on his front – a position I later learnt was called the prone position, which was frequently used to treat Covid patients. There was nobody by his bedside to hold his hand or reassure him.”

Sophie and Joel’s final piece was an incredibly moving portrait of doctors and nurses working at crisis point, in the most difficult of circumstances. As Sophie wrote at the time: “Patients lie on this ward, suspended between life and death. Most breathe with the aid of a ventilator, their lungs engulfed by this horrifying disease. Staff attend to them with tender diligence and efficiency.

“Masks are so airtight there is no hospital smell, and, but for the staff’s conversation, which is professional but surprisingly cheery, there’s a silence. No bleeping from machines, just a sense of weary calm hanging over everything.”

Over the course of the next few months Joel accompanied our reporters to Covid wards, intensive care units, a maternity suite and a bereavement unit in hospitals across Greater Manchester.

At Salford Royal, we met non-specialist ‘Cygnet’ Alex Hamilton who explained how clawing acetate, latex and polyester of her PPE was no barrier to kindness.

At Manchester Royal Infirmary, a nurse explained how she her panic attacks were triggered by the feeling of a facemask closing around her nose and her mouth.

At Royal Bolton, midwives on the serene island of a maternity ward explained how they were bringing life into the world at the darkest time in memory.

And medics showed how they made sure patients got urgent procedures, in spite of the pressures of Covid-19.

Manchester Evening News editor Sarah Lester said: “As Covid swept through the country we felt a huge responsibility to record history and to report how our society changed overnight.

“We told the stories of those who lost loved ones and those who put their lives on the line to care for us.

“We were also there to explain the ever-changing rules and speak up for our region in the face of what was a very centralised response. We identified issues which would turn out to be of national significance and detailed how the social challenges of our region often weren’t being considered in lockdown policy.

“In the face of misinformation, it was critical that we got into hospitals so we could report what medics were dealing with. When I look back at our Covid frontline series which told the human stories from inside the NHS it brings tears to my eyes.

“We told the stories of hope and kindness which showed how adversity brought out the best in so many.

“The pandemic was a truly painful time in our history but I feel we did our best in standing up for Greater Manchester and the people who live here.”