The real heroes who kept country going amid Covid

IT'S five years since I spoke to Rodrick Silva, whose dad Rudy drove the 37 bus through the part of London where I live.

- ROS WYNNE-JONES

Rudy had recently died of something called coronavirus.

"He had no mask, no gloves," Rodrick told me.

"People were still using the entrance next to the driver."

He sent me a picture of the foul toilet at the drivers' break points that his father had sent him in distress. "The toilets at the drivers' stop points were disgusting".

Rodrick said. "They were filthy. How was he supposed to keep clean?"

Today is a Day of Reflection across the UK for Covid-19 victims - ahead of the fifth anniversary on Tuesday of the moment the World Health Organisation declared the global pandemic.

It's a day I'll be thinking of Rudy and all the other lockdown heroes.

The men and women who kept our country going while many of us stayed safe indoors. The care workers and cleaners, bus drivers and fruit pickers, delivery drivers and nurses, hospital porters and posties.

Millions of workingclass people, thousands of whom paid with their lives.

When we talk about the Mirror's coverage of the pandemic, many will think of our award-winning investigation into the Partygate scandal that brought down a government.

But the human stories of those who gave their lives to keep others safe is the flipside of that story.

The people who isolated from their own families, slept in the bathroom, worked 20-hour shifts, never saw their friends, whose masks cut into their skin, whose dreams were filled with the dying, who held hands with strangers as they slipped away.

The people who lived through a devastating and disproportionately dangerous version of the virus on all of our behalf, while others were sick up a wall on a famous street off Whitehall.