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As UK Hits 100,000 COVID Deaths, Government Vows to 'Learn Lessons'

Henry Ridgwell

   LONDON - Looking through family photographs at his home in Leeds,
   England, Gordon Bonner, 86, said he was lost in a "hinterland of
   despair and desolation." It's been nine months since Muriel, his wife
   of 63 years, died from COVID-19. He was called to her bedside for the
   final moments.

   "I sat for the next hour and watched Muriel drown in her own body
   fluids," Bonner said. "It was the most harrowing experience of my life.
   And it will haunt me, and I'll tell you why. Such was her fight for
   oxygen that she was sucking at the air, and I can still see her face
   now and her lips formed a perfect circle as if she was sucking through
   a straw."

   The retired army major was not allowed inside the chapel at nearby
   Rawdon Crematorium for Muriel's final committal.

   "We had to stand in the car park, and I had to watch as six strangers
   came out, unloaded the coffin, took her into the crematorium chapel,"
   he said. "And the last I saw of her was the tail end of her coffin as
   the doors closed."

   Bonner's haunting account is one among a horrifying number of stories
   of loss and grief shared by families across the country.

   Britain became the first European country Tuesday to report 100,000
   coronavirus deaths over the course of the pandemic. A quarter of those
   have occurred in just the past three weeks as a mutant, more infectious
   strain of the virus has ripped across the nation.

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