Kate Garraway assures ICU doctor he ‘shouldn’t feel guilty’ for keeping family from patients as husband Derek continues Covid battle

Kate Garraway assured an ICU doctor that he ‘shouldn’t feel sorry’ for keeping family away from Covid patients – as her husband Derek remains in hospital after contracting the virus. 

The Good Morning Britain presenter spoke to Jim Down about his new book and spoke about the pressure coronavirus had on doctors. 

Admitting they were having to make their decisions ‘on the hoof’ as they learned about the pandemic, Kate then assured him he was doing the right thing by keeping family away from hospitals. 

She told him: ‘You do talk about feeling guilt for separated relatives and having to sort of try to explain to them why they couldn’t be there, and why you often couldn’t get back to them.

‘Just as somebody who’s on the other side of those phone calls you shouldn’t feel guilty because we do understand what you’re up against.’ 

He responded: ‘My heart goes out to you, and all the relatives of people have been in ICU. We’re not used to not having relatives at the bedside, and I think that added dimension to it for, for you, and all the relatives that it is just, just horrible. So my heart really goes out to you.’ 

‘Well, it’s wonderful and we all thank you for what you and all your colleagues and all the all the different teams in all the hospitals across the country,’ Kate then concluded. 

Kate – who shares two children with Derek, Darcey, 14, and Billy, 11 – has been open about the difficulties she’s faced, especially after not being able to see her husband since Christmas. 

Despite now being free of Covid-19, the illness has wreaked havoc on Derek’s body and he has suffered many issues as a result, including being left with holes in his heart, lung issues and diabetes which he did not have before.

Speaking about dealing with the virus, Dr Down explained: ‘It’s one of those moments of my career that I’ll never forget, because, like everyone, we thought the two things about the disease. 

‘One: we thought it would be mainly disease of the lungs, so we thought it was going to be a pneumonia type disease, and, of course, it’s turned out to be a disease that often affects when people come to it affects all their organs. Their heart, their brain, their kidneys, their blood clotting. 

‘It’s not just a lung disease so that was something we didn’t really know until it hit us, and then of course we’ve never treated this virus before, so although we could do intensive care, we didn’t know specific treatments to give. 

‘We didn’t know when to give steroids, we didn’t know exactly when to put people on ventilators, when to give other anti inflammatories, when to give antibiotics so we were learning a brand new disease on the hoof as it were. 

‘It would surprise us all the time, and of course, therefore things happen that we weren’t expecting. And that was shocking.’ 

Good Morning Britain airs weekdays from 6am on ITV.

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