Leeds reflects on 4 years since lockdown

We look back at the empty streets of Leeds in March 2020 as Leeds locals reflect on the first COVID-19 lockdown.

Transcript

00:00 I was working in an NHS hospital in March 2020 and I recall distinctly the preparations

00:08 we were making, trying to understand what this thing was. I'm not a clinician but I

00:12 work with a lot of doctors, nurses and others and we were making what preparations we could,

00:17 looking at what was happening overseas.

00:19 Literally just before lockdown I changed jobs, so I went from working in the office to working

00:25 for NHS. I started working in LGI hospital. So yeah, it was strange, very quiet, there

00:34 was no traffic at all.

00:35 It got a bit boring, you know when you couldn't do anything, it was just wake up, same thing

00:40 every day. We used to take him out because he was born a couple of, about a year or so

00:46 before so most of his childhood he was in lockdown so, and it was just literally in

00:53 an apartment, weren't it?

00:55 It was all an awful time but we were very, very fortunate to live very close to Round

00:59 A Park and we felt that we could socially distance safely here and enjoy the beauty

01:09 of the park. There are many walks around here, you know, through the woodland and up Elmete

01:15 Lane and across and we found a lot of walks that we didn't really know about before.

01:21 The weather was really nice, so we spent a lot of time outside.

01:23 Yeah, it was positive at the beginning, I think there was a lot of family time and time

01:28 to relax but then I went to uni, start of lockdown, well in the September and then that

01:35 was like the negative effect of that. It was isolating a bit.

01:39 We weren't locked down, we were an acute hospital, we were open 24/7 but we were having to think

01:44 radically about how open we were to visitors, how we had to reconfigure the wards, I mean

01:50 it was, you know, I can't imagine a good analogy, it was like preparing for a war I suppose

01:55 but we didn't quite know what. March was still quite early in proceedings.