Getty ImagesThe chair of the Covid inquiry has refused an application from the UK Health Security Agency to keep the identities of two junior clinicians secret.

There is only “weak evidence” that high-grade face masks better protected health workers than surgical ones in the pandemic, the Covid inquiry has been told.

BBCNurses bore the brunt of the pandemic, with low staffing levels and difficulties accessing protective equipment, according to England’s former chief nurse.

BBCCovid patients have been admitted to hospital more than a million times in the UK since the virus first emerged in 2020, while countless others have had care for other conditions disrupted as the NHS struggled to cope.

Getty ImagesAmbulance crews are wasting “significant” amounts of time being called out unnecessarily to prisons across England, the health safety watchdog has said.

Getty ImagesThe NHS is appealing for people with O-type blood to urgently come forward and donate, after blood stocks dropped to “unprecedently low” levels in England.

Science Photo LibraryA woman had to be tested for HIV after being given a vaginal examination with a swab already used on another patient, the health ombudsman has said.

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11 minutes agoGetty ImagesLong waits for cancer care are becoming routine across the UK with nearly half of all specialist cancer centres experiencing delays most weeks, the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) has said.

Published1 hour agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Family photoBy Jim ReedHealth reporterIt was February 2017 when the message arrived on Facebook. “There’s a much bigger scandal that you need to look into,” it read. “Thousands have died and still nobody talks about it.”That was the first time I heard from Su Gorman and Steve Dymond. I’d been working on a story about hepatitis C treatments. But they wanted me to go to Ramsgate, in Kent, to meet them about something else.A few days later, a heavy bundle of A4 papers arrived: handwritten notes, photocopies of old documents, press clippings from the Kent Messenger newspaper. I quickly learnt that Su was not someone you could easily argue with – or put off with an excuse. Train to Kent coastShe had met Steve at Exeter university in the mid-1970s, where they both studied Russian. They married on 25 October 1980, which was, Su was fond of pointing out, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.Steve had been born with a mild form of the bleeding disorder haemophilia. He didn’t really need a new type of treatment, called Factor VIII, but he was given it anyway. We now know that whole batches of the blood product, made from pooled or mixed donations, often from the US, were contaminated with deadly viruses. Much of the blood had been donated by high-risk donors, such as prison inmates and drug users. If just one was carrying a virus, the entire batch could be contaminated.I read the bundle of documents and later took a train down to the Kent coast where Su and Steve lived in a small bungalow, not far from the seafront. It was the first of perhaps half a dozen trips over the next few years as I – and other journalists – continued to report on what would become a national scandal. Image source, Family photoSteve had first been told something might be wrong in 1983. His local hospital called and warned he may have been exposed to HIV, or HTLV-3 as the virus was then known. At the time, there was no quick test. The couple had to wait 18 long months until they were given the all-clear. “It was an absolutely terrifying period,” Su said to me, a time when the “fear and panic” around Aids was only just starting to emerge. Su and Steve put off having children, something they both deeply regretted later in life. Around 1,250 haemophiliacs were infected with HIV as part of the infected blood scandal,