A 25-YEAR-OLD NHS worker has died from Covid just days after being taken to hospital ‘to get checked out’.
Lauren Jones, 25, from Llwynypia, South Wales, fell ill on Christmas Day after testing positive for coronavirus along with her parents.
Paul and Karen Jones last spoke to their daughter two days before her death when she told them ‘not to worry’.
Lauren, a GP receptionist who would have been due a Covid vaccine in days as a frontline NHS worker, died in the early hours on December 30 at Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant.
Paul and Karen are now warning other young people about the devastating consequences of the virus.
Paul, who works as a police officer, told the BBC: “I watched her walk from the car to the hospital. I thought she would have been out later that day.”
Lauren did not speak to her parents until the next day, when she was receiving treatment to aid her breathing.
Paul said: “She said she’d just had a little bit of ice cream and some water and was going back on the C-PAP machine. She said not to worry.
“That was the last contact we ever had with her.”
Lauren suffered from high blood pressure but her parents said the condition would not have seen her classed as high risk.
Karen added: “We stuck to the rules and it still got us. It’s out there and it could come for you.”
There are a record 32,070 patients with Covid on NHS wards, taking up almost one in three off all beds.
Coronavirus bed occupancy has rocketed four-fold in a month to nearly 7,799 yesterday.
Covid cases hit a new daily high of 68,053 last Friday as the impact of a new mutant strain and Christmas mingling emerges.
A total of 81,960 people have died across the UK, with the seven-day average of 926 deaths a day now just 15 short of the peak of the first wave last April.
