Surviving the Virus: My Brother and Me review – a rigorous dispatch from the Covid frontline

The boys are back in town – and not a moment too soon. As practising doctors and personable presenters, twin brothers Chris and Xand van Tulleken have carved out a neat niche for themselves across various channels over the past few years. They are good at delivering programmes that make medicine and sociomedical issues accessible to the lay viewer, while retaining enough rigour to mark them out from the herd. They are good for what ails ye all round, and would be the natural choice for a BBC documentary about the current state of knowledge of the ever-evolving effects and ramifications of Covid-19, even without their medical specialisms. Chris is a virologist at University College Hospital in London and a bona fide expert in infectious diseases, while Xand is a public health doctor with years of experience in attending disaster zones and fending off epidemics that try to take root there. “Now it’s my country, my home that can’t cope,” he says, not quite keeping the incredulity we have all felt, at least at some point during the past four months, out of his voice.

Surviving the Virus: My Brother & Me (BBC One) is an account of Dr Chris’s return to frontline work on one of the UCH wards repurposed for corona care after a decade in the research lab, and of Dr Xand’s work in care homes after his own recovery from the virus – save for the recurrent bouts of cardiac arrhythmia that at one point send him to Chris’s own A&E.

Filming runs from week three to week 14 of lockdown. In the traditional television manner, we are introduced to patients on the wards to personalise the abstract. Thus we meet doughty 80-year-old Richard, recovering relatively smoothly, and Florentino, who has spent weeks on a ventilator and dialysis machine. His doctors rake scans of his stiffened, unresponsive lungs for signs of hope, and begin to consider whether continued treatment will soon be doing his ravaged frame more harm than good.

In the care home, Dr Xand helps to take care of the 13 residents left after coronavirus swept through the place early on and killed seven – most living on the same corridor –within 11 days. The survivors, most of whom are suffering from dementia, are kept as distanced as possible from each other and have their temperatures monitored all day by masked, gloved staff doing their best to maintain safety and some quality of life for these infinitely vulnerable people.

The most dramatic moment is undoubtedly Xand being defibrillated as Chris watches in enforced passivity. But the most telling moments are scattered elsewhere. The rigour, that little extra edge that marks Van Tulleken programmes out, usually derives ultimately from the fact that the frontline and medical staff they talk to know that they are talking to doctors rather than parachuted-in presenters. The guard drops, the otherwise unavoidable filtering and artifice is lessened, and greater truths are delivered with greater passion. “It’s so malign in so many ways,” says critical care consultant Dr Mike Patterson. “I couldn’t have believed that there would be a disease that made us feel like this … there appears to be an immoveable death rate of 50%.”

The care home manager tells Xand that she has watched her charges “dying painfully, away from their families” and adds, with a kind of weary fury that recurs many times in many staff interviewed thereafter, that the government “gave us the lovely advice that care homes weren’t at risk … we didn’t know what we were dealing with. We couldn’t get PPE.”

“They are deaths that needn’t have happened,” says Xand, in the most explicit, though certainly not solitary, moment of all-but-political commentary.

The willingness of doctors to admit that they do not know things, do not have all the answers, and their intelligent readiness and confidence to advise according to the knowledge they do have, contrasts so sharply with the cowardly shuffling and incompetence of those in power that you flinch every time. Surviving the Virus covered a lot of factual and emotional ground, but it is the sight of people with the humility to stay open, the wit to learn, the ability to make connections and the scientific training to help them synthesise information, theorise, adapt and innovate that stay in the mind when the credits roll. The sight of competence and informed best efforts is a dreadfully striking one these days.