"It was like falling off a cliff. All you can think of in that bed is that you might never come out." In the days before he was rushed to hospital with pneumonia brought on by coronavirus, Dave Sweeton only knew he had been feeling a bit under the weather.
Having strictly adhered to social distancing, the Tameside councillor thought he was fighting off a chest infection and ruled out any chance of having contracted COVID-19. "I did feel I was coming down with something.
I was tender to the touch and sweating at night," he said. "But never in a million years did I think it was coronavirus. We just didn’t know." Within 36 hours Dave's health deteriorated rapidly.