'Just so hard': how Melbourne's medical staff took on the Covid wave

With dozens dying each day and staff shortages, doctors and nurses banded together, treated and even carried out research

There is only one Covid-19 patient left in Melbourne's St Vincent's hospital, where intensive care physician Dr Barry Dixon works. He still finds it hard not to focus on the bad days he experienced during the peak of Victoria's second wave when upwards of 60 patients were in the facility.

At one point, a person he knew well was admitted to the intensive care ward, their lungs struggling, and Dixon worried about their prognosis. They pulled through, but he says it was a traumatising time.