Kate Garraway hoped husband Derek Draper would promote ’emotional’ documentary alongside her

Kate Garraway had hoped her husband Derek Draper would be well enough to promote their documentary alongside her this month – when she began making the programme in August.

The ‘Good Morning Britain’ co-host’s significant other has spent nearly a whole year in hospital after initially being struck down with coronavirus in March 2020, and he is still in intensive care and dealing with the after-effects after the virus ravaged his body.

Kate’s new documentary, ‘Finding Derek’, will air on ITV next week, and as well as focusing on her family’s turmoil, it will look into how others have been affected by long COVID, in which people have experienced the effects of coronavirus weeks or months after the initial illness.

Speaking about the documentary, she said: “It’s a moment, I think it’s a moment for everybody isn’t it, when you suddenly realise it’s been a year, that we have all been living with this.

“This is something I began making back in August, obviously back then, rather hoping Derek and I would be chatting with you together, and that more recovery would be possible, but that has not been the case.

“It is looking not just at what happened to my family, but also to other families and the very, very long tale that COVID has.

“Obviously Derek is an extreme example, we don’t want to scare people with what he has been through, but there are many other people who have got versions of it, and still not enough is known about the impact of long COVID.”

Kate also insisted long COVID is “more widespread” than just being about breathing problems, fatigue, anxiety and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Speaking on ‘GMB’, she added: “When we talk about long COVID we tend to think of long-term breathing problems, fatigue, anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome – but it is much more widespread than that.

“It is very emotional.”

Last weekend, Kate admitted Derek has deteriorated “dramatically” since Christmas.

She said: “He’d been in hospital for nearly a year and I do wonder if he’s become institutionalised. I wonder if there’s a little bit of emotional lockdown going on.

“I feel like he is in an ocean of unconsciousness and sometimes he comes up to the surface. In the run-up to Christmas there were moments of consciousness where I felt like we were really communicating.

“But then the focus of the concentration disappears, and he’s gone.”