The DJ was offered a vaccine before her learning disabled sister, who caught the disease. She discusses Frances’s illness, the campaign to change the priority list and the return of Glastonbury
There is a lot of joy in little glimmers of normality these days. For Jo Whiley’s sister, Frances, this includes being able to go back to bingo. “It means the world to her,” says Whiley, the BBC Radio 2 DJ. “And she won £30 last week, which was like she’d won a trillion pounds; she was so happy!” It was only in February that Frances was admitted to hospital with Covid and her family were told to prepare for the worst.
It was something the whole family had been dreading since the start of the pandemic. Frances has cri du chat syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause significant learning disabilities and has other health issues such as diabetes. For the national lockdown in March 2020, Frances moved from her care home in Northamptonshire to her parents’ house. But when she moved back into residential care a few months later, the idea of the virus infecting the residents, says Whiley, was “your worst nightmare. I would speak to a lot of other people who had children or siblings in care homes and we were all thinking the same thing – that we were petrified of Covid getting into the homes.”
