Luke’s Story – Working during Lockdown

27Away from modelling, my day job is as the press and digital lead for D2N2, the Local Enterprise Partnership for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. We’re an organisation that invests European Union and Government money (around £500m of it) into projects like new roads, visitor attractions, education programmes, and world-leading research in order to improve the lives of the 2.1 million people that live in our region. 

As an essential worker (albeit one able to work remotely) during the pandemic, its been my job to communicate Government, economic, and public health advice to our communities, to educate, inform, and in many cases to reassure them that someone is listening, someone is acting, and someone will help.

In the first month of lockdown, we created two schemes from scratch to help people directly affected by the pandemic: our Redeployment Triage Scheme helps people who have lost their jobs because of Covid-19 into industries that really need more employees like supermarkets, care homes, and haulage firms whilst our PPE4NHS campaign has been asking our region’s businesses to donate any spare Personal Protective Equipment they have to our local hospitals and care homes where the need is desperate. 

It feels good to be doing something that will help people put their lives back together at the end of this. 

Having friends working in medicine, seeing the effects of the disease up close, helps maintain perspective.

I’m not in any immediate danger and I interact with people through a screen, not several layers of heavy-duty plastic surrounded by those biohazard warning labels you see in films.

This global crisis is just too big for anyone to get their head around so I don’t even try. I follow the news and keep track of the statistics: infections, hospitalisations, and the death toll but I try not to think about the human cost of it all.

I compartmentalise and think about the next job and one day.