Touching video from BBC urges people to not give up hope and to stay home
Forget meditation to help soothe coronavirus worries and motivate you to spend yet another day inside. All you need is Idris Elba.
The 47-year-old British actor narrates the poem "Don't Quit" by Edgar Albert Guest amid real-life moments from the coronavirus pandemic in the UK. The BBC Creative film was released Friday night.
A couple of lines tug especially hard at the heartstrings: "Don't give up though the pace seems slow. You may succeed with another blow." Listen as Elba delivers the poem with a voice perfectly fit for children's bedtime stories and videos to lull us into staying home.
"This is a time when everyone is pulling together to get through this crisis. We really hope we’ve managed to capture the emotion of that and show the ways in which the BBC is trying to help by using all our resources to keep us connected and bring us closer," Helen Rhodes, BBC Creative's creative director, said in a press release.
Last month, Elba announced via Twitter that he had tested positive for COVID-19 after being exposed to someone with the virus. Though, the actor said he didn't exhibit any symptoms. His wife, Sabrina Dhowre, tested positive less than a week later. On March 31, Elba took to Twitter to update his followers on his health status and said he and his wife are still asymptomatic.
People in the UK must stay home, though there are some exceptions such as trips to the grocery store, exercise, and medical needs. The country's prime minister Boris Johnson has since contracted the virus, though he is no longer in intensive care. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle recently predicted that the UK would have the highest death toll in all of Europe. On Friday, the UK recorded its worst fatality rate from the virus with 980 people dying in country's hospitals in a single day, the Guardian reported.