I was working as a GP when a new respiratory illness began crossing the globe. So much rewriting of history has happened since that it’s easy to forget how anarchic things felt in March 2020. Devastating images from China and Italy were followed by a deafening silence from the British government. Junior doctors were left to implore the government to lock down on social media and TV. In our clinic, left to our own devices, we mocked up an infection control room, saw patients in cars, improvised PPE, and rotated shifts in clinic and on the phone to reduce infection.

Roopa Farooki’s brilliant, raging stream of consciousness relates 40 days in her life as a junior doctor. An award-winning author, she retrained as a doctor and was in her first year working at an English seaside hospital when SARS-CoV-2 arrived here.

Forty days is the period Venetian ships were kept at anchor to reduce transmission when they docked from disease-infected ports in the 14th century, but during the chaotic opening stages of the Covid-19 pandemic Farooki is in constant motion, walking along dual carriageways and fields from her family home with her husband and children, to the hospital and its virus. She is also reeling from the recent death of her rivalrous older sister, Kiron, from breast cancer. At the end of each exhausting day she reaches for her laptop and writes this memoir: “stolen moments in the unobserved night, like a guilty grandad sucking down a secret cigarette”.

The result is vivid and immediate, fragmentary and unalloyed.

In Farooki’s hospital many think fears of the virus are overblown, but within a week staff are going off sick with it, the hospital gets overloaded and people start dying; many having caught the disease there. Claps and banging of pans and self-serving soundbites from politicians contrast with the suffering and inadequacy surrounding her – an already threadbare healthcare system, chaotic pandemic guidance, hopeless PPE, minimal testing and two treatments, oxygen and proning (“tummy time”, as an ITU consultant dubs it). As patients cough, vomit and bleed on the medics, a young colleague of Farooki’s dies of Covid in their intensive care unit. Why go to work when you may be robbing your children of a mother, Farooki’s relatives ask. When she has a rare day off, people jump out of her way on the seafront and shelves in the supermarket are empty.

And on top of all this she carries the heavy burden of grief and guilt at her sister Kiron’s death.

“Friend is too big and small a word for what you were... You were generous with physical affection and violence. Long childish cuddles on the sofa. Casual childish slaps and scratches and kicks and punches.”

She knows people do not suddenly become heroes because they have died, nor because they have become doctors. Writing in the second person, Farooki’s voice often melds with that of her sister. As circumstances designed to promote self-pity or self-congratulation pile up, Kiron/Farooki won’t allow it. Kiron is her constant companion, her secret sharer, as everyday life begins to implode.

“I don’t know how you can go to work, she says. Picking at you like a wasp. It’s selfish. It’s unsafe. […] And for the record, I don’t think you’re a hero. I don’t think you’re brave. I think you’re just a mildly talented eccentric who’s stumbled into a stupid time to start medicine.

“You’re right, you say. Thank you.”

In an age of amnesia and dishonesty, I loved the unedited, unflattering truth of the thoughts and feelings that Farooki’s exhausted brain trawls at the end of each gruelling day. The patients who sicken and asphyxiate, the buzz of social media, hospital rules that volte face without explanation, memories of decisions from earlier in her life along with the voices of parents and Kiron, patients, her children and husband; all meld into a pointillist narrative.

“You fill the bottles with the ascitic fluid for testing. Cytology, biochemistry, protein. You check the tracing of a heart. You manage soaring blood sugars. […]

“You walk home.

“You admire the children’s work.

“They start fighting about something stupid, the death of a virtual llama, the malicious uncharging of a tablet, the design on a painted pot, an insult at the table, and you shout at them, and then you start crying. And then the ones who started it start crying too.”

As Conservatives make their appalling claim that Boris Johnson has had a good pandemic, despite the underfunding, delays, indifference and charlatanism, it’s cathartic to travel back with Farooki’s memoir into the mess of the 40 days, the quaranta giorni, from which it all sprang.

34 Patients by Tom Templeton is published in paperback by Michael Joseph on 31 March

• Everything Is True by Roopa Farooki is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply