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Coronavirus is out there all on its own. There's been nothing like it. And it compares to no other journalistic challenge.

Certainly nothing I've reported on in more than 30 years comes close to how this virus has enveloped the entire planet and affected everybody I know, no matter where they are.

I've been stunned at receiving worried messages from far-flung fixers, producers, camera crews and friends I've worked with in all corners of the world I've reported from.

My friend in a Syrian refugee camp wrote to me, fixers from Yemen texted, my dear friend and former producer in India called, texted and WhatsApped.

My workmates from the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside those in Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Afghanistan and South America sent their caring inquiries and prayers.

Yes. Imagine that. A friend from YEMEN, one of the poorest countries in the world, texting me to ask if my family and I are OK and safe in BRITAIN, a rich, first-world country, with a solid infrastructure and a health service envied around the world.

It has been both staggering and humbling - and it has also shown how connected we all are, how this virus has bound us all together in a common understanding that's utterly incomparable.

I do a privileged job. And it's one I absolutely love. I've adored it since I first started out as a trainee reporter on a local British weekly newspaper when I was just 18 years old.

As a foreign correspondent, I've spent the best part of the last two decades being sent around the world's hotspots, being shot at, bombed and shelled.

My team and I reported on the outbreak of ebola in west Africa as well as the start of the coronavirus spread in Hong Kong in January.

I've been lucky enough to have a front row seat as a journalist to some of the most searing and seminal events over the past twenty years and I've felt nothing but gratitude for the opportunities I've been given to be that witness to them. It's been heartbreaking at times, traumatic too but I wake up still, feeling so damned lucky to do this job.

Now please bear with me while I give you some background. For the past 15 years or so, I've lived with my family outside Britain. We've travelled around together as a family from Delhi to Dubai, South Africa and now we're based in Istanbul in Turkey. My job generally involves kissing them goodbye, closing the door and getting on a plane knowing they are safe at home whilst I do my job and count the days until I'm back with them again.

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But coronavirus has changed everything for everyone - including journalists. We were lucky to be able to fly away from Sierra Leone and Liberia where ebola was claiming so many lives.

We left Hong Kong behind midway through January and went back home having spoken to some of their top epidemiologists who warned us of how deadly and dangerous coronavirus was. We saw the Hong Kong people rushing out to buy masks and gloves and bleach and how every public area was cleaned, sprayed and wiped down with disinfectant. That was JANUARY!

Since then though, the world has changed beyond recognition. Now, no family is safe. No home is entirely secure. There is no street where you can safely say coronavirus isn't lurking. There appears to be no country which is immune.

On top of that, the worldwide slamming shut of borders to stop the march of this deadly virus has seen the separation of friends and family all over the planet.

My colleagues - cameraman Kevin Sheppard and producer Stephanie De Groote - and I were called back from Turkey to Britain to cover the spread of the virus in anticipation of it hitting the UK hard.

I left Istanbul and half my family behind bound for Britain just as the prime minister was announcing lockdown in the UK on 24 March.

We arrived at Istanbul airport in the early morning only to find it virtually mothballed. The cavernous thoroughfares in one of the biggest airports in the world were virtually empty. The clothes and trinket shops were shut and the large duty-free outlets seemed to be wrapped in clingfilm.

The thousands of flights normally operating from the airport had mostly been cancelled. Three were displaying on the boards that morning - to Baku, Sarajevo and London. A few days earlier, I'd tried to persuade my three older children studying at university in Britain to return to be with us in Turkey. "We'll think about it Mum," they said. "It seems fine here." How wrong we all were.

My team boarded the plane at Istanbul wearing masks and gloves to find every single passenger was doing the same including the entire flight crew and captain. We landed four hours later in lockdown London in a capital and country which appeared to be in denial. I saw no-one wearing masks. In fact, we stood out in ours as we headed to an Airbnb where we decided we'd stay so we could operate as a 'household' team for the duration.

We knew we'd be meeting COVID-19 patients, survivors and probably going into hospitals and virus hotspots, so we needed to distance ourselves from colleagues and any relatives back in UK. Little did we realise we'd still be here six weeks later, still in the Airbnb with no prospect of returning to Turkey and home any time soon.

We focused on Warrington in northwest England because few areas outside of London and the big cities appeared to be getting much attention.

Warrington Hospital isn't a huge, shiny London or Glasgow hospital with all the latest equipment and resources that maybe one set in a metropolis can command. But to us, it represented perhaps the majority in UK - medium-sized with a workforce drawn mostly from the surrounding areas. And yet we were stunned by the fortitude of the people inside and out, coping with quite unprecedented events.

Nothing seems to have bound the planet together quite so much as coronavirus whilst also separating us. It has tested the human spirit, but the human spirit we saw, has also astounded.

Of course, it's been different all over the world. Yemen cannot be compared with Singapore and New York cannot be compared with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Warrington probably cannot be compared with any other UK town.

Every experience will be different but it also, seems to me, be the same. It's based on the same fears, the same sense of loss, the same feeling of danger and despair.

We met ordinary people in Warrington doing some extraordinary things in the face of fear, panic and, let's not swerve it, the sheer terror of catching this virus. We saw doctors and nurses working all hours and being innovative and in some cases, ingenious.

When they realised early on that their COVID patients were faring much better if they were kept OFF ventilators, they switched tactics. That meant trying to clear the patients' airways, support their breathing in other, less traumatically invasive ways.

But the hospital only had little more than a handful of sophisticated Continuous Positive Airways Pressure (CPAP) machines, but the smallness of their medical teams meant they were able to brainstorm a quick alternative. Why not use the black boxes used to treat sleeping disorders?

"There was suddenly a worldwide demand for CPAP," Dr Mark Forrest said, "and whilst there were plans to produce many more of them in UK we needed them now, not in a few hours, weeks or months' time."

The medical teams realised they had dozens of smaller, less sophisticated versions of CPAP machines in the store of the sleeping disorder clinic and in the community. They rounded them up, modified them, attached different tubes, and oxygen - and suddenly they'd increased the numbers of patients they could treat by about 600%.

It meant suddenly they were seeing a lot more people leave intensive care after being treated with their modified black boxes - as well as many more NOT having to 'step up' into ICU at all.

As Dr Forrest told us: "We're not the brainiest, we're not the best, we're just doing what we can." The smallness of their teams seems to have been an advantage, making them more agile, quicker to make decisions, more able to coordinate and cooperate.

But we also saw the community outside the hospital pulling together. Hidden in a trading estate on the outskirts of the town, we saw the town's Sikh community turning up at five o'clock in the morning to spend at least four hours making hundreds and hundreds of free meals which they took to the hospital to feed the health workers on shift, every weekend.

We talked to family-run undertakers who spoke of being called out several times a night to pick up bodies from care homes and in the community. They told us of their disbelief at the official figures, how their experience suggested the death toll was probably double what's being reported. And how they felt it was their duty and honour to provide as caring and memorable a send-off as possible for those lost at any time, but especially now during these coronavirus times.

We also spoke to many survivors too. These were people bound by one overriding emotion, the sheer horror of getting so close to death that they felt they were staring him in the face, convinced their lives were over.

One 32-year-old mother wrote letters to all her three children saying goodbye whilst waiting for the ambulance to take her hospital. Julia Cotter was so certain she was dying, she scribbled notes so her kids "would have something to remember her by". She told them how she loved them, how proud she was of them and how she "couldn't wish for better children".

Every one of the Sky crew hearing her story couldn't help but be moved. Her mother Kath was in tears hearing the letter Julia had left for the nurses who'd saved her life.

She wrote: "Your management, I hope can see how you are taking broken, frightened people who have accepted that their time is here and spinning that round to give them a second chance, a whole extra go at life."

Other survivors too spoke of "getting a second chance". Donna Wall, a 47-year-old mother of two told us she'd never take anything for granted again.

This virus has turned so much upside down. Maybe forever. But it's brought some inspirational people to the fore and in every corner of the world that you look at, in all this despair and sometimes overwhelmingly pain, there are folk just striving to do good and coping against all the odds.

Coronavirus: The Home Front - Sky News foreign correspondent Alex Crawford returns to the UK to report on the impact of coronavirus through the eyes of a hospital and town in the north west of England, on Sky Atlantic at 10pm tonight and on Sky News at 7pm tomorrow