
A few weeks ago, my grandmother died in Jamaica. We werenât at all closeâI only met her a couple of times in my lifeâand yet, I feel sad. She had Alzheimerâs but was diagnosed with COVID-19 a couple of weeks prior to her death, along with her carers, my uncle and his wife. As a result, she deteriorated much more quickly than expected.
My mum has made the difficult decision not to leave London to go to her motherâs funeral and be with her siblings as they grieve. She had to make this decision because UK prime minister Boris Johnson and his Tory government have shown over and over again that they donât care about ordinary people when it comes to dealing with this pandemic. Johnson was happy to âlet the bodies pile highâ in order to prioritise profits.
Opening up and letting the virus ripâso that there is now an average of 31,000 cases per day in the UKâmeans that my mother would have to get a COVID-19 test before she left London, quarantine when she arrived in Jamaica, get another test before she left Jamaica and test again when she arrived back in London. All of these tests reportedly cost more than ÂŁ100 each. She would also be at risk of contracting the virus while in Jamaica, and she is currently only partially vaccinated. So, she decided not to travel. She was robbed of the opportunity to see her mother again before she died, and canât even say goodbye now she has passed.
This is what reopening too soon looks like for ordinary people. Had my grandmother been in New South Wales, she would be one of the deaths that are so easily dismissed in the now defunct 11am press conferencesââan 85-year-old woman with underlying health conditionsâ. The humanity behind these descriptions is lost, and the condolences they send ring hollow. According to Dr David Berger writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, âone in two Australians has at least one chronic conditionâ, but the authorities continue to try to normalise these deaths as if they donât matter.
Theyâd be dead soon anyway, right? Their deaths are reducing the burden on the overwhelmed health service, right? But no thought is given to the family and friends of this âdead woodâ who have lost their loved ones, or to the people who have died alone, scared and in pain, or to the health workers who are forced to make impossible choices about who to give precious ventilators to or whose hand to hold as they die. Our elderly people are not dead wood. They deserve to spend their retirement safely, enjoying time with grandchildren or pursuing hobbies, not dying a premature death from a disease they should never have had.
For Victorian premier Dan Andrews, the hundreds of people predicted to die in Victoria in the coming months are likewise expendable. Their lives are apparently a price worth paying to get out of lockdown and back to business. Lockdowns are hard, human beings arenât wired to be so disconnected for so long. Iâm a therapistâI know the impact of lockdowns on peopleâs mental health. But donât be swayed for a moment by the governmentâs rhetoric on mental healthâthey just want to use it as an excuse to open up and further risk our health. We can see how much they really care about those with mental health issues if we look at the limited funding for services, or the closure, with a weekâs notice, of a young peopleâs critical psychiatric care ward at St Vincentâs Hospital in Sydney. And itâs as if the mental health impacts of those thousands of deaths, or the mental health of the health workers who will be dealing with the trauma of working through this disaster for years to come, simply donât exist.
But do you know what would help peopleâs mental health during lockdown? Being paid to stay home, and knowing there was a job waiting for them when things reopened. And being paid to take time off to get tested, vaccinated and so on. Itâs living in a system that prioritises profit over health, even in a pandemic, that gives people anxiety and depression. It really is that simple. Australiaâs Mental Health Think Tank came to the same conclusion in a recently published policy paper.
And so, as with everything under capitalism, it comes down to classâwho is essential in our society? Jeff Bezos jetting off into space has shown how inessential he is. But his retirement is safe. The supermarket workers of today are the people with underlying health conditions of tomorrow. Class inequality means that it is essential workers who are likely to develop chronic health conditions and will therefore be more at risk in the health crises of the future. They are ordinary, working-class people who keep the rest of us alive and yet are some of the worst paid in our society. To us they are necessary, to the bosses they are expendable.
So yes, Iâm sad that my grandmother died. Iâm sad for my mum and her brothers, but Iâm also angry. Iâm angry that the people who run society think it is acceptable to throw their hands in the air and say thereâs nothing we can do, that thousands of people are just going to die when they donât have to. Theoretically, modern capitalism should be well-placed to deal with a pandemicâthe resources available would be more than enough to combat it if there was the political will to do so. But no, Gina Reinhardt and others like her who have increased their wealth during the crisis just havenât made quite enough money yet. According to the Guardian, âthe worldâs billionaires did âextremely wellâ during the pandemic, growing their already-huge fortunes to a record high of $10.2tnâ.
On the day my grandmother died, there were 511 new COVID-19 cases in Jamaica, the youngest of which was just 3 days old. The youngest COVID-19 death that day was a 19-year-old woman. These are the kinds of people that will get sick and die of the virus in New South Wales and Victoria if we reopen too soon. It doesnât have to be this way. We need to fight for every single life. We need to aim for elimination, even as irresponsible governments make this increasingly difficult. It is not impossible. The thing missing is the political will. Now is the time for us to fight back.
Source: Redflag.org.au