Something terrible is happening

Is that a good way to begin?

As I shambled down a warren of hospital corridors four months ago, head aching, feet throbbing and Mel Giedroyc’s hilarious yet alarming episode of Off Menu soundtracking my trek from ward to hallway to lift to hallway to toilet to hallway to lift to hallway to ward, one thought ran through my mind:

Something terrible is happening.

It was the third day I’d visited my mum, who needed urgent but – we believed – fleeting medical attention, and, as before, not one doctor, nurse, paramedic, member of admin staff or visitor was wearing a mask.

Having attended a handful of essential appointments over the past four years, I was aware that healthcare workers and the general public alike had long given up on trying to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

But to repeatedly see this large-scale representation of how clinically vulnerable people have been left to “fall by the wayside” was dispiriting, confronting and terrifying.

Something terrible is happening.

In July 2021, despite the fact that most of the world hadn’t been vaccinated against Covid, that the vaccine didn’t prevent transmission in any case and that Long Covid was disabling people at an exponential rate (now around two million and counting in this country alone), Boris Johnson told the UK population to stop wearing masks and start acting as if we weren’t living through a generational public health disaster.

Scientists warned this policy shift would be disastrous, then-health secretary Sajid Javid admitted, “We could reach 100,000 cases a day later in the summer” and eighteen thousand people went on to die of Covid in the next six months.

Something terrible is happening.

At first, no one I knew bought into Boris’ nonsense. We collectively gaped at footage of British pubs crammed with superspreading parties, as if lockdown had been the real virus and “freedom day” was the cure.

Friends, family members and online acquaintances alike said they’d keep wearing a mask when they went to the shops or the cinema or a hospital, would avoid crowded places and protect themselves and others.

They were going to act as if there was still an ongoing pandemic, because there was.

There still is.

Something terrible is happening.

And then, one by one, without announcement or fanfare, most of them stopped.

If you weren’t high-risk, this probably made sense. It was certainly sanctioned by society, mandated by workplaces and insisted on by educational institutions.

I get that – as long as you stay lucky – it must be easier and more fun to not think about adapting your life, standing out and making difficult changes in solidarity with disabled people. To act like Covid is over, or poses little threat, or has been eradicated by vaccines, none of which is true.

Something terrible is happening.

I understand, above everything else, that the government and public health education have failed us, that it shouldn’t be up to the individual to assess risk and interpret science and get an entire school or workplace to clean their air and request masking.

But that doesn’t make people dropping Covid precautions any less harmful.

When they choose not to wear respirator masks, test regularly, or stay indoors when infected, they’re increasing their chances of spreading a deadly and disabling virus, including to those who can’t mask for medical reasons, immune-suppressed patients and young children, who might not survive.

Something terrible is happening.

The British government has stopped tracking weekly cases and deaths from Covid, so it’s hard to know how many more people have been affected since 2021.

What we do know is that, as of last December, a thousand Americans were dying of Covid every week, and there’s no reason to think that number has significantly slowed.

We know that around 1 in 196 people are infected in the UK right now, and that there was a 24% increase in hospitalisations for Covid this summer as new variants continue to evade our immune systems thanks to a lack of mitigations and waning vaccines.

Something terrible is happening.

Not everyone who gets Covid dies or is permanently disabled, of course, but at least one in 10 infections leads to long Covid, for which there’s no treatment or cure.

Any Covid infection can cause long-term organ damage, the extent of which we likely won’t appreciate for decades, and there’s also mounting evidence that it increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, sight and hearing loss, type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes and high blood pressure (aka “the silent killer”).

As someone who became chronically ill following a virus in 1999 and still hasn’t accepted it, I understand thinking it couldn’t happen to you, or that if it did, there would be support and treatments available but in my experience, none of that is true.

Something terrible is happening.

Most of the medical staff we met during my mum’s stay were helpful and reassuring, willing to do anything except protect us from the ongoing threat of an airborne disease. 

Knowing they had all the power in this situation and not wanting to make life harder for my mum, I didn’t confront them, just turned up every morning with fresh masks and a newly charged external battery for her mini HEPA.

She only took her mask off to eat, drink and brush her teeth, and I kept mine on the whole time, hunching by the bicycle racks in the drizzle every lunchtime to shovel in a sandwich and gulp down some water.

When I readjusted my respirator before heading back inside, sticking it to my face with micropore tape for a better fit, I saw elderly people, coughing people, and pregnant people, all without even the flimsiest surgical mask, and thought the same thing each time:

Something terrible is happening.

On my mum’s third and last day in hospital, we were on the verge of jubilation. She didn’t seem to have caught Covid and was about to be discharged, apparently unscathed.

We were so focused on that outcome we hadn’t considered any others.

As we awaited confirmation she could leave, a junior doctor drew the curtain around her bed, crouched so he was looking into her eyes, and uttered a series of words that no one wants to hear, words that made us both cry, words that were preceded by a sentence I wouldn’t recommend using in this or any situation: “How honest do you want me to be?”

Soon after, I made my final trek from ward to hallway to lift to hallway to toilet to hallway to lift to hallway to ward, feet throbbing, Mel Giedroyc’s hilarious yet alarming episode of the Off Menu podcast blaring as James Acaster and Ed Gamble laughed and tears rolled into my 3M Aura, one thought running through my mind:

Something terrible is happening.

Something terrible is happening.

Something terrible is happening.

For one horrible moment, I thought about giving up my Covid precautions on the grounds that I’d soon be plunged into existential despair, loneliness and grief.

For one horrible moment, it was tempting. I imagined meeting up with friends in cafés like it was 2019, enjoying the comfort and company of human connection without worrying about spreading infection. How much easier it would make my life if I decided to stop trying.

But it felt cheap, to use someone else’s prognosis as an excuse. To stop caring about myself and others as a warped expression of love. That’s not how you honour your loved one’s compassion, generosity and strength.

You can’t make one terrible thing better by ignoring another.

I dried my hands, wiped my face and shambled back from ward to hallway to lift to hallway to toilet to hallway to etc.

On the way, I saw so many patients, staff, and visitors, none of them wearing masks, all of whom deserved better. I looked at each of their foreheads and tried to psychically communicate the same message:

Something terrible is happening.

It really, truly is.