This piece was written during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It struck me that the impact of the virus on an individual was down to many factors, many of them governed by an element of 'chance' - or perhaps 'luck', either good or bad. I hope no-one will take offense at what might seem a light hearted approach to a serious issue, but these thoughts are very much a personal response to the situation.
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I am (probably) part of a privileged elite, partly by birth, in part by effort, but mainly by being lucky.
I was born lucky. Dad was a coal miner, mum had worked in the pit canteen before staying on at home to look after her ageing parents. I’m sure my parents had known difficult times - they had lived through two world wars and a depression – and they would have seen the Spanish Flu pandemic. They worked hard, in mum’s case bringing me up – that can’t have been easy. But we were lucky. Dad had a good job, and when he took early retirement, he had a pension. We were comfortable. We had a house, and eventually the mortgage was paid off and it was truly ours. I was loved. There were the usual arguments, but never violence. Like many in the village, mum and dad were members of one of the local Methodists Chapels and there was no drunkenness, there was no drama, and in my teens I probably regarded life at home as boring.
My parents believed in education, first so that their boys didn’t need to go down the pit, but education was also the way to get on in life. Again, I was lucky, I enjoyed most of school (but not the football, or later the rugby, though cricket was tolerable until I had a bat in my hands). We had books at home and there was a library in the village. I passed the 11-plus and went up to a good school. Again, the luck held, and I did OK. Then came university and a good degree in Geology. The choice of university was more or less dictated by the school, OK it was recommended, and, looking back, I might have made a different choice, but my luck was in and I did fine. A few years of research, and then came a succession of jobs in IT. I had found my career – more by luck than planning. Even the succession of jobs was driven by luck - by hearing about the first job by word-of-mouth, then by spotting something interesting when not actually looking for a job, and finally by being asked to fill a temporary contract at a bank which became full time for the next nineteen years.
OK, the luck did falter at times. Teenage cancer, radiotherapy which left scarring on the lungs, years later a heart attack, a triple bypass, a replacement heart valve and later a pacemaker. Perhaps not such good luck, but here I am, still ticking (thanks to the pacemaker). I was lucky to live in a century and a country where there was the NHS – it’s only thanks to them that I am still here – though in the case of the bypass, that was done in luxury because I was lucky enough to have a job that included BUPA cover. I still remember the Turkey Stir-Fry and the other things that the NHS couldn’t offer.
When I took early retirement I was lucky enough to be on the ‘old’ pension scheme, so I ended up with a decent monthly income. And then I spotted an opportunity to help at the local museum – a lucky spot in a newsletter. I’m still there 17 years later, nearly as long as I was at the bank, and I’m even using that Geology degree some of the time. And with all this luck the ‘work’ has kept my brain more or less intact and active (even if it is getting a little worn).
And then along came Covid 19. And it set me thinking about luck - how it affects me - and how it affects other people around me, people across the U.K. and around the world.
As the numbers being reported started to rise it was clear that a lot of people would catch and suffer from Covid – but (hopefully) not everyone. Some would be lucky, some less so. As you went about your life as the pandemic unfolded you might meet someone with Covid who was also shedding the virus. It’s wasn’t a certainty. You might never encounter anyone from whom you could catch it. But this is where you started making our own luck. This is where our behaviour came in, things like social distancing, and face masks, as well as ways in which the authorities could influence the luck, like providing PPE for carers. You may not know whether you have the virus, and I certainly don’t know whether you have, so let’s both assume that one of us has and do our best not to pass it on.
We all read uninformed comments about ‘herd immunity’, but there was also the ‘herd instinct’ at work. When restrictions started, and more so when we entered lockdown, I think even the government were surprised at how well people complied. We were in this together, and people were trying very hard to do the right things. But just as the suggestion of lockdown loomed, and even in the early days of the lockdown, some people thought it was ‘not that serious’ and it was OK to go to the races even though the face mask didn’t really match the suit or the flowery hat. Some people decided that they would have a final trip to Snowdonia, or some other beauty spot. Because of luck and the way statistics work, they may well have been fine. But when a few did it more followed – ‘If all these people think it’s OK then I’m sure it will be fine’. The individual might have escaped unharmed, but within the herd the dice were being loaded against us all. It happened at the start, and it happened again when the easing of restrictions was announced just before a sunny weekend.
If you ‘catch’ the virus, you may just feel a bit achy, have a bit of a temperature, or a cough, or any of the other symptoms. It’s not a certainly, but it’s still better to avoid it. You may well feel terrible, and it may pass - eventually – but you can’t assume that it will. You might end up in hospital. You might end up on a ventilator. You might survive it all, but that’s not a reason to just let blind luck rule the day. Wherever you can, it seemed and still seems sensible to load the dice in your favour. Stay safe - as far as you possibly can. And this is where it becomes harder. What if you can’t do much to make sure you stay safe? What if you are working in the NHS face-to-face with Covid patients, or in a care home, or you’re driving a bus, or keeping food on people’s tables. You can’t just go home and hide ‘just in case’. We can’t always manage our own luck, we need help. Help from the management, help from the government, as well as mutual help from those around us. And it’s not pure luck! It involves planning, it needs cooperation, it is many things including patience, but it takes effort and as individuals we don’t always have the resources.
Our individual luck is limited. And ultimately for some their luck runs out. Each day we hear the new total for the number of people who have died as a result of Covid. Each day there are lots of numbers – deaths of people in hospital who have tested positive for Covid, deaths of those in care homes, excess deaths compared to other years, etc. However you count them, these are statistics. When a politician says that ‘people will die’ it’s an abstract statement, it’s something that seems to be happening in a different place, it isn’t here, it’s probably somewhere else, it’s probably going to be someone else. But when the number of deaths reported is 40,000 (or however many) it’s not ‘just’ a statistic. It’s actually 40,000 individuals who were alive a few weeks ago who are now dead - it’s 40,000 explosions. Each explosion kills one person, a personality, perhaps a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a child. But that is only part of it, for every one of the people who have died the explosion has also injured others – the doctors, nurses, carers who had been fighting to save the life, they were impacted by the shrapnel. There are the families whose grief couldn’t be expressed, who couldn’t say a proper goodbye. It wasn’t just 40,000 lives lost, it was many, many more who suffered in the collateral damage.
And a lot of it was down to luck. Where we lived, what job we had, how old we were, whether we took care to stay safe, whether the other person took the same care, whether the virus reached our lungs, and lots more. At the end for many it was whether they were lucky enough to have someone to hold their hand, to ease them over that final threshold.
As I said at the start, perhaps I’m lucky. I’m in the ‘vulnerable’ group who are ‘shielding’ (a strange sort of luck, perhaps), so I’m doing everything I can to avoid catching the virus, I suppose you could say that it’s largely up to me to make my own luck.
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