Since 1st June, a considerable number of countries in Europe have been loosening their regulations around the corona virus. Lock down is ending! I have heard friends planning holidays within Europe, and seen pictures on social media of people drinking wine on the terraces. But not for me. As I mentioned before, since the beginning of the lock down, among many others in the chronic illness and disability community, I was already worrying about being forgotten and losing all the new access to the outside world that we had suddenly got during lock down. And it turns out that I was right. Vulnerable communities, the elderly, the sick and the disabled are, yet again, being forgotten. Not in the way I had expected, but by being deliberately left out of the discussions surrounding the easing of the corona rules. To put it simply, in the Netherlands at least, the advice for people in my position is still the same as it was a month ago, when we were in lock down.
Dutch government policy
In the Netherlands, the government has decided on a programme of controlling, but not containing the corona virus. What this means is that they will monitor the number of people in intensive care and ensure that the medical system is not overwhelmed by corona patients. However, it also means that they are not actively trying to stop the spread of the virus, nor contain it in anyway.
At the moment, whilst testing is available, there is no plan in place to ensure that people know when they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for corona. On top of this, some people who have tested positive for Corona are still required by their company to go into work otherwise they will not get paid. In other words, despite denying it, they are working towards the already debunked idea of herd immunity. And the estimates are that this, instead of containment, will lead to another 40,000 to 150,000 deaths, not to mention a large, and inestimable number of people who will be permanently sick and disabled from this policy.
This means that there is highly likely (read almost guaranteed) to be a second peak of infection in the Netherlands – something which should be worrying even for currently able-bodied people. But for somebody who falls into the vulnerable category, this essentially means that we are almost indefinitely unable to leave a lock down situation.
Government advice for the vulnerable reflects this, suggesting we only go out when necessary and do not meet up with anyone. But the question we are all asking ourselves is how long will this go on for? Another year or two? It seems as though, instead of planning a method of containing the virus, the vulnerable must wait in until the virus magically disappears, or there is a vaccine or a cure. Meanwhile, the rest of the country can go back to their daily, “normal” lives a few weeks earlier, and the government has to spend less resources on a system that might have allowed us all to end lock down.
In the UK, it seems that in response to critique that the loosening of the corona regulations did not mention vulnerable people, the government has announced that the vulnerable are safe to go outside. This is based on very little evidence and I have seen many health organisations warning vulnerable people to be wary of the statement that it is safe to return to normality. They suggest that the vulnerable remain shielding. The promised system made to track the virus in the UK does not seem to have materialised in an effective form yet, and so until then, the situation is much the same as in the Netherlands: the vulnerable and those close to them on lock down, everyone else back to normal.
The impact of lock down ending messily on vulnerable people
Once more the vulnerable, elderly, disabled and chronically ill are being shown how little we matter. Instead of ending lock down and protecting the vulnerable, as is being claimed, they are once more locking them out of the outside world. In reality, this means we have to make very difficult choices about how to negotiate isolating in a world that is no longer isolating.
One of the very early concrete decisions that I had to face was whether the risk of getting infected was higher than the very negative effects of no longer having access to my treatment. I was suffering daily migraines and was back to spending most days in bed all day, so I really needed access to treatment; however, the reality was that to get there I needed to use public transport. In the end, I decided I could not handle losing my health so rapidly and decided to take the risk, but ended up being the only person on the entire metro wearing a face mask (fortunately it is now required to wear a face mask on public transport), and taking a large gamble on my health at the same time.
The same problem occurred with my wedding: I needed to get married on a certain date, but the women ordaining our marriage was very insistent that we did not wear face masks during the ceremony. And the language exams for which I am studying, take place in huge exam rooms, with a large number of people, all of whom require them for immigration or studying purposes, so are very unlikely to stay at home if they have symptoms.
This lazy lifting of lock down regulations adds further accessibility struggles for the vulnerable in an already inaccessible world. It means that much of my energy is now arguably wasted trying to weigh up and mitigate the risks versus the benefits of achieving certain necessary tasks.
And, of course, this does not just affect those in the vulnerable category. My partner lives with me, and I have two other able-bodied house mates. They need to go back to work, and their lives are increasingly returning to normal. This means that for me to be safe, they either have to quit their jobs and wait out the virus with me, or I have to go somewhere else. In reality, it means I will have to put myself at risk in my own home, because my house mates cannot simply stop working. The world carries on and I don’t have anywhere else to go. Unfortunately, my empty ‘second home’ just doesn’t exist!
For the elderly or terminally ill this can often mean that they will never be able to see certain family members again, and are indefinitely stuck inside unable to know when or if they will ever be able to spend time with family and friends. This is devastating for everyone involved. The fact that there is no end date to this also increases the sense of isolation and lonliness. I am in many ways lucky because I live with my partner and two house mates but am noticing that the diverging realities between me and my friends is really harming my motivation to get out of bed. There seems very little point if this isolation and monotony is my life until a cure or a vaccination has been found.
All of the extra considerations and concerns that the vulnerable now face seem to exist in a different reality from those elsewhere – as if we live in a parallel universe. All around me, I can hear people planning summer holidays, hanging out with friends, returning to work, to the gym and in general getting on with their lives. In the meantime I am left wondering when I will be able to see my family again; will I be able to see my friends before they emigrate, and when will I be able to return to the projects that I help out with, and be included in the limited part of the world that was accessible to me before Corona. Not only have I lost access to the wonderful world of lock down internet socialising, but I have also not regained my original access to the outside world. In fact, my world, since lock down has ended, has become considerably more complicated and even smaller than it was.
An alternative lock down ending
But it did not have to be this way, and in other countries it is not. I am by no means an epidemiologist, but having done a little research it seems to me that, with a little time and energy, there are ways in which the corona virus can be contained, if not completely safely, in an effective enough way that vulnerable people could have a little more freedom and peace of mind.
For example, in Germany they have a system of testing and monitoring which means that wherever you have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the corona virus you will be notified and required to quarantine for two weeks, thus significantly slowing the spread. And if these measures are implemented after a long period of lock down, when the total infection level is already very low, these numbers will remain low. However, coming out of a lock down with none of these measures in place means there is absolutely no reason to consider ourselves any safer now than when we initially entered lock down.
We can look to New Zealand to see a country that handled the pandemic very successfully. As of today they are coming out of lock down almost completely, the only exception to normality being that their borders will remain shut until other countries match their infection levels. Which, at the moment are that they have zero active cases of corona in the entire country. They have also had the highest testing capacity in order to contain the spread of the virus.
It seems as if the governments of both the UK and the Netherlands are happy to prioritise the economy over their people. By returning to normality and ending the lock down in a way which does not try to contain the virus, but rather aims to slowly infect the population over time, whilst not overwhelm medical support, they demonstrate that people’s health is less important than their economic output. And in this situation, the vulnerable may have to face months or even years of isolation – so that everyone else can get back to normal sooner.
To give you an idea of the scale of the governments’ decisions, based on recent statistics from the United Kingdom: just under 9 million (1 in 7) of the population were aged over 70*; 260,000 people (1 in 250) suffered with ME or chronic fatigue**. Add to that the huge numbers of other chronic illnesses, cancer sufferers, and those with other conditions that render them vulnerable. These are the people the government is willing to risk.
Add at least one person per sick person, who lives with or is isolating to look after that person (in reality it is almost certainly far more) – and then multiply this number across all the other countries that are ignoring the vulnerable as they re-emerge from lock down, and you have some idea how many people such policy is willing to ignore – who have almost literally lost their freedom to live in any sort of normality for the foreseeable future: visiting family, shopping, eating out, etc., while the rest of the world forgets and goes back to normal. And remember, certainly for some, this isolation may deprive them of their last chance ever to visit (or be visited by) loved ones or to return to places and activities that made them happy.
As a country we should be asking ourselves why we are so okay to leave the vulnerable locked down – rather than taking the time and resources to avoid this. We can, we should, and we could all be emerging from lock down together. But at the moment we aren’t.
Links to further reading
- An article about herd immunity being epidemiological neoliberalism.
- New Zealand’s success story
- Containment nu. A Dutch platform campaigning for containment. They have articles in both English and Dutch that are very informative.
- Article in Dutch about vulnerable groups whilst lock down is ending written by a chronically ill person.
- Another article in Dutch discussing the impact of the lack of corona control in the Netherlands.
