Public or even private mourning during lockdown was forbidden. It has hardly been openly allowed to be expressed, perhaps as a mark of respect to the dead, but more as a strange way, of a show of support for the bereaved, in crisis situations.
by Victor Cherubim
The Coronavirus has brought out the best and the worst in society,perhaps in our lifetimes.
During this unsettling time, it has become my drive to write blogs to provide my readers, a respite of enthusiasm or escapism, as well as "random research" of a "lock down world" in disarray.
It has no doubt been a public nightmare in many ways. Some terrible things have happened, Draconian laws accompanied by over zealous approach at enforcement powers by the Police as well as others, with public as well as global governments not at all prepared for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Antibody Tests and Ventilators.
It was a known fact that Governments around the world have not enforced hygiene over decades. But most of all, there has been no reserve capacity of Intensive Care Unit Beds. All the available ICU units had been fully occupied worldwide with Care occupants prior to the outbreak of this virus in December 2019. It was a calamity waiting to happen.
The real cause of this virus turning from a epidemic to a pandemic is because of too little, to late action taken by world governments over years,if not decades.
Result was understandable panic by the public. Public judgement of law enforcement has thus been harsh on Governments for over reaching, in fact overreaction, with lockdowns, restrictive in some cases, on social contacts and generally knee jerk reaction. There was no balanced approach all the while, and no coordinated action by health authorities worldwide. Can you blame globalisation or do you blame populism for concerted action to control the spread?
Some will maintain it was unavoidable, others will rightly state it was unpreparedness.
Public sentiment trampled
Public or even private mourning during lockdown was forbidden. It has hardly been openly allowed to be expressed, perhaps as a mark of respect to the dead, but more as a strange way, of a show of support for the bereaved, in crisis situations.
We can only comprehend the exact number of dead due to the Coronavirus pandemic as an a number statistic, with exact condition of cases calibrated and measured in a variety of ways, by each country, according to its own standards.
John Hopkins Research team too, has quoted these figures of people with Coronavirus, according to statistics compiled by Governments around the world, as people counted "as dead". There is no detailed medical history record of the cause of their individual condition, prior to death, perhaps, as it has become an impossible and thankless task for governments.
Nobody really knows the exact numbers attributed to coronavirus and/or due to natural causes, other than these official statistics. Rather, no one has been able to assess, who has succumbed as a direct result of the contagion of this pandemic or partly due to natural causes of death. Perhaps,it has been easy to lump one figure as the number dead and attribute it to this pandemic at this difficult time. The anomaly is that it has become a "statistic rather than a condition".
The World Health Organisation to date has not authenticated a verifiable figure,perhaps, due to the vagaries of identification information.
As Longfellow stated: "the dead have been left to bury the dead".
In many countries the only form of internment is cremation, with families not attending final rites or saying fond farewells. It all appears very strange, with some countries requesting families to say goodbyes to loved ones by SMS messages relayed to patients in hospitals, before entering ICU's. Some day in history, there may be monuments erected for these dead like the monument in Vienna, for the Black Death of 1347 to 1351. Some day, a century later,historians will write epitaphs in commemoration.
The anomalies of life under lockdown in Britain and abroad
The UK now has been in lockdown for almost a week in a bid to tackle this pandemic. At least 19,522, the authorities say, have tested positive for Coronavirus with 1,228 people confirmed to have died to date, some 90 days of pandemic outbreak. Experts warn it could be months before life returns to normal.
Whilst there is a virtual lockdown worldwide, there is no general consensus about "anti-body tests" or what action needs to be enforced to combat it on a worldwide scale other than WHO advice on "Tests,Tests and Tests".
In Belarus,the government has dismissed the pandemic as a conspiracy,with life going on as normal. In Sweden, on the other hand,there are no constraints of segregation or movement or containment. In refugee camps around the world, people have no choice but continue living as normal in cramped conditions,with a scarcity of food and water, as compensation.
Compare this to the 1.4 billion population of China,with confirmed cases of coronavirus deaths officially declared as 83,000 to date (30 March 2020). There is fakenews, even conjecture that the death rate is 40 times this figure.The anomaly is that there is no way of authentication or verification. Only the Space Satellites have shown towns and cities in China deserted during the period of quarantine over months with air quality less polluted by the shutdown of factories and travel.
At a cursory reckoning, it appears to be minuscule in relation to deaths recorded per head of population in the two main European counties, of Italy or Spain. We are told that Italy has a population of 50 million with infections surging past 100,000 and 11,591 deaths and Spain has 46 million with 85,195 infections and 7,340 deaths.
We know the health system of these two European Member countries have been crumbling under the weight of caring for so many desperately ill patients,infirm all at once. The number of Intensive Care Units in both these nations were never expected to cope with the outbreak of this virus. Care Homes in these countries were not required to state the cause of death of inmates.
Financial assistance from the EU has been lacking over years. As a show of solidarity, a minuscule number of Coronavirus patients from Italy and France have been recently transferred by air ambulance to be cared for at German hospital ICU's.
In the UK 20,000 former NHS staff have volunteered to go back to work and some will perform support roles, such as changing beds, at the newly turned Excel Exhibition Centre now called Nightingale Health Care Emergency in East London and at similar makeshift centres nationwide,
A breathing aid, called Continued Positive Airway Pressure Machine (CAPM) to deliver oxygen to the lungs without the need of a Ventilator or for a patient to be sedated,has been developed by a team of researchers from Mercedes Formula 1 Team and University College London. They hope to produce up to 1000 such machines a day. The CAPM would help keep Coronavirus patients out of the limited number of 25,000 Hospital ICU beds in UK.
The cost of dying
The curbs of life and death in this time of Coronavirus is unaccountable.
At this time digging deep within our psyche to focus on our immediate access to our human instinct of survival is the key.
Creating the environment that brings each one of us inner peace and serenity can lead us to mental,emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Whilst we individually mourn the dead, and do all in our power to constrain our governments to deliver solutions sensitively at this time of crisis, let our creative side of our humanity shine.
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