Joyce Fegan: Time to wake up from our collective Covid-19 complacency
Remember the memes? The WhatsApp chain letters? The panic grocery buying? The banana bread recipes? The stepping off the footpath as you passed a stranger? The Zoom table quizzes? The new babies presented to grandparents through freshly-cleaned window panes? The closed playgrounds? The clapping for healthcare workers? The painted stones and handmade posters outside of people's homes? The Late Late Show and celebrity Skype interviews? The sound of traffic-free roads? The Garda checkpoints? The deserted M50? The grass growing on Grafton Street? The return of fish to the canals of Venice?
That was lockdown, a few short weeks ago — our great effort to combat the common enemy of an invisible virus with devastating and fatal effects.
The novelty soon wore off.
It feels unlikely we will ever commit so collectively to such a state of discipline, pause, and separation ever again. And yet the number of new cases of Covid-19 is rising, here and abroad.
By Thursday of this week, 362 new confirmed cases had been reported in Ireland. Germany reported 1,000 new infections for the first time since May. A Spanish town with 32,000 people is back in lockdown. And Greece is having its own 'wake-up week' with a recording of more than 5,000 coronavirus cases.
Just because we're jaundiced by news of the virus, doesn't mean the devastating effect of it has gone away.
Covid-19 complacency has set in. How do we wake ourselves up?
Have you ever heard of the concept of moral licensing? The idea behind the theory is that previous good behaviour gives us a licence to behave morally questionably later on: 'I was really good, now I can let my hair down'.
New Yorker writer and journalist Malcolm Gladwell used the term when discussing how the US went from electing its first black president to electing someone as morally duplicitous as Donald Trump.
With Covid-19 we stayed away from those over 70. We didn't hug our grandparents. They didn't hug their grandchildren. Parents juggled, and continue to juggle, full-time work at a kitchen table while minding their children. We kept apart from friends. We missed non-emergency medical check-ups and treatments. We stayed within a 2km-radius of our homes. Remember that website that was built to check out, to the metre, where your 2km extended to? Yes, we were once that disciplined.
But you can only wear tight shoes for so long, and as soon as you experience the relief of taking them off, it's very hard to put them back on again.
Novelty always wears off. And our human capacity for complacency always kicks in.
In Ireland, there are hundreds of thousands of us who were privileged enough to be able to work from home, as hard as it was and can be, but there is healthcare staff from porters to kitchen attendants, and from ICU doctors to midwives who can never work from home. They face this virus daily. They do not have the luxury of complacency.
As of Thursday this week, there have been 1,768 Covid-19 related deaths in Ireland. Those 1,768 people do not even have the luxury of breath in their lungs. Their loved ones were robbed of funeral rituals and the opportunity of being supported through their grief.
Our children need to return to school and friends, playing and learning. They don't care for your house parties or your personal position on the evidence-based act of wearing a mask.
Our fellow citizens in nursing homes certainly don't care for your house parties or foreign holidays either. They have lived without the life-enhancing act of human embrace for months now. John Hume, during some of his final weeks on this earth, after doing so, so much to improve the lives of others, went without visits from his beloved family as he was being cared for in a nursing home. And this generation doesn't care too much for the term 'staycation' either.
There are also older people who live alone and would only love to be able to get out and see their friends at their active retirement group or bridge club. But they don't have the luxury of complacency either.
There are people who have lived in homeless accommodation or direct provision throughout all of this and who desperately want to live a life of dignified independence — but Covid-19 has paused so much more than a holiday abroad for them.
There are also our fellow citizens living with serious health conditions whose surgeries have been canceled at worst, and postponed at best. What doldrums to have to live in. And there are the hundreds of thousands of small businesses all over Ireland who are fighting to stay open, to serve us, the public, and are operating to the letter of the law in order to keep food on their families' and on their staff's families' tables.
It is as if we all wore this really tight pair of shoes for a dozen or so weeks and on taking them off, swore subconsciously to never put them on again. But Covid-19 went nowhere. A vaccine is not ready. The long-term effects of the virus, on those who survived, is not yet known.
We remain in the unknown, in spite of our collective Covid-19 complacency.
But we must live too, however, it needs to be in such a way that our most vulnerable our tended to first. Our children need to get to school. Our elderly need to be held. Our sick need medical treatment. And our healthcare and other frontline staff in supermarkets must be supported to the absolute full.
Last month Yale Professor Marc Brackett tweeted the death of his 82-year-old aunt as a result of Covid-19.
"Before she contracted the virus she was vibrant — literally worked out nearly every day," he wrote, before going on to issue the most basic of requests: "Please wear a mask, distance yourself, wash your hands and find ways to stay connected that are safe. Life shouldn’t end this way".
While vaccines are being trialled, while Covid-19 is still active around the world with cases rising, and as winter approaches we need to re-group.
We need to take Covid-19 seriously again. We need to wear masks in public settings and wash them afterward. We need to wash our hands and we need to keep our distance, all in order to protect the least privileged and most vulnerable of our citizens, neighbours, friends, and loved ones.
And in the midst of all of that, we need to make sure we do find ways to stay connected that our safe. Have your own green list of people that you check in on or spend time with.
We played a short game but we need to regroup for a long one. While we wait for things to get better, we need to play our part to ensure they actually do.
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