Covid 19(84) – Or the debate on “the individual’s responsibility towards public health” that never happened
In August last year, when knowledge about this new coronavirus and its effects was still in its infancy, when vaccines were still a remote possibility and treatments for the disease consisted in addressing only the symptoms… and hope for the best, I got myself in the first available plane to go back home. I was armed simply with a flimsy medical mask and a paper form - which the Portuguese authorities threw straight in the bin as soon as I turned away - and was subject only to a rather cursory temperature check at departure. A year later, with close to 60% of the British and Portuguese populations fully vaccinated, with an array of drug treatments at our disposal to cure the disease and with a year of scientific research and knowledge to add to last year’s, I was asked… not only to be subject to two doses of an EU and UK approved vaccine, but also to undertake 3 Covid-19 tests, use a flimsy mask, fill a digital form detailing all my movements for the foreseeable future, present a negative test certificate and a vaccine certificate…and be subject to the, by now purely ceremonial, cursory temperature check at the airport.
The tests in particularly puzzle me greatly. These need to be bought privately - even though public test sites are deserted - in one of the hundreds of providers that have since popped up like mushrooms. Tests that need to be done 3 days before traveling, even though you have more than enough time to get yourself infected in those 3 days prior to departure, and that can vary in cost from 20£ to 200£…even though they cost just about 2£ to manufacture. And this is for amber list countries… for others, more tests and costs must be incurred, as well as a sanity testing 10 days quarantine.
The traffic light list of countries is another interesting concept… I’m still struggling to understand why in June this year, travellers to then green listed Portugal had 3 days warning before it was classified as amber…when travellers to covid torn India had a 10 days window in which to return to the UK with the Delta (or some other politically correct Greek alphabet letter) variant, before the country was put in the red list. Anyway…don’t get me started on logic and pandemic measures… there is zero correlation between the two.
The 2019/2020 winter and spring had been particularly difficult. I had been sick three times that season, with some respiratory illnesses of one form or another and, the last one, in late February/early March 2020, left me with a laryngitis and lingering cough for weeks. Winters are tough for us tanned people living in northern latitudes – I had neglected my vitamin D intake. In any case, with a persistent cough – which could very well have been Covid -, I was unable/unwilling to travel and stay with my family during the “end-of-the-world” times we all thought, at the time, were just around de corner. Then lockdown number one hit - just “a couple of weeks to flatten the curve” they said - …and I was stuck here… in a foreign country… sick and alone… waiting to hear about the demise of countless numbers of my extended family by phone or video call… unable to help them or be helped by them.
But then those phone calls never came, fortunately, and my levels of alarm fell to normal heights, more suitable to address the actual situation rather than the unknown monster lurking in the dark. The news I did start to receive though, were about the nearly unbearable toll of the self-isolation dictates and other assorted draconian measures imposed by governments throughout the world…and back home was no exception. Elderly family members struggling with loneliness and several other non-covid related ailments, youths struggling with school and absence of social interaction, jobs lost, business failing, relationships broken, severe deterioration of nearly everybody’s already fragile mental health… not to mention physical health… with several cases of serious diseases going untreated.
I had been nearly religiously sticking to the self-isolation dictates (I say nearly, as I have always been a proponent of following the spirit of the law rather than the letter), for example, I was only going out for exercise and essential shopping, I wasn’t socialising with anyone outside my household, and I was even using a face mask in supermarkets way before it was made mandatory – I had a few surgical masks at home already, as my aunt is immunosuppressed and we all have them around for visiting her and her family when we are sick. I was doing this in the believe/hope it was a temporary sacrifice for the benefit of us all. I wanted to extend vulnerable stranger the same courtesy I wish others would extend upon by loved ones… I did this despite my scientific and rational brain telling me it was impossible, by then, to supress the virus… and I did it despite knowing there was no way these measures were only going to last the few weeks/months we were initially promised.
In many aspects I had been more papist than the pope, in the beginning, in the naïve hope this could all be over faster if we all did the responsible thing…but when it became clear that suppression was no longer possible, that the disease was not that deadly and, principally, that the lockdown cure was worse than the disease … I began to slowly engage my brain again… and, once more naively, I thought we would all restart that painful and tiresome process of thinking for ourselves. I thought that, by the end of the initially allocated lockdown time, we would all sit down like adults and discuss our options… naively, of course, as it never happened, and it would never have happened… I can see that now… and it will not happen for the foreseeable future. Not until we stop treating it like a religion that must not be questioned or denounced or else… we are all going to hell (or at least lose face)… bad, bad people we are.
No, I’m not a covid denier… no I don’t think the disease doesn’t exist, no I don’t think it was caused by 5G towers or part of some multi government conspiracy to justify the measures we have seen. I thought I should get that out of the way before continuing… just in case.
As the public debate never happened… meaning the debate about how much can we ask individuals to sacrifice for the benefit of public health… I made my own decisions of how much I was willing to sacrifice and do for the benefit of other people’s health. Of where my responsibility towards public health starts and ends and, upon reflection, I’ve arrived at a few overarching principles. Principles towards which I have moulded my behaviour… ever since end of May 2020. These are:
- My responsibility is towards my own health first (the “do no harm” equivalent of the Hippocratic oath doctors take). I should therefore do my best to keep myself both physically and mentally healthy… not be a burden on others or the public health system and be fit and strong enough to help others when needed. If we all do this, we are all better off.
- I cannot take 100% responsibility of other people’s health and wellbeing. Most of the responsibility for their health and wellbeing is their own. I’m not their conscience, mother, doctor, counsellor, or priest… my responsibility for their health ends where my responsibility for my own health begins. I would go even as far as saying that my responsibility for their health and wellbeing ends where my responsibility for my own health and my rights begins.
- We live in a strongly interconnected arguably overpopulated world, diseases like this are inevitable. The best we can do is keep ourselves as fit and healthy as we can, improve our health systems and invest in research (but not the kind of research that will speed these pandemics up). We also need to give scientists the time they need to provide treatments and vaccines for these diseases when they come by. In order to buy time, it is reasonable to ask the population at large to make small behavioural changes to their daily life. These should always be voluntary and temporary like (The use of masks, social distancing, working from home, staying home when sick, washing hands when entering premisses… not much more than that really). Very much in the same way I choose to wear a mask when I’m sick and I visit my immunosuppressed aunt, or in the same way I chose not to travel back home in March last year suspecting I might have been sick with covid.
- The above reasonable measures require funds, I would be willing to have my taxes increased temporarily to cover for those costs. However, I’m not willing to fund research twice, once through my taxes and then through the purchase of overpriced medication, vaccines and particularly all but useless tests.
- We all need to die one day. We cannot live forever, and we cannot reasonably expect that the number of victims of respiratory diseases falls to zero before we restore peoples’ liberties. The whole concept of the lockdowns was to flatten the curve and to provide everyone with the chance to receive the health care they needed and had paid for with their taxes. Nobody said the objective was to have zero fatalities or infections even. Furthermore, we have had more than 1.5 years to improve the health care system… with all the money thrown at the economy due to the lockdowns…only a fraction of that would have been sufficient to make a huge difference in the public health systems of the world.
I find hard to believe that a great part of the population doesn’t share, at least to some degree, these same views and concerns… and still we all seem to accept these often-illogical measures and decisions from our dear leaders… without much apparent discontent. Is it because they have been permeating our lives slowly and insidiously? Is it because we are still afraid? Or is it because we see some hypothetical “good” coming out of the side effects of these measures? For example, isn’t better to have most of the UK population enjoy their holidays wearing wellies and ponchos in some caravan park in Blackpool rather then bikinis and shorts in the south of Spain? It does seem to reduce the carbon footprint of the country and it does keep airports free for those who really need/can afford to travel… I’m of course being sarcastic in these last two sentences…in case you haven’t detected it. I’m not a fan of the package holidays culture myself, and the package holiday people either… to be completely honest. I never said I was one of the people, but I like to think that I am for the people… and the people has the right to know the truth and make their own choices.
I do fear that some well-meaning people, concerned with the next big challenge – climate change – might be taking this opportunity of mass control to test a change of mass behaviour. The following piece exposes this possibility quite well:
I would hate to think this is the case, and that someone else’s perceived virtue is being imposed on me… It doesn’t really matter if I want to go to Portugal to enjoy the sun or visit family I haven’t seen for a year…it is nothing of anyone else’s business. It is my right to travel, it is my right to go to my own country and to come back to my country of residence… I like those rights and I’m not willing to give them up supposedly for a dubious and illogically constructed benefit towards public health.
I would recommend caution to the individuals looking to use this opportunity for other perceived good intentions…there is so much you can push the elastic band until it breaks… and the people are not as dumb as you might think.
I’m looking forward to travel next year, when we will all be immune to all the respiratory diseases that can possibly ever affect us humans, but will still be obliged to do all of the above and, in addition, present a certificate (preferably signed by the Pope himself, or some Nobel Peace prize winner) attesting to our virtuous nature, in exchange of a donation to one of the organizations listed in some government site and which will be used to offset our carbon footprint. Its ok, they will allow us to pay this donation - of at least 1 000£ per person – in up to 4 small easy instalments throughout the year. Maybe if this is imposed as slowly as the covid restrictions…perhaps we won’t notice it, or even be grateful for the opportunity to lift a weight off our conscience.