My niece

My niece Zoe is twenty years old and she studies nursing. I envy her. Her job is indisputable when society functions as it should but now it’s never been more important and more dangerous. Many industrialized countries do not have enough PPE for nurses or doctors. They are now expected to use what masks or gowns or other gear are at hand, regardless of its true protective qualities. And it may be used multiple times because there’s not enough to go around. Not to further beat this drum with a cudgel but I can get an espresso machine delivered to my door within a 12-hour turnaround timeframe but medical supplies have gone the way of the dodo.

How did it come to this?

Remember Y2K? We thought planes would drop out of the sky, computers would jam, salaries setup via direct debit wouldn’t get paid, life saving machines that relied on specific date stamps would perhaps stop pumping blood or oxygen or whatever scenario was predicted in our Disaster Recovery Plans. And nothing happened. Chicken Little didn’t fall from the sky and on we went with our little lives, while other calamities were woefully mismanaged. One of the many ironies of this pandemic is there were no big test runs for these extraordinary days despite SARs, MERs, N1H1, those bats that killed a bunch of people in Queensland... Sure, Bill Gates gave a TED talk a few years back; various pandemic offices were established but then summarily disbanded. Collectively we shrugged our shoulders. There are those pesky outbreaks of ebola every once in a while but that’s primarily West Africa so obviously not our problem.

Yet here we are. I was in San Francisco for 9/11 and that was bad enough. I don’t want to say it’s exponentially worse because it diminishes that particular horror. But this is different. Many of us are following WHO guidelines and sheltering in place but people like Zoe venture out to do their jobs and it’s what we expect of them and yet so, so wrong. Why do good people bear the brunt of this when systems and procedures and governments should have plans and supplies and water tight contingencies in place to prevent the very thing that most of us are now witnessing from the confines of our homes? It’s wrong is what it is. And it gives truth to the idea that a pandemic doesn’t only highlight a hacking cough. Like a rash, it exposes the anger and fear in ways that frighten me. Right now, all those people protesting in Michigan about their civil rights being trampled on? Put them in a pen I say and if they get sick, deny them the care they’ll need because they don’t believe it anyway. Give the ventilators to the nursing homes, to the hospitals in New Jersey and New York. We all retreat into our beliefs but stripped of compassion.

In the meantime I chat with Zoe via Messenger each week and I hope that she has the health and the stamina and the very great good luck to dodge these CV-19 pathogens. Because her uniform is not necessarily going to help.