- They have thousands of ventilators, thousands of trained staff. We have 62. And I can count the trained staff on my fingers. And we think we can just open our schools, conduct elections, flood worshiping places, all at once. And keep on with business as usual in our hospitals?
When I saw the word hotspot on the front page of the daily last Friday, my heart lifted. I thought it meant that suddenly, the COVID pandemic was going to be attacked strategically like was promised. I thought that suddenly 25 hotspots had been identified and were going to be shut down. And that the promise that was made long ago, was going to be kept.
I bought the paper. And then my heart sank. The hotspots were completely unrelated to COVID19. Right across the first page, unto the second and third pages, was the news about what was going to happen at the weekend. There was nothing about COVID19 on those prime pages. It was politics. It was about a weekend filled with anything but physical distancing and hand sanitizing.
And now the deed is done. The people who needed to be voted out have walked into history. There are new leaders now. New manifestos have old spokespersons waxing lyrical. The case numbers are going up. One would have thought that the focus would double back on itself and return where it mattered. That the double vision that politics afflicts us with, would slowly self-correct. And the difference would be clear, between physical disease and social malaise. I have seen pictures from the election. There are people just standing in each other’s faces. The masks are gone, the hugs are in. There are no physical distancing lines on the ground. Its just open fields for virus jumps. And running beneath those electoral battle lines, are all the makings of another surge.
It’s as if no-one knows that today the world got the largest ever daily jumps in new COVID infections on this day. The number of cases in Ghana is not going down. The rate of new infections is not slowing down. The hospital beds are filling up with people who need trained personnel. And it is this kind of training that the country they live in, has never invested in. It’s been decades since independence. The decades that have passed, have not made any difference in the development of our medical capacity. We are still where we were. The money has not actualized on the hospital wards. There is a poverty waiting, for any COVID 19 patient who needs help. There is poverty like no one could ever have imagined. A poverty so hidden away from the eyes within the black Land Cruisers, that no one has done anything about it all these years. And from what I saw in those pictures from the past weekend, maybe no one will in the coming years. But I hope I am wrong.
This disease is real. It is lurking in the shadows, waiting on people’s hands, sheltering in showering droplets from people’s breath. This disease changes things very quickly.
Germany has been a leader in COVID19 control, but today… 1600 people, from one meat factory, in one day, just like that. They have thousands of ventilators, thousands of trained staff. We have 62. And I can count the trained staff on my fingers. And we think we can just open our schools, conduct elections, flood worshiping places, all at once. And keep on with business as usual in our hospitals? We can run out of money for tests, and essential equipment, even with a growing COVID19 fund?
I have lost colleagues to this disease. I have dear friends who are at home now, dealing with the isolation that this disease brings. The difficult thing about that isolation, is how alone one is left. How the sacrifice of our daily grind, seems to warp into a nothingness as one is forgotten. As someone replaces the fallen front liner at the duty post, the wounded front liners are lost in institutional amnesia. There is no isolation support. The same ambulance of stigma comes to their homes. Takes them away to the hospital. The same task force treats their families like vermin, standing at prescribed 2 meter distances, and shouting instructions on what to do.
I was driving my family yesterday, in an air-conditioned car. We had left home, we had made no stops. We were going straight to our destination. We had our masks, in our pockets, ready to wear them as soon as we got to the destination. The police man stopped me. His mask was under his nostrils. He asked me why I was not wearing my mask, and spewed his nose droplets into my car. I told him we were the same family, from the same home. He shook his head vehemently, insisting we needed our masks. I could have told him I was a doctor, but I did not. I was in a hurry to drive away from his droplets.
And he had the law on his side… not the science.
