I think the biggest issue is fear. My grandma, mid 80s with underlying health conditions including COPD, is officially shielding. She is terrified of coronavirus, and yes the stats for her are not great. Her routine health appointments have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. She isn’t allowing anyone into her house (my family) for risk of giving it to her. I’m not close enough to check up on her but the rest of my family are. They are dropping by, making sure her garden is done, bringing her shopping. When lockdown was stricter, she didn’t want my dad driving for 20 minutes each way to check on her because she was worried he’d get in trouble. Even though it would be checking on someone medically vulnerable.
Without too outing myself - everyone in my family works in a higher risk industry (lots of people in confined spaces, some dealing with Covid-19 directly but lots of potential for carriers). My grandma doesn’t drive anymore. She’s terrified of public transport and even sitting in the car and at the hospital with her sons. When her routine medical appointments are rebooked, I’ve no idea how she will actually attend them without having a panic attack. God knows what missing her routine appointments for 2 months (at least) has done, what has been missed.
My fear at the moment, isn’t that my grandma dies from covid-19 because she has locked herself down. My fear is that she dies because her routine medical appointments have missed something worsening. Or when her routine appointments are rebooked she is too terrified of covid-19 to attend them. As heartless as this sounds, my grandma is reaching the age where she will likely die soon, it could be general old age or related to existing conditions. She could live another 20 years obviously but that’s the minority who do. I don’t want her to die but I realise it’s inevitable and I’d like to hug her, go for a meal with her before she does. It’s one of the great unknown unknowns - if we continue life as it was, would she get it and die or would she recover but she wouldn’t be so bloody terrified. Or have we created a fear greater than the virus itself and my grandma didn’t contract the virus but for 2 of her last 5 years, she wasn’t able to hug and kiss her siblings, her children, her grandchildren.
People often throw around how people with the virus will die, thinking that will create the fear. I imagine for some people that idea is scary but death is rarely dignified or nice. My aunt died the exact way that most people like to say covid-19 patients have died. She had secondary breast cancer that had spread to her lungs and liver. My grandad would probably fit the enviable category of a ‘nice’ death, although I disagree. He was placed in palliative care but it took about 10 days for him to actually die. It took 10 days of him eating less and less to nothing at all, drinking less and less, until they had to wet his lips with a sponge, not moving, not speaking just waiting for his body to finally give up. Now it’s no drowning in your own lungs but it’s hardly a nice death just becoming weaker until your body finally stops.
I’m not sure whether we should have locked down to begin with or continued on with some social distancing. I think we can only reach that conclusion with hindsight when we understand the virus a lot than we do now and we understand the full impact of other deaths (cancer, DV, suicide). I think reflections on that can’t be made for 5, 10 years. However, I think a lockdown was inevitable when you consider the fear around the virus and there are a number of factors that contributed to that fear: the way China reacted in those early months (ignoring it and then locking down an entire province and building a field hospital); social media including platforms such as this (yes, I see the irony) and the way the media reported on it. The government then adding a slogan of ‘stay home, save lives, protect the nhs’ then accelerated the fear.