Gareth O'Callaghan: Apart from how to wash our hands, we've learned nothing from covid
Cemetery workers and funeral agency workers transport a coffin of a person who died from covid-19 into a cemetery in Bergamo, Italy in March 2020. Picture: Reuters/Flavio Lo Scalzo
“So we're meant to sacrifice the economy in the interests of keeping sick and elderly people safe? Shutting down the country will destroy everything, including our health.”
Shocking words spoken by a friend five years ago this week as the country was heading for its first lockdown. Prioritising health and vulnerable people’s lives above the economy and tens of thousands of careers and jobs was insane, he told me — that the foundation of everything, including health and welfare, was a steady economy.
Wrong. Nothing is more important than health and human life, no matter what, I said to him, seconds before our friendship ended.
I couldn't believe an endearing, kind-hearted husband and father, popular in his local community, would be prepared to put lives at risk just so his business wouldn't crash, which it did when he died of covid-related complications six months later.
Covid brought out the Jekyll and Hyde in many people, which probably explains why many of us lost friends.
By then I was keeping a diary, noting observations that would remind me later just how lucky I was to have survived when millions didn’t. I read back through some of it last week, in an effort to recall those days, and what, if anything, I’ve learned from them.
I started keeping the journal because the news with its shocking images quickly became overwhelming. When the notion of fighting an invisible enemy that could kill became a reality, common sense became scarce.
When I visited Moscow in 1990, I watched long queues outside half-empty food stores, with people fighting over bread and toilet rolls.
Now, here I was standing in a queue of mask-wearers, waiting to be admitted to my local supermarket by men in security jackets, as I watched shoppers leave with trolleys full of baking supplies and tinned foods, some of them fighting over toilet rolls.
What I remember most about the covid lockdowns is not the afternoons spent in our garden listening to the birds, or the brilliant cyan-blue colour of the sky — which the conspiracy theorists were telling us was back to what it should be in the absence of chemtrails — or the sounds of neighbours cutting grass or having barbecues.
I didn’t make sourdough or invest in watercolours in the hope of emulating Picasso, nor did I convert the garden shed into a bar to show off on Facebook, complete with draught beer taps and funny motifs. Instead, I read. I watched musicians online stage live unplugged sessions from their homes. I made stews and slept a lot.
I had no problem keeping within the two-kilometre exercise limit, nor did I have an issue with spending time at home. I’m a loner, so it suited me; but I can also understand why it transformed others into Edward Hyde types.
Television images left me in a state of dread. There were no words on those occasions as I watched articulated trailers being used as morgues at hospitals in Lombardy, weeks after covid arrived in the ski towns of northern Italy. “The medical teams are fighting a war here, and they are losing,” Sky News told us.
Emergency arrivals wards looked no different to intensive care units, the sick were arriving so fast.
Twitter quickly became an asylum for neurotics — a distraction for some people who might otherwise have murdered their entire families during lockdown — to rant about fake news and insult anyone whose opinion was moderate and considered.
Most of all, it was the relentless bad news that I found unbearable. I recall the videos of Italian army trucks transporting bodies in the dead of night from Bergamo to remote cremation sites because the city’s morgues couldn’t cope.
Then there were the coffins — thousands of them — being buried in mass graves in New York, which we had visited the previous autumn. City workers in hazmat outfits stacked them in deep trenches on Hart Island in the Bronx, which for years had been the final resting place of those with no next-of-kin, or for families who couldn’t afford a funeral.
Death the great leveller saw the wealthy buried alongside paupers. By the end of March 2020, New York state had more coronavirus cases than any single country, with almost 8,000 deaths; 29,000 died in April. It had only just begun.
It also meant they could no longer connect with friends who they only met during morning Mass. It isolated the elderly even more, and that was far from healthy. It made no sense that supermarket aisles were overcrowded, while church aisles were off-limits.
I watched in horror as thousands crossed the Irish Sea to Cheltenham as then taoiseach Leo Varadkar was announcing the first lockdown. People weren’t getting the message, their indifference to the emergency was gruesome. The Six Nations game between Ireland and Italy that month had been postponed, the St Patrick’s Day celebrations cancelled, so why not Cheltenham?
I read in my diary about a young man who walked into the emergency department at Cork University Hospital on February 25, 2020, with unusual respiratory symptoms, later identified as covid. His was the first case of community transmission of the virus in Ireland. Sadly, he died.
As I sit here on a beautiful March morning recalling these memories, it’s still difficult to fathom how a virus so tiny that it’s impossible to see with the naked eye could have caused the deaths of over seven million people — a testimony perhaps to how nature and nurture affect disease and health, and how that invisible connection remains one of medicine’s unanswerable questions.
In February 2020, Marcello Natali, an Italian doctor working in Cremona in the heart of the most infected ‘red zone’ in the region, was already warning about the lack of supplies and protective support for hospital workers. Has that since changed in our own hospitals? No.
Natali spoke about the overuse and abuse of antibiotics: “We certainly were not prepared to face such a situation. Also because of our generation — that of the most antibiotic era – who grew up thinking a pill against disease was enough. We thought a pill was a solution to everything.”
Weeks later, Natali was dead.
So why are we not better preparing ourselves for the next pandemic? Irishman Dr Mike Ryan, the epidemiologist who became the WHO’s covid chief sums it up in a question: “Where are we putting our money in defence — defending ourselves against foreign armies or defending ourselves against viruses?” he asked in February 2021 as he accepted Trócaire’s Romero Award.
“Now that covid is behind us, it’s business as usual,” a colleague said to me in October 2022 when all restrictions had been lifted. Every time I hear those words, I’m reminded how little we have learned. We can’t allow ourselves to return to normal, because normal is what led to the pandemic.
Covid was a wake-up call to how we live our lives. Perhaps it's my dead friend's chilling words that I remember most, spoken about people who are no different to our ageing parents or immune-compromised siblings, who are entitled to as safe and healthy a life as the rest of us.
When faced with the virus, “pure individualism gets us nowhere”, Mike Ryan said. A “sense of community is what saves you in a pandemic”.
