Cameron Duodu writes: Coronavirus - Some distasteful truths

I sit on the porch, overlooking a concrete driveway and a small patch of green grass. I try to smell

the fragrance that I know is being emitted from the white petals of a couple of potted jasmine plants.


Why am I telling you this? It's because COVID-19 has made me rather introspective. It has revealed to me how fragile the human project is. All the beauty we find on Planet Earth is being eroded before our eyes. Fear is being forcefully transmitted into every brain on earth that is privy to the information that is available to us all. As a songster of ours said a long time ago, "Kurom ay3 hu!" [It's become scary in town!]


SCENARIO: You have been trained to be a nurse or a doctor or a hospital cleaner or porter. You go to work as usual. Then, one day, you begin to sneeze or cough and experience a high temperature. You are taken to the very hospital in which you have been working. It is only then that you are tested and found to be COVID-19 positive.

For crying out loud: why be tested only after you had shown symptoms of the disease? Did they give you the necessary Personal Protective Equipment [PPEs] before sending you to work in the hospital as usual? When they failed to test you, did they not know that if you had caught the disease from a patient, you would also expose others to it? By allowing you to go near uninfected patients, you'd become a potential killer to the people you went to work to save, hadn't you? If you allowed this conundrum to become clarified in your own mind, how would you be able to reconcile it with your duty of saving lives, not taking them?
You trusted the “health authorities” when you agreed to put your skills at their disposal. Have they reciprocated that trust?

SCENARIO: When asked about “PPEs” to health workers, the POLICY-MAKERS never give exact numbers! But they always do claim to have “adequate supplies” (either in the “supply chain” [about to be distributed!] or "on order"). We're talking about life and death and they are being so vague? Shouldn't it be someone's job to know exactly where every sorely-needed gown, eye-guard or face mask is, at any one time? Shouldn't national policy be: “GET PPE, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARRY”?

It is not the politicians who are to blame so much as the health professionals who “advise” them. (Except Donald Trump!)

On almost every occasion that Donald Trump makes an outrageous claim about COVID-19, he has had Dr Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, of the National Institute of Health, at his side. Dr Fauci almost always tries to swerve the President away from his more phantasmagoric pronouncements. But the body language of the situation – the cool professional rationalising what he thinks the President wants to say, versus a President who thinks he knows better than his own professional advisers – is unsustainable, surely? No wonder he's apparently now been excluded from Trump’s COVID pulpit sessions!

In the UK, it is quite evident that the Tory policy of partially prying away NHS professionals from such crucial functions as administrative control and purchasing of equipment, as well as the organisation of medical tests, to private firms (established solely to make profit) has had a drastic effect on the NHS. One NHS purchasing officer (no doubt brought into the NHS to provide it with private sector "commercial expertise"!) is even reported to have established his own company, selling PPEs! So, he is now the competitor of his own employers? How absurd can you get?

The contradiction of asking a public health service to run on commercial lines has been ruthlessly exposed by the suddenness and ferocity of the COVID-19 attack on Britain. It has not been possible to cover the tracks of the profiteers. And the public is seeing what Tory policies really mean in practice.

Worse, it has been found, in the UK, that more health professionals from black, Asian and other ethnic minority groups are dying than their proportion in the general population would lead one to expect. The media in the UK have been reporting this, but their analyses of the causes almost always stop short: they're limited to the "poor living conditions", poor general health and areas of abode of health workers from minority groups. But does this analysis apply to the affluent doctors who have also died?

That's nonsense! It's the taboo words, which British society doesn't ever want to acknowledge, “institutional racism”, that is subtly operating, Should the question not be asked: who are in charge – in actual practice – of issuing PPEs to health professionals before they go to work in COVID-sensitive wards?

Who are in charge of drawing up rosters that assign health professionals to the dangerous acute/emergency units of care in hospitals?
Junior doctors in Britain have been protesting vociferously for years about being dangerously overworked in hospitals, especially in the Accident and Emergency departments. If the “roster-masters/mistresses” can create such an unprofessional and risky situation – consciously – in relation to junior doctors, what prevents them from unconsciously engaging in acts of “institutional racism” against non-white employees of the NHS?


Such a notion may sound unfair. Right. The answer to that, surely, is to carry out an impartial enquiry into the deaths of health professionals from minority groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, isn't it?
I heard a discussion of this issue on the normally inimitable BBC Radio 4 the other day. “Institutional racism”, I am afraid, was never seriously mentioned among the causes of the deaths that are causing concern. I don't think that this was necessarily because the participants in the programme refused to acknowledge the existence of "institutional racism" in the NHS. It's just that it didn’t occur to them, as non-ethnic minority Britons, that such a phenomenon does ACTUALLY exist in their society (despite this being widely revealed in r the Stephen Lawrence enquiry Report).

The reason why this idea seldom occurs to even intellectually honest Britons can be found, of course, in the answer to this rhetorical question: Why are so many media institutions in the UK satisfied with employing people of only one [racial] mindset on their establishments?

I sincerely hope our health professionals, who acquired much of their knowledge from the UK and the USA, are sharply watching the mistakes these countries are making, with an eye to avoiding them like the plague!