“We didn’t get any support to help test our employees, we didn’t get any protective equipment. They didn’t help us to do what they wanted us to!”, the chairperson of the lobby organisation for private health care services in Sweden whines. According to her, their businesses were left out in the cold as soon as the pandemic spread. They had to fend for themselves like the poor little helpless babes they now claim to be. They were abandoned in the midst of a oncoming pandemic, according to their version of events.
Recently, a study from the Swedish health care inspection (IVO) painted a stark picture on the state of the Swedish geriatric care. The institutions that are supposed to care and tend to the elderly, where the vast majority of Sweden’s disproportionate high number of Wuhan Virus casualties can be found. According to the report, old people diagnosed with the disease were oft-times given sedatives, painkillers, and locked in their rooms to die. To hand-wave away potential criticism, the geriatric care units locked the doors so that families couldn’t visit their old ones. Meanwhile, the unprotected employees and carers cycled through the wards, spreading the infection like wildfire.
The elderly were left to die. Hooked up to drugs and shut away in their rooms. Not by the Swedish state or the public health ministry, but by the health care administrations, private and public, across the country.
And according to the public and private elderly home administrators, they didn’t know any better. They had no means to do any better. Their hands were tied and they didn’t get any help. So they left their clients to die. Because, apparently, that was the best they could do without the stern government hand to guide them. They say that they didn’t know any better.
If that was their best idea, I hate to imagine what their bad ideas looked like…
The private and county municipal health care industry in Sweden has faltered. The pandemic was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And they’re not alone. Reports of business sectors falling apart are abundant. The taxi-cab industry clamours that it’s bleeding and demand government aid packages to stay afloat. Same goes for hundreds of gas stations across Sweden. And yet, it seems that the country is doing much better economically than most others in the western world, where big and small private businesses are snuffed out en masse.
The Wuhan Virus, Covid-19, the novel corona virus, the new plague, is proving to be the death knell to many of our social and financial institutions.
These stories might come as a shock to most. Maybe not strictly as a surprises any more, after a year of lockdowns and a new modus operandi for the world, but certainly something worthy of lamentation. What you took for granted, this consumerist society, the service industry, the very fabric of our post-modern world, is cracking under the pressure of a pandemic disaster.
To me, however, it gives a rise to nothing but anger and derision. Because we knew that another pandemic was coming. We had near misses for several years counting up to this Wuhan Virus. We had the avian flu, the pig flu, SARS, all potential killers. We dodged them, for the most part, but you can’t stay lucky forever. And what did we do? Did we prepare? Did we stockpile protective equipment? Did we build safeguards against economic lockdowns? Did we train the public pre-emptively on how to deal with a potential plague? Did we adjust our health care services to match a looming eventuality?
No. We did not. We knew it was coming. Scientists and doctors knew it was coming. And our leaders, us the public, didn’t want to listen. We wanted to carry on like always even though every single one of us that knew better told us that it wouldn’t always be so.
We were told. The public was told. Politicians were told. The media was told. And we didn’t listen. We made no adjustments. The health care services around the world didn’t stockpile materials. They didn’t shore up the turnover of employees. They didn’t put safeguards in place. Because that would have cost money. Our politicians didn’t push the issue. They didn’t pressure the health care industry to prepare. They didn’t push the markets to invest for a pandemic winter. Because being a storm crow won’t win you any votes. And so, our gutted public health care advisory boards were left, toothless, to set up contingencies on their own. Without respect or attention paid by the rest of society. Because the looming threat of pestilence was their problem, we dismissed.
And now we, the industry, the public, the politicians, the markets, wail and whine at the public health defenders that they haven’t done enough to protect us. Even though we all knew damned well that our margins weren’t enough to handle the strains of a crisis. We knew. The health care industry which constantly cuts corners and personnel to mitigate fiscal concerns knew. The politicians who threw away stockpiles of medical protective equipment because the storage of it turned costly knew. The markets that continually rely on the wild and unsustainable consumption of goods and services knew. The banks that provide loans to businesses under circumstances that weren’t sustainable or resilient enough to withstand a plague knew. The public lulled into laziness and complacency knew. We all knew that the centre wouldn’t hold come a real disease.
And now we complain when our margins aren’t enough to withstand a plague. Now we shift blame while we full well know that the paradigms and systems we have laboured to maintain couldn’t sustain this kind of inevitable event. We knew we should have changed, we should have evolved, but we couldn’t be arsed to. It is almost as if we’ve actively exerted ourselves to create and propagate a society that can’t handle the stresses of inexorable disaster. This isn’t the first time a confluence of calamities have steam-rolled civilization. It will not be the last time either.
I think it is beyond the pale when the likes of Eva Nilsson Bågenholm, the chairperson of the lobby organisation of the private health care sector to whine and complain and shift blame. I think it is beyond the pale of the likes of her, in charge of safeguarding our elderly, to claim that they didn’t know what to do when disaster eventually hit as everyone knew it would. We all knew this was coming. And we collectively chose to shove our heads in the sand, to keep cutting corners, to keep slimming the margins.
The doctors and epidemiologists don’t deserve our scorn. We should instead look into the mirror. We deserve to feel absolute and utter shame because we chose to disregard history, the storm crow advice of the WHO and national health care advisors. And now we’re proving too cowardly to face up to our own lack of foresight.
The pandemic’s humbling effects aren’t the fault of doctors and medical professionals. They simply work for us, the democratic public. It is not their fault that we hamstrung their efforts. The fault is our own.
/Sebastian Lindberg 1/12-2020
WastedWords 