Intensive Care by Gavin Francis

Author:Gavin Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

By 6 May the UK had registered 29,000 deaths from Covid, the highest in Europe. On 7 May the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, extended lockdown further, shortly after insisting on people wearing face coverings in shared transport, shops and places where physical distancing wasn’t possible.

The same day, 10 May, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson relaxed some lockdown measures for England, encouraging a return to work, but still asking people to avoid public transport; he said that driving to work and to places for exercise would be permitted. The message was no longer ‘stay at home’ but ‘stay alert’. How anyone could stay alert against a virus 0.000012 cm in diameter wasn’t clear. I asked a friend who works as an ITU specialist in the English Midlands what he thought of the speech. ‘No mention of facemasks in public? Everybody in their cars? I think it’s an experiment at the expense of the English.’ Nicola Sturgeon made it clear she was unimpressed by Boris Johnson’s approach: ‘I have asked the UK government not to deploy their “stay alert” advertising campaign in Scotland.’ The message in Scotland was not ‘stay at home if you can’ but ‘stay at home full stop’.

But the longing to open society, at least a little, was irrepressible: in my daily GP work it was ever more obvious that the measures were having devastating social and economic consequences, and I hoped that all the sacrifices my patients were making would be worth it, and this lockdown would be the last. Redundancies, suicides, insomnia and bankruptcies, not to mention the effect on children of having no school structure, no exercise, no communal opportunities to play. Although evictions were currently suspended, unless robust housing legislation was urgently put in place, they would inevitably rise as unemployment soared.

‘The best protection against coronavirus is your own front door’ was a formula often repeated by politicians during this first lockdown. Each time I heard it there was a silent rejoinder in my mind: what if you don’t have a front door? The emphasis on ‘stay at home’ was everywhere – government broadcasts repeated it on TV, on the radio, on info boards over motorways and on social media. To give homeless people a ‘home’ to shelter from the virus, and to recuperate from it safely, was not only a humanitarian ideal but a public health necessity.

On 23 March the Scottish government, public health officials, charities and local councils had all come together to mitigate the worst of the pandemic’s effects on the homeless. The initiative was brokered by the charities Streetwork, the Cyrenians and the Bethany Trust. An eighty-bed hotel ordinarily occupied by well-off tourists was hired by the government and within twenty-four hours, the evening of 24 March, it was full of homeless people, as was a smaller hotel, exclusively for female residents. The winter shelter, which would ordinarily stay open until Easter, had already closed to minimise the spread of Covid-19; a third hotel was opened as a temporary ‘night shelter’ shortly afterwards.

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