Sick Countries

Yesterday we visited friends to celebrate Samichlaus with them. It’s a holiday-season holdover from the Swiss childhood of one of them. In essence, we spent a whole evening eating melted slices of Swiss cheeses over small cooked potatoes with various types of pickles (onions, tiny cucumbers, cabbage or beetroot), shelled and ate nuts, munched pretzels or crisps, and finished with a gingery tray-baked dessert and chocolates and cookies.

It's the type of eating where you snack your way through the evening instead of wolfing down a meal, so you talk with each other. We didn’t see these friends in person very often before the pandemic began, and even less now. We had a lot of catching up to do.

One of these friends uses a wheelchair. She can walk, but not much. Like a friend who has multiple sclerosis, she needs the wheelchair because she doesn’t have the energy to walk and do anything else. With the wheelchair, she can have a reasonable life because she doesn’t have to spend all her energy just getting from place to place. The wheelchair offers the unexpected advantage of causing people not to challenge face masks she and her partner wear.

It also has disadvantages. Even when she can get into a shop in her wheelchair, often there isn’t enough space between racks or shelves for her to get to them in her chair to do any shopping. Recently when she accompanied her learning-disabled sister to an airport, the passenger assistance team couldn’t understand that the person standing was the traveler with a disability and in need of help, and the person in a wheelchair wasn’t catching a flight and didn’t need help.

Young children tend to respond to her more appropriately than adults. She reserves some of her limited energy every week to do a bit of volunteer work with kids.

Attitudes and Perspective

Yesterday was an extremely rare instance of visiting indoors face to face with people and feeling no anxiety about it. That wasn’t because we all tested before the visit. Rapid home tests aren’t reliable any more. These friends are diligent about wearing high quality face masks and in general being very careful about potential exposure to pathogens. We brought our big HEPA filter with UV-C. They liked it and decided to get one for themselves.

All four of us at the table have some type of chronic health issue left from a deeper illness many years ago. We talked about the difference between our attitude toward the pandemic and the attitude of most people around us.

Much of our attitude comes from being able to extrapolate from our past to have a clear sense of what Long COVID would be like. We don’t want to risk being very ill again when avoiding it mainly involves some inconvenience. Maybe other people simply cannot imagine what they are risking.

But data indicates we’re accumulating more and more “company” in understanding what it’s like. Unfortunately newcomers are learning the hard way and discovering they may not ever get fully well again. We find this especially disturbing. We have some grasp of how it feels to be sick like that and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

It’s happening in many countries, but the UK stacked an increasingly disabled population on top of an existential crisis for our entire health care system, declining public services and a multifaceted economic crisis. As Richard Partington summarized it in the Guardian:

No other advanced economy has failed to return employment back to its pre-pandemic level, with the UK an international outlier. It’s a trend that has leading economists puzzled. It’s a puzzle because, in principle, as higher wages are offered – alongside the worst hit to living standards since the middle of the last century – that should bring more people back into the labour market.

Although he touched upon most of the factors involved in lagging British employment, he skipped some of the most enlightening pertinent data available from the Office for National Statistics. He cited ONS figures about low unemployment figures. Then he spent the rest of the article wondering why so many people of working age have left the workforce and aren’t even looking for work when the benefit system is miserly and the cost of living is biting hard.

What did he miss?

No Mystery

The answer is right in front of us.

If we look again at ONS data, the answer is right there. ONS estimates half a million people of working age in the UK have dropped out of the workforce because of Long COVID, becoming “economically inactive” which means not working and not looking for work. That’s twice as many people as the current number of people unemployed and looking for work.

If businesses are unhappy about how tight the current labour market is, they need only look at what happens when a worker ends up with Long COVID. The odds of LC are reduced by vaccination, but not eliminated. Each time a person gets infected with the virus, even if the infection is very mild, the odds of LC go up. It’s Russian roulette with a virus as the live round.

Britain has a history of sometimes being “the sick man of Europe” in one way or another, usually economically. This time we’re being literal about it. Other countries also have a problem with more and more people being ill for the long term, but we have taken it so far that we are the only major country too sick to have as many people working as we had before the pandemic.

What To Do

One of our friends told us about a conversation with a man she knows who recently got COVID and has been hammered by it. He lamented that he didn’t understand how he got it.

She asked whether he went anywhere. Oh yes, he went out to some clubs with his friends, but he sanitized his hands every ten minutes. How could he have gotten sick?

She asked whether he wore a face mask. He said no.

She had to explain that’s why he got sick.

We have tools to improve everyone’s odds of staying reasonably intact until one of the teams working on a better vaccine succeeds. Sanitizing your hands is good. It will help you avoid picking up diseases that spread when people touch contaminated surface. But sanitizing your hands doesn’t protect you from airborne diseases. Plenty of varieties are making the rounds. Common colds, sore throats, flu, RSV… and yes, COVID. Not to mention Group A streptococcus, which has killed a few more young children in the south of England since I wrote about it early last week.

We can cut this down tremendously by using tools we already have. Wear face masks around other people whenever possible (including outdoors if you may get too close to them or there are too many of them). Meet other people outdoors with plenty of distance when possible. Indoors, make sure there is plenty of ventilation and air filtration. Top up your vaccinations whenever it’s time for a booster. (Vaccines don’t keep you from getting infected, but they help you come through the infection with less harm than you would otherwise have.)

If you run a business and are frustrated by how often your workers are sick, use these tools and teach people why they should use the same tools in their personal lives. Don’t wait for someone in authority to tell you to do it. By then, who knows whether you’ll still have a functional team?

If you are a worker, use these tools to protect yourself. If you are prohibited from protecting yourself and can’t jump to a safer job, do the best you can and hope for the day when your employer’s insurance company puts its foot down about this. Workers compensation may eventually get pulled into this too, just as it can when tuberculosis (another airborne disease) is caught in a workplace that doesn’t protect adequately against it. Bosses will listen when either their insurance company or the state workers comp fund announces that not protecting you will cost them a pot of money.

If you aren’t running a business and aren’t somebody’s employee, you are still a human being. You can protect yourself and people you care about. We and our friends tested, limited potential exposures as best we could in the days leading up to Samichlaus, and ran a good-sized HEPA filter in order to visit safely.

It isn’t difficult. We aren’t deprived. On the contrary, because we were careful, we all felt free to relax and enjoy catching up with each other.

We may live in “the sick country of Europe,” but that doesn’t mean we have to resign ourselves to being one of the sick. Neither do you. We don’t have to live in lockdown. We just need to use the tools we have.