Health experts on the psychological cost of Covid-19
On Instagram, a friend posts a photograph of a male nurse in an intensive care ward of an American hospital. He is wearing full protective clothing and holding up a patient questionnaire on which he has scrawled a message for his colleagues. It reads: “Just going to hold his hand for a while, I don’t think he has long.”
On an Irish radio station, a woman reads a poem she has written for a loved one lost to the virus. It is called My Sister Is Not a Statistic. It begins:
Tomorrow, when the latest Deathometer of Covid is announced in sonorous tones,
Whilst all the bodies still mount and curl towards the middle of the curve
Heaped one atop and alongside the other
My sister will be among those numbers...
On Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, a critical care nurse from Sierra Leone, who works in a hospital in the south of England, describes the frantic chaos of the first few weeks of the pandemic. “We didn’t have equipment at all, but our ordinary aprons and gloves… I’d go in there praying and hoping I don’t get infected. Then I’d go home, praying and hoping, and trying to isolate myself from my daughters so I am not passing it on to them.”
Amid the prolonged stasis imposed by lockdown, as the days drift into one another, the unreal magnitude of what is unfolding is momentarily undercut by acutely personal testimonies from the eye of the storm. These are just three examples of ordinary people who have responded in extraordinary ways. Their actions speak of selflessness, defiance and bravery in the face of the invisible threat that hovers around us in the very air that we breathe. But they also provide us with glimpses of the immense human cost of the pandemic, the great well of loss, fear, sadness and grief beneath the mounting statistics.
In Britain, as I write, 37,000 people have lost their lives to the Covid-19 virus, while 267,000 have experienced and survived the terrible uncertainty of infection. As a fragile normality slowly returns, many mental health experts are asking the inevitable questions: what will be the long-term emotional and psychological cost of such a sudden and seismic disruption of our way of life?
