Covid-19 has hit and like many, two weeks ago I was laughing at the folks stockpiling toilet paper. Also, like many, I’ve started to get scared. Reading about patient 31 who slipped past detection in South Korea and then had contact with more than 1,000 people, possibly resulting in over half the cases in that country, I can see the risks mounting. But I can also see a sinister way that people are trying to reassure themselves.
You’ve probably seen the graphs shared on social media. About 20% of people infected will end up in hospital, one-quarter of them in ICU. When things get really bad, medical staff will be faced with a choice between patients when allocating limited life-saving resources. Yet, crazily, these stats are often being used to comfort rather than warn. Because the other thing we know is that most of the people in this 20% will be the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions.
I’m the healthy-looking immune-compromised person. I’ve even had friends tell me they are not worried about getting Covid-19 as they know they will survive it. It won’t be people like them who die. Well, it might be me, actually.
People with disability make up 20% of our population. And while many disabilities won’t make an individual any more susceptible to Covid-19, there are many more people not identified as living with disability who still have health conditions that will put them at risk. The same goes for the elderly.
And this brings me to another issue – privilege, and the great myth of self-isolation.
Sure, I live with a couple of auto-immune diseases, but despite the dreary imagery around those with disability or health conditions I don’t live in the attic of my parents’ family home making friends with the spiders and knitting. I live in a flat, I have an adorable partner who’s working overseas, I have what before all the closures was a full-time job, and I generally love my chronically underpaid work in the arts. I’ve put myself in self-isolation as much as possible, but I can’t afford to live by myself. My flatmates still go to work on public transport, go out socialising, one is planning a trip overseas and the other went to Westfield Bondi Junction this Saturday (For those of you not in Sydney, it’s affectionally known as the Death Star because of how huge and busy it is. It’s filled with lost looking shopping minions and I have got lost myself in its eight floors of retail horror on several occasions – it’s a pretty glass and stone petri dish). I can’t go to my family; my parents are old and a plane-flight away. Realistically, I can’t self-isolate in any comprehensive way.
And yet I go on social media and see colleagues and friends sharing stats about how unlikely they are personally to die from Covid-19. How in essence they are safe and are going to go on with their lives worry-free.
Believe me, I get the frustration as society seems to be ground to a halt. I too feel healthy. Yet a show I directed has just had its Melbourne comedy festival season cancelled, who knows if my Canada gig later in the year will ever happen, my relationship is going be confined to video-calls, and my first film is just about to screen at the Sydney film festival. If it’s cancelled it will set my career back years. This is all very unfortunate, yet I know I live in a community and I need to take responsibility for it.
This leads to the nub of ableism underlying all those “we have nothing to worry about” posts. I can’t help but see it as an assumption that we will not lose anyone of value, anyone “like us”, that inconvenience and economy slowing is not worth lives saved, that one life is worth less than another – some lives can be compromised. If I get sick, I won’t die so I’ll take a risk on being another patient 31.
Finally, our government is beginning to limit mass gatherings and quarantine travellers, although our cities are still busy. So, here’s the question: if you are comforting yourself by focusing on statistics that highlight that you personally are not at risk of death, if you are not going out of your way to limit the spread of Covid-19, are you taking part in what is really a form of social eugenics?
• Anthea Williams is a theatre and film director
