Coronavirus crisis: To our healthcare workers on the front line, we salute you
There will be robust discussions about the handling of the COVID-19 crisis but the courage of our healthcare workers is not in doubt, writes James Morrow.
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As much as we like to flatter ourselves that we are clever beings who can see around corners and address threats rationally, we humans are ultimately sensory animals. It is generally not until we hear the gunshots or see the bodies on the street that we really sit up and take notice of a danger.
Which is what makes the current war we are in against coronavirus seem all the more surreal – and hard to get our heads around.
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Though it has been three months or so since the first headlines started appearing about a mysterious respiratory virus coming out of China, the war still feels, in many ways, distant.
The horrific death counts out of Italy and Spain and tented field hospitals set up in Manhattan’s Central Park can seem impossibly far away from a country like Australia where so far we have been spared the worst of the disease’s health effects – though the dire economic effects are already being felt on every high street in the country.
And meanwhile here in Australia we, or at least most of us, seem to be doing what we are told. Which is to say, not a lot of anything: fattening our waistlines, perhaps, while we flatten the curve.
But it’s a different story for our doctors, nurses, and frontline healthcare professionals.
Those doctors and nurses and others on the front lines may not wear slouch hats or carry .303 rifles but they are very much heroes in that great spirit of Australians who put their lives on the line, voluntarily at that, for their fellow citizens, against an enemy that is all the more harder to fight because it is invisible.
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For the vast majority of them, they wouldn’t think twice about what they are doing – and equally, the word “hero” is the last way they would want to be described.
Even if, in the face of the current crisis, it is well deserved.
Speak to any doctor or nurse and they will tell you of their terror of an onslaught of patients that might eventually come through their wards which could become overwhelmed with not enough beds and respirators to go around.
It’s not an impossibility, either.
While we have been comparatively lucky in Australia and recent days have seen some of the hoped-for “flattening” of the curve, one only has to look to places like New York City to see what can happen when a health system becomes overwhelmed.
There, in one six-hour period on Monday afternoon local time, the coronavirus death toll rocketed up by 124 – or one death just about every three minutes.
Not new cases, most of whom would be expected to survive. Deaths.
And while they are concerned for their patients there is also the threat that they themselves face – particularly in tricky procedures such as intubating coronavirus victims, hooking them up to the machines that are vital to helping them, breathe and, hopefully, recover.
“Anyone who says they are not worried about dying would be few and far between,” Dr Tim Southwood, an intensive care specialist at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital told The Daily Telegraph last week.
It’s not an empty worry either, particularly if a feared “tsunami” of cases hits hospitals – though the trend in recent days does suggest that the day-by-day numbers of cases are decreasing.
In Spain, one of the globe’s most hard-hit countries, some 14 per cent of the nation’s 40,000-plus coronavirus cases are medical professionals who’ve been forced off the front lines into isolation when they are needed most.
Indeed while the vast majority of them would not think of themselves as heroes there is no reason why they shouldn’t wear and celebrate that label.
At RPA, a so-called “Tiger Team” staff a 16-bed unit that was built from scratch in just one week – and which as of last week already had nine patients.
It’s a story being repeated at hospitals around the city and Australia.
And while we are sure to have a necessary debate in the coming weeks and days about the best policy prescriptions for fighting this disease and at the same time getting us back to work to try and restore the very prosperity that pays for such a generally world class health system, this should be one thing that we agree upon.
Of course, others on the front line also deserve praise: supermarket and other checkout workers, bus drivers and others who work to keep the rest of us going, whether we are essential workers or not.
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Many Australians have already been asked to pay a terrible price in jobs lost and dreams deferred. The government has done what it can to ease their suffering – and none of this is to take away from their losses.
Others of us have seen our personal freedoms put on a high shelf, and we can only hope that governments give them back as quickly as possible when this is all over.
But in the meantime, when we see them, let us salute our healthcare heroes.
Don’t shake their hand or pat them on the back, obviously. A friendly wave from an allowable social distance will do.
And maybe even offer to buy them a beer – when it’s safe to go back to the pub.
James Morrow is the opinion editor for The Daily Telegraph.