Breathtaking

Above all – and contrary to my expectations – becoming a pandemic doctor was revelatory. The crisis has undeniably revealed sweeping truths about social and ethnic inequalities, class divisions, global interconnectedness and the fact that our society’s most vital key workers were, and remain, among the lowest paid and least empowered. Historians will dissect these issues for years to come. My revelations were about people. I learned from ward to ward, from bedside to bedside, paying meticulous attention to one human being and then another. I discovered how to distinguish what we absolutely cannot do without from what is really, in the end, superfluous.

[Emily] Maitlis’s words do not merely strike a chord, they spread like wildfire. For although anyone clearly can succumb to this brutal disease – as the PM’s [Boris Johnson’s] fate has so unnervingly demonstrated – in no sense does this mean our chances of doing so are equal. Nor do we equally suffer the burdens and privations of the pandemic. Now that those workers once dismissed as ‘low-skilled’ have been rebranded as ‘key workers’, for example, they are rightly being lauded as essential lynchpins of British society. But will this new status result in commensurate pay rises, better terms and conditions of work, or even – most pressingly – in adequate PPE? For security guards, shelf stackers, cleaners and carers, viral loads of Covid are a daily reality. Some of us, statistically, are more likely to come out of this worse than others. Far from uniting the UK’s deep-seated economic and social divisions, the pandemic is serving to exacerbate them. I notice the odd starry-eyed piece in the press about post-pandemic utopian futures, but I worry that history shows otherwise: that in times of momentous upheaval, power consolidates power.

Not so long ago, death was an intimate business. As a small child, for example, my grandmother woke up one morning to find her sister had died in the bed beside her. In Victorian England, this was by no means unusual. Typically, we left the world as we entered it, wrapped not in hospital sheets but in the warmth and intimacy of our own homes. Birth and death were witnessed experiences. We observed dying up close, we knew what it looked like. We smelt and heard and touched it. And then, as modern medicine became increasingly institutionalised, we lost that familiarity with the process of dying. Professionals intervened – paid doctors and nurses. Death, in essence, was outsourced to others. In the late twentieth century it became possible to live your entire life without ever directly setting eyes on death, despite half a million people dying in Britain annually. Death evolved from a natural and domestic occurrence into something fearful and foreign from which many of us now recoil. Even some doctors have a habit of tiptoeing away from the daunting business of their patients’ dying.