Coronavirus - catapulting bodies

 

I have been watching an interview with David Simon, creator of HBO's, “The Wire”. Set in the US city of Baltimore, it is a powerful indictment of US capitalism at the turn of the 21st century. In Simon’s own words, “We have a system indifferent to people, to their morality. Instead of Olympian Gods throwing lightning bolts at people for the fun of it, our institutions – the police, the schools, the elections and so on – are the Gods with Capitalism as the ultimate God. Capitalism is Zeus.”

Simon argues that the series, which ran from 2002 – 2008, exposed “a war against the underclass fought by the people who have against the people who have not.” In this world, he said, there is rising indifference to the growing numbers of those who are “increasingly worthless.”

The Baltimore of The Wire exposes an economic model that doesn’t need as many people as it once did for the 1% to accumulate their huge wealth. “Our institutions”, Simon argues, “have become utterly unfeeling to the people they are supposed to serve.”

Moving from mythical Greece to the 14^th Century and on to today, a London cardiologist told Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph, that every mistake that could have been made about Covid-19 was made. He likened the care home policy to the 1346 Siege of Caffa when the Mongol army catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the walls of that Crimean city.

Drawing on this analogy, Evans-Pritchard says government policy was to let the virus rip and then "cocoon the elderly". “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did. We discharged known, suspected, and unknown cases into care homes which were unprepared, with no formal warning that the patients were infected, no testing available, and no PPE to prevent transmission. We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable. We let these people die without palliation. The official policy was not to visit care homes – and they didn’t (and still don’t). So, after infecting them with a disease that causes an unpleasant ending, we denied our elders access to a doctor – denied GP visits – and denied admission to hospital. Simple things like fluids, withheld. Effective palliation ... withheld.”

While this was going on, Boris Johnson and his ministers told us that there was no danger of outbreaks of coronavirus in care homes. Hospitals were bullied into releasing patients into these homes. Tens of thousands of elderly people have died as a result of this calamitous policy.

Now we are being told there is no danger of outbreaks of coronavirus in schools and the government is bullying teachers and parents into sending their children back to school.

Young and old, rich and poor – everyone is at risk of catching, spreading and potentially succumbing to the coronavirus. But just as in Baltimore, the risk of ill health is highest for the elderly and for the black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities.

Of course, the government cannot admit to their role in what Simon called a "war against the underclass". They are not going to stand before the TV cameras and say, "We don’t care a toss about you." In place of that, they move on to the next convenient lie.

Meanwhile, the perjuring politicians continue to work from home having been gifted their generous bonus, and Boris Johnson’s old school, Eton, remains closed until the autumn. Their indifference towards human life is not total. They look after their own.