“Remember the “living with polio” campaign?” said Irish journalist Philip O’Connor the other day.
“Nope, me neither.”
Remember the "living with polio" campaign?
Nope, me neither.— Philip O'Connor (@philipoconnor) December 20, 2021
The point being made here is clear: we don’t put up with deadly diseases like polio. We’re not content to live alongside dangerous pathogens as a society. And so the implication is, why should we “live with Covid”?
And why indeed?
Make no mistake about it – Covid-19, like all potentially fatal illnesses, is a dreadful disease.
One can only imagine how awful it must be to contract it as someone in a vulnerable category, or to watch a loved one go through it. Struggling to breathe, clinging to life on a ventilator, and, in many sad cases, not making it, despite the best efforts of the nurses and doctors.
You honestly wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It’s nothing short of appalling, and sincerely, God bless any family who has to go through such a tragedy.
But sadly, Covid is not the first disease of its kind, as many of us know all too well. Not to mention, Covid isn’t Polio, or anything like it. In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralysing hundreds of thousands of children every year.
Before this, we had the Spanish Flu, which, in the last century, claimed 50 million human lives worldwide. To us that death toll sounds unthinkable – but this was a hard reality for the people of the 20th century.
Even the common flu, before Covid, claimed as many as half a million human lives every year. Half a million people – many of them old and vulnerable – passed away every 12 months from this respiratory illness before Covid even existed.
The Bubonic Plague, SARS, leprosy – the world is full of deadly diseases.
Is it fair? Of course it’s not fair. None of this is fair. But sadly, life rarely is.
From Typhoid, to Malaria, to Measles, Mumps and Tuberculosis, not to mention a thousand other ailments, humanity has been plagued by – well, plagues – for as long as we have existed as a species.
When you think of the middle ages, what images come to mind? Valiant knights on horseback? Majestic castles? Kings and mutton?
These are the pictures of history that we see in movies and books. We don’t see the crippling illness and pestilence that was omnipresent in human society, and continues to be in much of the world.
Which brings us to the topic of “living with Covid.”
For starters, we need to make it clear what living with Covid is not.
It does not mean telling old and vulnerable people “You’re on your own” and simply letting them die. It does not mean doing nothing to protect people from disease.
I mean, we’ve been practicing basic hygiene for the last few centuries, and it’s worked pretty well so far.
What living with Covid means is, accepting that this disease, like virtually every other disease history, is with us, whether we like it or not. It’s about realism and being pragmatic – seeing the world as it is, and not how we want it to be. It’s about understanding that we have to live our normal lives, virus or no virus, and that we can’t socially engineer our way out of this.
Tsunamis lead to great human tragedy. They still happen. Hurricanes, floods, fires, droughts – these are unavoidable, inevitable forces of nature. As are viruses like Covid-19.
Philip O’Connor says we didn’t have a “living with polio” campaign. But that’s not true, is it?
We did live with polio – for thousands and thousands of years. We didn’t have polio lockdowns. We didn’t suspend our normal lives. We knew the disease was here to stay, and so people had to accept that grim fact and get on with it for centuries – which they did.
Even today, in areas such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, there are annual polio outbreaks. People still live their day to day existence – they go to work, school, get married, attend sports matches. They have to – what choice do they have?
Part of life on planet earth is accepting that we can’t control everything. We’ve achieved so much as a species technologically, that we think we’re invincible – like there’s no suffering that can’t be overcome by our genius, and utopia is just around the corner.
But it’s not – risk and danger is as much a part of life as joy is. And we can’t destroy normality in pursuit of an impossible goal.