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Lifting the veil – Covid 19 in the UK
Lifting the veil – Covid 19 in the UK The Covid 19 pandemic has exposed in new ways the strengths and weaknesses of British society. Pandemic response has been a fascinating mixture of different stories: communities reaching out to each other and adapting to support the vulnerable; health and social care workers sacrificing themselves and their family lives in seeking to protect the lives of those for whom they care professionally.
Local churches around the world have been at the forefront of such a response – sustaining struggling community members by nourishing the body and the soul; by extending pastoral care and support; by offering spiritual and practical models to help both congregants and those beyond the gathered church manage the profound grief and loss that they are coping with.
The issues haven’t changed actually…they’ve perhaps become more visible. Urban parish priest, North West England, May 2020 Novel diseases reveal all kinds of things about people and societies that are either not expected, or that were perhaps veiled but which suddenly surface with force. One of the most visible and striking aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic is the stark illumination of what it means to live in an unequal world, as health and social inequality are writ large in mortality rates, access to healthcare and access to vaccines. In the UK the high disease burden and excessive mortality rates borne by ethnic minorities and those with learning disabilities has been shocking to many, although less surprising to those health professionals who have worked tirelessly for years to lobby for better parity of care. The unequal access to high quality health care for many communities in the UK has concerned health workers for a generation, exacerbated by the austerity policies of the past decade. But prior to Covid 19, this has been a
problem which has been relegated primarily to one of ‘groups on the margins’. Pandemics demonstrate how health and wellbeing are collective concerns and highly complex states. The preparedness of the body to respond to a virus relies on good nutrition, on favourable working conditions, on a stable income, on low stress, on an absence of underlying conditions that keep the immune system under pressure and therefore less capable of responding to new pathogens. Perhaps one of the lasting legacies of the Covid 19 pandemic in the UK might be a greater public understanding of the interaction of the physical body, the material conditions of life (diet, housing, access to green spaces, access to good healthcare) and social environments in the protection of health. The need to lobby collectively around the multiple concerns that foster bad health outcomes and render already marginalised communities particularly vulnerable to disease outbreaks remains urgent. Pandemics not only reveal inequalities, but they foster and sustain them due to ongoing economic crisis, unemployment, the burden of new caring responsibilities and the costs of treatment and drugs. In such contexts, caregiving on the part of the churches must incorporate advocacy to influence structural change in relation to racial, social and intergenerational justice for the protection of the vulnerable. Caregiving must be both local and it must be scaled up to the national level to challenge the systems that condemn so many to ill health. The relationship between the
