Thread by @fascinatorfun

Inside the ‘Covid Triangle’: a catastrophe years in the making | Financial Times

This is such a revealing article on so many fronts.
ft.com/content/0e6354…

It was only a matter of time before this pharmacist got Covid.

“A lot of minicab and Uber drivers came to see me. They showed classic symptoms of the virus, but they kept saying things like: ‘Just give me something for the sore throat, cough syrup or something,’” he says.

“I told them time and again to get a Covid test, but they just did not want to get a test or go to the doctor because they knew they could not afford to isolate.”

He says his Primary Care contract meant he could not refuse to serve anyone, not even those refusing to wear a mask

Why is that? How can a Primary Health contract require someone to work in an unsafe way?

So he caught Covid and took it home. He tried to keep his Dad with Alzheimers and his mother with Parkinson who normally cared for his Dad safe by moving into an Air B& B.

Too late.

That Triangle, Barking & Dagenham, Newham and Redbridge suffered terribly.

All the markers of severe deprivation already present before the pandemic amplified by it despite sitting cheek by jowl with huge wealth.

Hospitals ran out of oxygen, ambulances were in short supply

Homelessness, already affecting 1 in 25, exacerbated.

Food banks and community support groups under intense pressure like never before.

John Harris’s family’s funeral service say these factors resulted in a tragedy of epic proportions.

In January his phone rang constantly. In 49 years he has never experienced it like it. His father says it was worse than during the Blitz

In Devi’s Solanki’s family the virus manifested itself v differently, with her father in law vulnerable from heart surgery escaping infection whilst his wife needed urgent medical attention.

But it was Devi’s fit, slim husband who was worst affected ending up in intensive care

Fir the doctors working in ICUs it was obvious very early on that those needing ventilation and life support were predominantly from black and ethnic minority communities.

With 77% of Newham’s population and 66% of Redbridge’s being BAME hospitals were at breaking point.

The pandemic may have galvanised local communities.

It might have laid bare the elegy of inequality, but what does it say about us as a nation if we fail to respond effectively and swiftly to address these?

And when another pandemic strikes? What then?

“There are often these moments of restructuring that come after such crises,” says Gray. “But in the past, we have been able to look away, and my fear is that we will continue to look away. What is visible now will become invisible again.”