“On top of the mounting statistics looms a further casualty of the pandemic: our psychological wellbeing. Will we be able to cope with the fallout?”

“Health workers receiving applause outside the regional hospital in Málaga, Spain. – Photograph: Jesús Mérida/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock”

by Sean O’Hagan

“On Instagram, a friend posts a photograph of a male nurse in an intensive care ward of an American hospital. He is wearing full protective clothing and holding up a patient questionnaire on which he has scrawled a message for his colleagues. It reads: ‘Just going to hold his hand for a while, I don’t think he has long.’

“On an Irish radio station, a woman reads a poem she has written for a loved one lost to the virus. It is called My Sister Is Not a Statistic. It begins:

Tomorrow, when the latest Deathometer of Covid is announced in sonorous tones,
Whilst all the bodies still mount and curl towards the middle of the curve
Heaped one atop and alongside the other
My sister will be among those numbers…

“On Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, a critical care nurse from Sierra Leone, who works in a hospital in the south of England, describes the frantic chaos of the first few weeks of the pandemic. ‘We didn’t have equipment at all, but our ordinary aprons and gloves… I’d go in there praying and hoping I don’t get infected. Then I’d go home, praying and hoping, and trying to isolate myself from my daughters so I am not passing it on to them.'”

Click here to continue reading this article at The Guardian.