Monday, March 23, 2020

Collateral Damage

Both my father and my grandmother died from hospital-acquired pneumonia, aged 89.

The current global statistics covering coronavirus mortality are almost certainly incorporating many more cases such as theirs, but in Guatemala I suspect that we are going to see numerous instances of people dying from treatable chronic diseases, ostensibly un-related to covid-19, simply because the more limited healthcare system here is no longer able to function as it should.

Simultaneously, large numbers of people with so-called underlying conditions are going to end up with pneumonia because their conditions worsen under lockdown and they are dispatched to overcrowded hospitals.

This is a society that anyway appears to treat the over 65s as if they are living on borrowed time.


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