Disabled people who are still shielding from Covid have far less trust in the government than the general public and are far more likely to believe it handled the pandemic very badly, a survey has found.
The survey also found that immunocompromised people are far more likely to be experiencing poor mental health.
But those still shielding from the virus reported much higher levels of political participation.
The survey aimed to investigate how continuing vulnerability to COVID-19 affected people’s political engagement and mental health.
Forsaken but Engaged, a report on the survey findings, found that those immunocompromised people who participated in the survey “experienced higher levels of worry due to COVID-19, poorer mental health, lower perceptions of representation, lower trust in government, and poorer satisfaction in democracy and in terms of how the government has handled the pandemic”.
Four years on from the identification of the virus, more than 1.2 million immunocompromised people are still believed to be at high risk because their conditions and medications make the Covid vaccines ineffective.
Many are either still shielding or living restricted lives, trapped in “enforced isolation”.
The survey results were compared with a survey of the wider public.
Compared to the general population, immunocompromised people reported much higher levels of concern about the long-lasting negative impact of the pandemic on society (91 per cent were worried, compared with 60 per cent of the general public).
Nearly one in four (24 per cent) of those who are immunocompromised reported poor mental health, compared to nine per cent of the general public.
When asked to rate their level of trust in the government (on a scale from 0 to 10, where zero means “do not trust at all”), the average for immunocompromised people was just 1.19, two points lower than the general public (3.18).
And seven in 10 immunocompromised people said the government had handled the pandemic very badly, compared to three in 10 of the general public.
But their experiences of prolonged shielding appear to have increased their levels of political engagement.
Compared to the general public, in the past 12 months, 71 per cent of immunocompromised people said they had contacted a politician or government official, against just 18 per cent of the general public.
And 88 per cent said they had signed a petition (against 40 per cent of the general public), while nearly three-fifths (58 per cent) said they had posted or shared something about politics online (against 17 per cent of the general public).
Among its recommendations, the report calls for action to support and protect people who are still shielding, and those who may need to shield from a virus in the future.
It also calls on the Department of Health and Social Care, and the wider government, to recognise the psychological needs of those who have been shielding.
And it says the government should ensure those who are immunocompromised have adjustments put in place to allow them to vote in-person safely.
The Forsaken but Engaged inquiry was a collaborative project between the universities of Liverpool and Bath; the all-party parliamentary group on vulnerable groups to pandemics; Forgotten Lives UK – which campaigns on behalf of the 1.2 million people who are still at high risk from Covid because of a compromised immune system – and the national expert group for immunocompromised patients.
Mark Oakley, co-leader of Forgotten Lives UK, said: “This report highlights the stark contrast between the immunocompromised, who are still shielding, and the general population.
“They are now heading into their fourth Christmas shielding and this report shows how they are being ignored.
“The scale of increasing mental health issues caused by the isolation and the problems it is building for the future is shocking and this needs to be addressed urgently to protect their mental and physical health.
“It is no wonder that the report shows the level of dissatisfaction of government handling of the pandemic is double that of the general population.
“Those in this position have shown a stronger desire to vote, take part in political activities, and are four times more likely to try to contact their MP.
“It underlines that those affected by this need to be engaged with properly on all levels by politicians and facilitated to be able to do so safely.”
Dr Luca Bernardi, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Liverpool, and one of the report’s authors*, said: “Our findings reveal that Covid is not a thing of the past for immunocompromised people, who feel left behind and unrepresented by the political system and whose trust in government is way lower in comparison with the general public.”
*The other author was Dr Jo Daniels, senior lecturer and clinical psychologist at the University of Bath
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Dude. I LIVE IN FUCKING WUHAN and have done so since 2003. I gave you the warning in advance that you were talking to boots on the ground and not to try to push bullshit past me.
You tried to push bullshit past me.
Aside from the first six weeks or so of utter confusion (and, yes, corruption in Wuhan’s political leadership¹ with some in cahoots with Hubei’s health authorities²), the response was quick, efficient, and effective. Even in those six weeks of confusion, well, I was getting alerts on my phone about a “novel respiratory disease” that “may be a risk” via emergency alerts on my phone starting on December 11th, 2020. Was the handling of things in Wuhan in those six weeks good? No. But still they managed to outdo New York, who had plenty of warning of what was coming and chose to do nothing. Considering that Wuhan was ground zero in a viral nuke launched by complete surprise (at the worst conceivable time of year, no less, with the largest human migration in the world already ramping up), I’m amazed at how low the body count actually was.
Except actually I’m not. After the two-month lockdown (a real one, not the cosplay ones all y’all had in the Americas and Europe), the masking mandates, the regular testing (for most of 2020 it was once every two days, for 2021 they relaxed that to as far as once a week unless outbreaks were detected, then by late 2022 it was back up to once every three days before they finally decided to “let 'er rip”), etc. all interacted such that when outbreaks happened they were stopped dead in their tracks, with individual buildings being locked down as they refined their technique instead of the whole city, or huge districts, or neighbourhoods. If you lock down, test, and react quickly, you keep the body count down. Who knew!? (Hint: anybody with a brain cell.)
That being said, the rest of what you cite is total bullshit. Cremation services did not “run out of space”. (Someone doesn’t understand how cremation works apparently.) What happened is the usual bullshit of the “free” press: a rumour is heard and passed along as breathless fact. Someone heard a crematorium running at an unusual time (likely reason: using the chance to clean it out while there was no business coming in). That someone told someone else who told someone else, each step getting more embellished until someone’s shooting up a pizza place because the non-existent basement supposedly has kids being molested.³
Let’s do some basic arithmetic. A million people, give or take, died in the USA over the course of COVID-19. That’s 1 in 350. If we assume that an average person has a circle of 20 acquaintances (a ludicrously low assumption), that means about a 6% chance that one of your circle has died, and it is virtually guaranteed that a “friend of a friend” has died. If your circle is larger than 20 (which it pretty much is guaranteed to be unless you’re a hermit: most people have more than 20 friends + family + coworkers + … in their lives), the numbers get larger. If your circle is 50, that’s a 14% chance one of your circle has died and it’s pretty much expected to have 7 deaths in your “friend of a friend” range.
I was a teacher here for 16 years before shifting back to tech work. My circle from all over China, kept in touch with all over social media because that’s just the way things are done here, is well over 2000. Not 20. Not 200. 2000 or more. So let’s go with 2000. If China had a death rate as high as the USA’s (and it’s an article of faith among the humiliated white world that it’s far higher because they can’t stand the fact that brown-skinned people outperformed them so badly!), I would be very likely to personally know about 5-6 deaths. And indirectly, assuming everybody else has only 20 in their circle, I would very likely know about ~114 deaths. If we assume 50 for the latter, it would be about ~285 deaths.
And here’s the funny thing. I only know about two deaths by COVID-19. None of them in my circle, both in “friend of a friend” circles. Funnier still: both of those deaths are in the west (one in Germany, one in Canada), where my circle has been shrinking in the over 20 years since I started living here.⁴
Here’s the other thing: there was about 50,000 expats (mostly Americans and Brits) living in China over COVID-19. Many of them have returned to their home countries since. Where are the stories from them, who are not beholden to the CPC in any way, shape, or form, and over whom the Chinese government has no leverage, talking about the piles of bodies they had to climb over to buy food or whatever? Pretty fucking silent that quarter. Almost as if … your narrative is complete bullshit.
But go ahead and reassure yourself that you’re not the one wearing clown pants on the world stage by lying to yourself. That won’t go even slightly bad with the next pandemic.
¹ One of the reasons the response lagged upon identification of an unfamiliar viral disease was there was an attempt to break the world record for the largest potluck dinner which, following the legal post-SARS era requirement for a full-blown lockdown at the first hint of such, would have been scuppered.
² There were key figures in the Hubei government’s health services offices who wilfully slowed down the processing of reports on behalf of the potluck crew.
³ Oops. I accidentally detailed a different completely fucking idiotic conspiracy theory and how it grew and got accepted as truth by a bunch of fuckwits. Where by “accidentally” I meant “illustratively”.
⁴ Before you start spouting off about the Chinese government “lying”, it’s pretty fucking hard to lie in a way that would make me not notice friends, relatives, coworkers, and students suddenly not being there anymore. And by “pretty fucking hard” I mean “impossible”. If you try to go that route, I’ll just Nelson Muntz the fuck out of you.