The Sacrificial Lambs of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Written by Amy Denton-Luke
It’s been five years since the beginning of the pandemic, and I’m still angry. While many folks will look back and remember “lockdown” and the early days of Tiger King, baking bread, and videos of people cheering for essential workers from apartment building windows, there are horrors of the pandemic that I fear too few remember and that I as a chronically ill person cannot seem to forget.
Do you remember when hospitals were so overwhelmed with COVID patients that they had to pick and choose who to put on ventilators, in which a person’s pre-existing conditions and perceived “quality of life” was factored into the decision? In the ventilator allocation guidelines for many states, people with chronic illnesses were officially deemed less worthy of saving.
As early COVID patients suffered agonizing deaths in the hospital, alone and unable to spend their final moments with loved ones as they desperately gasped for air, people outside those hospital walls comforted each other by saying, “Don’t worry, it’s only the sick and the elderly who die”. The deaths of immunocompromised and older folks were not cause for alarm or concern; it didn’t matter unless and until it was happening to young, healthy, able-bodied people.
After a brief experience with “lockdown” and an urge to get back to “normal”, many folks were unwilling to take even the simplest of precautions to keep others safe if it meant that it might inconvenience them in the slightest, like wearing a mask, social distancing, getting vaccinated (if medically able), or testing before get-togethers. An alarming number of people consciously decided that a mild inconvenience was more important to them than saving the literal lives of others. Because far too often, it wasn’t the people breaking those rules and refusing to take precautions that were at risk, it was the medically vulnerable and often the most marginalized people who paid the ultimate price for such selfish choices and actions.
“COVID is a hoax,” said one president, setting a path for noncompliance, conspiracy theories, and unnecessary deaths. “The pandemic is over!” declared another, when the data showed anything but. “It’s encouraging” that 75% of recent COVID deaths are people who were “unwell to begin with”, the CDC director said. As we counted the costs of the pandemic, disabled lives were considered acceptable losses, and the folks with Long COVID who are now permanently ill didn’t even make the list of honorable mentions.
“We have to learn to live with COVID,” I heard my own family members say, “It’s natural selection. Just let nature take its course.” Was it fear, frustration, or cognitive dissonance, I wondered, because they damn well knew that I was at risk in this ‘genetic cleansing of the herd’ they were advocating for. Apparently dining at a restaurant or being mask-free was more important to them than me. “If the sick are at risk, then they can choose to stay home,” they reasoned, perfectly willing to banish an entire community to a lifetime of isolation, when they themselves complained about how “unfair” it was just days into lockdown.
Immunocompromised, disabled, and chronically ill people were the sacrificial lambs of the global pandemic. It’s been five years and I’m still viscerally disgusted by the selfishness, lack of compassion, and total disregard for human life I witnessed. A reflection of our still very ableist culture, disabled lives were not and are not considered worthy of living, of being protected, or being considered, counted, or factored in at all- as if our sacrifice was just a given. I wish to shake able-bodied people to wake them up and plead: these were not some vague, distant “other people somewhere out there” you can pretend didn’t actually exist. These are your family members, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers you were willing to sacrifice; real people with real lives that hold equal value to your own.
How do we move on like we didn’t just witness the world reveal that they do not care whether we live or die? How do we maintain relationships with the loved ones who actively advocated for policies and willingly took actions that directly put us in harm’s way? Because when worst came to worst, the world chose worst. And when the powers that be had the chance to educate and protect, to lean into the science, data, humanism, and the social contract that we as a society are alleged to have, they threw up their hands and threw in the towel, giving into the demands of entitled grown-ups throwing temper tantrums over the crime of being asked to be considerate of others.
I am grateful for those who did take the pandemic seriously, who used precautions and did their best to keep others safe; those who cared about the people around them even when they personally may not have been at higher risk. I know how difficult it must have been going against the grain, especially as it wasn’t uncommon to be shamed, mocked, or even confronted by others for masking or exercising any other detectable caution or care for fellow humans. Empathy is now a criticizable offense, it seems. To those of you who showed up for the disabled community: I thank you and I commend you. But understand that so many more were apathetic, and those who were doing active harm were not as few as you would hope.
The most hurtful part is that none of it had to be that way. While I wish folks had actually complied with lockdown so that it may have made more of a difference- and perhaps my childhood friend Sarah, a brand new mother with MS, might not have dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 32- I realize that at a certain point, people had to return to work, to normal daily life, and to find a way forward, but it didn’t have to be one extreme or the other, lockdown versus zero precautions whatsoever. We all could have taken a balanced approach, returning to daily life while also taking precautions to protect the most vulnerable and each other. Everyone could have masked, socially distanced, gotten vaccine boosters, tested before large gatherings, continued reporting test data, improved ventilation in schools and workplaces, stayed home while sick and contagious using the appropriate guidelines for when it’s safe to return to work and not the nonsensical numbers the CDC was later pressured into making up.
Disabled people didn’t have to be left behind. No, we as a country chose this. We chose to pretend the pandemic was over or was never real to begin with, and intentionally left the vulnerable to suffer and drown in our wake…
I wish I could rewrite history and bring back all the life that was lost to COVID, Long COVID, and further disability and isolation. My community deserved better. We deserved equal and fair treatment, support, safety, and protection. We deserved to know our lives meant more than wearing a mask, especially to our own families. We deserved a country that followed the scientific data and guidelines, and at least kept essential spaces like grocery stores and doctors’ offices safe so that we could meet our basic needs without risking our lives every time we left the house. We didn’t deserve to be abandoned, or for our lives to be offered up in exchange for the supposed “greater good”, which as far as I can tell simply means the comfort of able-bodied people.
As people move on and memories of the lived experience of the pandemic fade, our community will never forget: this world was willing to sacrifice our lives for the sake of their own convenience, normalcy, and “freedom”. I hope it was worth it, my dear fellow humans. Because in the process of sacrificing the most vulnerable, you sacrificed your morality too.
About this piece & Disabled in the Wild
When people ask me how and why I started Disabled in the Wild, they are often surprised to learn it was a result of COVID and anger; anger not just from what I had witnessed during the pandemic, but what I had gone through in the years prior that informed my pandemic experience. By March of 2020, I had already spent the previous four years in isolation due to a serious illness, wearing a mask during the few times I had to leave the house, and already feeling very much abandoned by friends, family, and the world around me. So when March 2020 came, it was difficult to hear the excessive complaints about "lockdown" and masking, and even more heartbreaking to witness my loved ones throw chronically ill and disabled people under the bus. Did they realize that I would be included in this group they were so willing to sacrifice? My anger over peoples' responses to COVID drove my desire to find an outlet to speak up, to use my voice to advocate for the chronically ill, to work toward dismantling ableism, and ultimately led me to create Disabled in the Wild, so that I could demonstrate to others that our lives are not much different than their own and are indeed worth living. While it's still painful to reflect on this time, it also feels good to bring the story full circle here, and to share some of the events and feelings that ultimately led me to create this blog.
To read more about why I started this blog, go to: www.disabledinthewild.com/blog/why-i-created-this-blog
