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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Saying “COVID is over, get back to work” during the height of the pandemic will do that.
But wOn’T sOmEbOdY tHiNk oF tHe eCoNoMy?!!112
Western governments in general handled COVID-19 very badly. I wouldn’t trust anything the US, Canadian, or UK governments in particular said about COVID-19 spread and I’m not even immunocompromised.
I don’t disagree, but as others have said, I don’t think any government handled covid well, they all prioritised the economy over the people who keep it running…
New Zealand did a pretty good job
China (10.38/million as of July 2022 according to Statista), Japan (250.06), Korea (476.63), Vietnam (442.68), etc. etc. etc. all handled it to the point of being up to two orders of magnitude better than Europe or the Americas (selections of which you can read in a posting below this one).
China definitely hide more deaths and continue to do so.
And your source for this confident pronouncement is what, again, precisely?
Be specific. Don’t vaguebook this. Oh, and while you’re at it, you should likely be aware that you’re talking to a pair of boots on the ground, so bullshit ain’t gonna slide.
Reading about covid before it WHO anounce it because my friend was planning a trip to wuhan on December. Health officials who don’t count covid related death to covid. Officials track records of lying during covid about death even though cremation services have no space anymore to process people. These were my confidence is coming from.
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.
“We were shut in on Oct. 14, and we had to do endless PCR tests, and after about 10 days, we had to wear N95 masks, and were given traditional Chinese medicine,” said Yuan.
Whenever a positive or suspected case was found at a production line, there would be a public broadcast, but work would continue, he told Reuters.
“People would be called away in the middle of work, and if they don’t show up the next day, that would mean they had been taken away,” Yuan said.
Around 20,000 workers had been put in quarantine on-site, Yuan had heard, but he could not be sure how many were infected, as management did not publicise that information.
You mean the Reuters report that contradicts itself within a few sentences? The Reuters report that passes on hearsay? That Reuters report?
OK, when I say “source” I mean “actual data” not “lazy-assed fucking press presenting hearsay as fact”. Here’s a mental exercise for you. (I know it will hurt, but it’s good for you: as you use your brain more, it hurts less to use it.)
Take that report and change the words identifying company and location to a different company in a different location. Say … Tesla and the USA. (I picked those two names for a reason, but you’re unlikely to pick up on why.) Would you believe the story then? Would you find the trivially observable flaws in the report?
If not, well, this conversation is over because you can’t do even the basics of analysis required to do more than parrot the prevailing narrative. I’m not going to waste any more time on you. If, however, changing it Foxconn→Tesla and China→USA gives you a report that raises a host of alarm bells, you might want to ponder why you believed it in its original formulation.
(Hint: the reason is obvious, and speaks very poorly of you.)
Once you’ve gone through that, ask yourself the next question: even if the report weren’t internally inconsistent, reporting purely on hearsay of TWO PEOPLE, how representative is one factory in one city for a nation of ONE BILLION, THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE that’s GEOGRAPHICALLY LARGER THAN THE USA?
Here’s a thought for you: fix your own fucking problems (a million dead of COVID-19 in the USA alone!) instead of trying to claim a country that handled it literally two orders of magnitude better than you did worse. The way the west handled COVID-19 was utterly fucking shameful, with whining shitheads complaining about haircuts while their fellow citizens died around them or got put on long term disability.
Grow the fuck up. As a culture, I mean.
Not being as bad as doesn’t make something good.
Feel free to explain precisely how you’d have done better than the countries I named, keeping in mind the nature of the disease, the completely unknown quantity it presented, and the surprise with which it struck at, arguably, the worst conceivable time to strike.
Be specific.
I’m listening.
Wait till you learn how Eastern governments like India handled it…
Indian government also used covid to supress a mass movement, proliferate a survaillence app with no data accountibility, push through laws in parliament, put Journalists in prison who exposed underreporting of deaths and mismanagement of hospitals…
Yeah, just like the US and every other county that instated medical fascism. We need to make sure no country can ever do it ever again
Every government in the world suppressed mass movements. I can tell you about Western countries that did it more than India did, even though what happened here was not very nice.
Ah cool that’s fine then.
India: 380.81 deaths per million as of July 2022 according to Statista.
USA: 3,099.62 deaths per million as of July 2022, same source. UK: 2,565.6, Canada: 1,110.87, France: 2,115.56, Germany: 1,707.57, Sweden: 1,849.05, … and a cast of dozens.
I think western countries just dun fucked up.
You really need to read up on India if you think their official figures are at all accurate.
Indian here. If you are so skeptical of Indian sources (crowdsourced were highly accurate and we distrusted government numbers), you probably need to go check how USA suppressed the mysterious pneumonia like disease that spread in old age homes in Virginia and Maryland, and how the numbers were suppressed by hundreds of thousands, if you look at what Johns Hopkins University was saying back then. Trump even instructed CDC not to give kits to investigate the mysterious disease in Virginia and Maryland in August, months before the Wuhan wetmarket conspiracy theory was spread around by Western media, all of which turned out to be a “smoking gun” according to the Nobel Prize awarded US doctor who initiated the Wuhan conspiracy theory.
Another Indian here. I think both US and Indian governments can (and indeed are) competitively bad for their people, which includes handling of Covid
India was only better because our cuisine/diet and lesser hygienic lifestyle allows us to be far more immune to diseases. As garbage as our government is, they did only one good thing, instruct to make the much safer indigenous vaccine that was not based on mRNA.
Are you a Nationalist? I feel like you’re a nationalist.
What conspiracy are you taking about?
That China invented COVID in a lab. A US Nobel Prize biologist spread the lies and retracted from it after a year of xenophobia against China.
Crowdsourced is probably a lot more accurate. Government ones were easily disproven.
And you act as if it’s a competition. I’m well aware the US sucked with their numbers too depending on the state government (ie. look at Florida.) And you don’t need to tell me Trump was awful and doing his best to avoid and ignore it until he couldn’t at all anymore.
If you have a better source of numbers, present them. Speculation (especially that based on the bigotry of humiliated cultures) is not data.
Based on bigotry of humiliated cultures? Wtf are you even talking about?
Do a google for “the economist india covid” and look at the tranche of data they have to show their numbers aren’t accurate. It’s true for a lot of places and has absolutely nothing to do with a humiliated culture or whatever dumb bullshit you’re on. That says a hell of a lot more about you than me.
So your “source” is vague Google searches.
I supplied a link.
See a difference?
Provide your data. Put the fuck up or shut the fuck up.
Thanks for getting this important information out.
If only society in general cared.
And if only we had a radicalisation pipelines as efficient as what the right has, all these disenfranchised people are a massive asset that could do a lot if properly organised.
I still have to wear a mask everywhere and I hate the nasty looks, even though a mask makes sense with my service dog and cane … My friends with invisible disabilities and autoimmune disorders, they’ve been harassed for wearing masks in public. It still boggles me. How is it anyone else’s business if I choose to wear a mask? One of my friends snarled back that if, in writing, they promised they’d cover her medical bills, that she’d take the mask off. Shut them up pretty quickly. 😅
