Covid 19 shook us, not stirred us, shook us and maybe we needed it to wake up. The people who work for the ambulance service, the fire guards and those who work in grocery stores those are the people that have kept up the system and you truly saw who was actually holding up the system.
The worse thing has been the miscommunication and the lack of communication. The politics have been very negative, based on fear, not on openness, not on scientific communication. My background is in health promotion and my PHD was about health training. I have been giving away free resources, I have been writing a lot of blogs and posting a lot on Facebook. I see a lot of chance in Covid 19 for health promotion to empower people to look after themselves.
I have my own radio show and I invited experts talking about the pandemic about how people perceive it, I had people like university doctors and others trained in NLP and in communication. We talked about how no one has been discussing how you can strengthen your immune system, and about our psychology and how it connects with our body, how we can get stressed and make ourselves ill. When you hear 24 hours a day of fear and what can happen, that can make some people ill.
We have been hearing experts talk about the virus but not about health promotion and staying well so I think that that’s a little manipulative, you get the feeling that somethings not right. Our chancellor told us what to do, our chancellor has no expertise, not even a title, or a university education. If you have a crisis you get together a taskforce from different fields so you include every single viewpoint to get the best out of the crisis. I’m very interested in Nazi history and it’s felt like what we did 70/80 years before, If you have a critical voice you are seen as a conspiracy theorist, we haven’t been allowed to be critical, there is something not right if you’re not even allowed to be critical or to question.
A lot of people who had a chronic disease didn’t get a chance to get any treatment, depression rose, all the women’s shelters were full, we have seen people calling the police on their neighbours because they saw one person too many in the house. Where is the solidarity? Where is helping and nurturing each other? We have no idea what the consequences will be because of wrong decisions.
Some people got depressed and some started to enjoy nature and time with family. For me it was a blessing to have time out from everything else and to nurture myself. I lived an exciting life before Covid but I am satisfied, zoom and things like that mean I’m connected anyway, I have met so many people I have everything that I want. Covid 19 gives us a new chance, live the life you want to live, not wait for retirement, fulfil yourself, your dreams, your biggest dreams, not tomorrow, not next year, but today.
Claire Berry 