I lived much of my life in Jamaica, from where today’s Lockdown Diary comes.My daughter was born there, and when she entered the world she saw the light of day in a rustic, clean and basic hospital. Her godmother was a doctor and showed up at the birth but left everything to the midwives, since Jamaica’s approach to childbirth remains charmingly old-world. Given the limited resources, I would not have wanted to encounter any severe complications.
Recently, someone close to me lost a god-niece who did suffer such complications. When she showed up at hospital in labour, she was initially denied admission because she showed symptoms of Covid-19. After a frantic evening of running from hospital to hospital, she finally delivered a healthy baby, but died in the process. I’m told they found she never had Covid-19.
Within a couple of days of my daughter’s arrival at home with her mother, there was a knock at the gate and two nurses strolled into the yard. Unannounced and unbidden, they had – as is the usual practice in Jamaica – been notified of the birth and were no coming to weigh the child and check on her progress. As a student of development, Jamaica had always been something of an enigma to me: a poor country with indicators on life-expectancy and health one normally associates with advanced economies. During that morning visit, it finally hit me: Jamaica may be a Third-World country, with Third-World medical facilities, but its primary health-care puts that of many richer countries to shame.
Most of the reporting on Covid-19 in developing countries has focused on their resource-strapped hospital systems. Western journalists are predicting a bloodbath when the pandemic reaches the developing world with full force. And as the tragic loss of my friend’s niece reveals, the country is ill-equipped to deal with a major outbreak of disease. If a wave of patients start spilling into the wards of the Third World, yes, catastrophe may follow.
But as the visit of the nurses after my daughter’s birth revealed, public-health systems in developing countries, like that in Jamaica, are often set up to prevent just that eventuality. Some countries have got behind the Covid-19 curve, but a great many have been aggressive in nipping the problem in the bud. It’s early days yet, but I’m willing to take a punt on the possibility that many developing countries will avoid the sort of horror-stories currently unfolding in some Western ones. Their horror-stories will remain like that of Jodiann Fearon, a beautiful young woman whose life was cut short by the vicissitudes of life in a poor country.
brixtonsubversity 