“We are now at 10,000 dead in Australia. The psychic cost of this many of our citizens dying from the pandemic is largely being borne now by their loved ones and those vulnerable to getting the worst of Covid – people at frontline, public-facing services, medical staff and the immunocompromised.
The shock (one of the shocks) at the start of the pandemic was that this great trauma would be shared among us equally – death distributed without care for class or colour.
But now a different reality has settled in; that this great trauma will not be shared. It will be individual and private and discrete. The trauma will not be collective because the names of the dead have not sunk into mass consciousness. The burden of this death will not be shared equally.”
[Senior writer Brigid Delaney, The Guardian, 2 July 2022]
