What is the Value of a Human Life?
In the days when Joseph Stalin was Commissar of Munitions, a meeting was held of the highest ranking Commissars, and the principal matter for discussion was the famine then prevalent in the Ukraine. One official arose and made a speech about this tragedy — the tragedy of having millions of people dying of hunger. He began to enumerate death figures … Stalin interrupted him to say: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”
(Someone said that statistics are human beings with the tears dried off)
It appears morally questionable to assign monetary or economic value to a human life but in reality, it has practical importance that far outstrips the moral unease it may cause. In recent times, this exercise has been made even more urgent. Governments have been presented by what Economists Guido Calabrei and Phillip Bobbit referred to as “tragic choices”. Mortality Vs Prosperity. The trade-offs are stark and the scenarios are akin to limited life jackets on a sinking ship. Lock-down, some may die, others may also die; No Lockdown, many will die or just some. This macabre cost benefit analyses are aptly tragic, although, someone has to do it…..
At last count, 4.41 MILLION DEATHS. The detachment of statistics provides crucial distance when theorizing about mass death. It makes a sober discussion possible. But it also devalues the sanctity of human life. Human psychology is such that by dint of a very common cognitive limitation, we place more value on a single life than on many lives. In other words, homicide is more jarring to our sensibilities than a genocide might be.
But what about their many lives seen as individual ones? — bread-winners, family glue, funny uncles, WhatsApp aunties, employers, philanderers, friends who organized trips — basically, people. The plans they must have had. The individual improvements they had anticipated, the versions of themselves they wished to unleash, and the opportunities they still held out hope for.
The Corona virus snuffs life at a rate that persuades us that our shared mortality is so inevitable to the point that our lives can be considered breathtakingly fleeting, worthless & fragile. I am not convinced.
Memoir is not Data
Behavioral economics (a common reference by this blogger) makes many important contributions to understanding the human condition one of which has been by providing the distinction between the “remembering self” and the ”experiencing self”. In other words, what we remember about an experience is almost always prone to a number of cognitive errors, especially of magnitude- which basically means “it probably isn\’t AS bad as you make it sound”. For this reason, memoir cannot be classified as data. But again, even though problematic, it is not an entirely without merit. Experiences shared, post facto as they can only be, are still instructive.
Thankfully, I am learning that a major device of my trauma is the vivid remembrance of insignificant details of the entire experience, in High Definition. This should be of help in rehashing my date with the grim reaper-Covid 19. So here goes:
Day 0 Trouble is brewing — ON Thursday evening, I implement a premeditated decision to jog the journey from work to home. A distance of 12km I have done severally, on previous occasions. My brother watches me saunter to the car to change into my gym clothes and remarks how tired I look. He offers to take me home; makes a plea for me to abandon my plan. I decline. M journey home is a strained jog, which I dismiss as the day’s toll. It turns into a casual walk after about 5km. While home, I am making frantic calls to secure a vehicle for a planned trip to Moyo District- 500km away- the next day. After a meal of rice and chicken in the sofa, I am weighed down by a thick form of fatigue and wonder if it will even be possible to make it to my bed. Easily attributable to the long walk home.
Day 1 Let the games begin- Friday MORNING. My body is a furnace, and my drenched sheets carry this confirmation. I feel a single arrogant ache that has successfully commandeered my entire body. It has zapped all my energy and whatever bodily functions that seem to still persist are exclusively involuntary. My head is an impossible burden because its movement sends pain signals across entire regions of my body. The head ache and body ache are working in concert. I am sick as a dog.
I enlist a friends help to drive me to the clinic. Because I stay on the third floor, the journey downstairs consumes no less than five minutes. After a painless prick from a disinterested lab tech, results are in; NO malaria, NO typhoid, suggestion of serious ‘bacterial’ infection. I know enough about Uganda private health care to question the bacterial infection diagnosis which gets bandied about quite a bit. But for relief, I oblige. I receive painful antibiotics intravenously. I hurl respectably. I am amused at how ill I have gotten in a relatively short space of time.
(A Second opinion later reveals that what I have is not bacterial but a viral infection)
When I get back home, I lie on my bed, get an IV-drip of paracetamol. It reduces the head banging only enough to prevent a head explosion which I was convinced was a very real possibility. I lay in bed all day, with no appetite for anything other than water and juice. I attempt a fruit, a slice of mango, and what surprised me more than the lack of appetite for it, was how bland it tasted.
Day 2 Saturday Morning. I dutifully drive in for my second day on the antibiotic course of treatment. I am more coherent but still winded going down the stairs. The fever is starting to break but the headache though much reduced is far from contained. As the drugs go in through flaccid looking veins on my hands, as if on cue, I begin to heave, albeit a dry heave this time because my stomach is empty. I prioritize rest and recovery. Still on a liquid diet. A visit from my brother and his wife provides useful banter. Banter distracts, and in the midst of steady suffering, is a gift.
Day 3 Easy like a Sunday morning. I am less inclined to stay in bed. I am feeling better. Fever is basically gone and the headache is insignificant. I am still tired but not dangerously so. I manage to ingest actual solid food and in the evening I secure a 45 minute walk in my neighbourhood. Seems to me, the end is nigh
Rona, Is That You?
Day 4 Much like the day before, my overall physical condition is improving and the curse of optimism blinds me from what is yet to come. In the middle of the day while I shuffle around my house, quasi cleaning and listening to podcasts my throat begins to ache, slightly first, then with gradual intensity . I decide that fresh air might help me extinguish the discomfort. When I returned from a short walk and into my small abode, I began to pay the price for overthinking. Having to clear my throat every few seconds and cough dryly sent my mental faculty into overdrive. My basic high school knowledge of the cardiovascular system and how the respiratory process generally works was a distant memory at this point. My throat was sore, I was coughing dryly and therefore could reasonably expect to stop breathing anytime soon/ I phoned my sister in law to take me to the hospital. Because we are neighbours and she is a decent human bein
g she arrived in record time and found me outside the gate waiting eagerly to be taken in.
Doctor does his doctoring thing: He tells me I have a “serious” viral infection and since we are in the middle of a pandemic suggests I take a corona virus test but also begin on a course of treatment immediately. An X-Ray reveals that my lungs are “unremarkable”, which I later learn, according to medical parlance, means my lungs are A-okay. He tells me to go home and RELAX. A good confident young doctor, but his encouragement was not effective because I did quite the opposite of relaxation. I scoured the internet for hours and successfully generated all the doomsday scenarios possible. The fatigue of all that grim hypothesizing is what led me to sleep that night.
Day 5 I am now physically fine except become engaged in a new battle with flu like symptoms. Unrelenting Nasal congestion necessitates the much vaunted steaming and concoctions. These methods give me some relief and the medicine for my throat is also making it less painful to swallow. At this point I am in elective institutional isolation so food and water and concoctions are in bountiful supply
Day 6 I am resting, hydrating, walking .I am now making plans to re-enter society. For those that check on me, I offer the sweet phrase “I am out of danger”.
Day 7 Its Friday again. I drive to my home and I am glad to be there to spend the next days of isolation. I am not the strength that I was once, I can’t run fast and long like I was accustomed to, but I am grateful to be part of the statistic that can talk about recovery. Reflecting in the aftermath, I am stunned by the good fortune of family and friends and the miracle of medical professionals.
Ever since; I am Reckoning, grappling — but importantly, I am alive.
For Context:
Death Be Not Proud — John Donne
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
P.S. Here is a great resource in helping you deal with Post CoVID recovery
