Let us stop being proud of the yet to happen death of “healthcare heroes” and start thinking about ways in which we can help them fight a fair war. The fight is going to be analogous to a malnourished child (our healthcare system) fighting a buffed up athlete(the coronavirus). But let us be generous and have the following thought experiment: say there was a fight between a 25-year-old malnourished man and a 25-year-old trained athlete. The thoughts that immediately come to mind are:

It is an unfair fight.

The malnourished man is going to lose.

If anyone forced the man to fight, he/she is a murderer.

If the fight is inevitable, at least give the malnourished man some weapons!

Who on earth designed a system where the malnourished has to fight an athlete?

There must be some things we can do to make the fight at least a bit fairer. For eg. we can take time to feed and train the malnourished. We are actually doing some of that. We are taking the time. Lockdown is buying us time. A window of a second opportunity. I am not sure about feeding the malnourished man though. What I think is stupid to even consider an option is to let the fight begin and declare the malnourished man a hero because he died fighting the buffed athlete.

Let us stop disguising system failures as heroism. Medical personnel who have died in this pandemic died for several reasons and at least some of them were preventable. A healthy (no comorbidities), young (in his/her 30s), nonsmoker physician dies while serving in a COVID ward. The death is glorified as an act of heroism by the administration, government and other stakeholders. Grieving families, friends, medical fraternity and colleagues are put in a dilemma: “Do I speak against the very work that my own died doing? After all, he deemed the work so important that he died for it.”

But did he? I will, someday soon, either be the hero or those poor manipulated people. So I am writing this eulogy for myself in case I don’t get to later. Calm your fuming neuron for a bit and consider this: The system is made of parts. Human resource is just a part of the system. Someone who is mobilizing the parts thought he/she had to protect other parts of the system more.

So here it goes, the promised eulogy: I did not die because I thought I had to take care of the patients no matter what. I wanted to take care of the patients while being protected. Treating patients while not being protected is no act of heroism. It is instead putting thousands of patients, whom we see after that one infected patient, at risk. That isn’t how a century’s worth of medical knowledge has taught us to think. I died because I was not protected enough. And probably infected many more before I died. I wasn’t protected enough because the preparedness was not up to the par. New separate facilities were not built even when the whole world warned us. Required numbers of personal protective equipment were not made available. Training regarding the care of patients and the use of PPE was not given when we did not have an overwhelming number of cases. Armies were not used to enforce stricter lockdown. Private hospitals were not strictly mobilized. Doctors were not made a part of the management task force. And many other preventive measures were not thought of.

Inequalities in health have always been a double injustice. Life is short where quality is poor. And in terms of healthcare workers: the countries where we are least valued, to begin with, make sure that we are the most vulnerable at times of crisis.

I apologize that I am pointing out this during the time of despair. I am not arguing that I or the members of the medical family who died while working amidst this crisis are not heroes. Despite what they are trying to make you believe heroes were not created by this crippled, coward system. My argument is that we were heroes, to begin with. My argument is that heroes were killed by a broken system.

My goal is to make my friends and family understand that I won’t be a hero if I die working against this disease. That would be just another example of the functioning of the catastrophe of the system created for wealth acquisition and named healthcare. I hope everything gets sorted out and we learn to prioritize the most important part of the system (the human resource) before it is too late.