The present crisis of pandemic has shocked much of the population of this planet into an inertia, with many people floundering in myopic circles of their nearest supermarket and television. There are others who have not stopped working. Not the health service workers who are standing firm doing their jobs but the people who most people do not realise even exist, those that clean up after us. The bin men, sewage workers, and those that sustain us, water supply staff, all these people are keeping the vast majority of us healthy, or at least as healthy as we were prior to the Covid explosion. These people allow us all to function as society, the doctors and nurses could not save lives without them, government could not function, nor law and order.
Without them we would be in the shit, both literally and figuratively. Society would crumble all too quickly with anarchy and disease rife. Without fresh, clean drinking water, drainage and sewage treatment or household waste collections many more deadly diseases would stalk our streets. We would not be able to wash our hands and our food would come to resemble growth in a petri dish. Doctors and nurses would be sources of infection and members of a dangerous profession as many were 300 years ago.
The plague doctors’ mask was not to stop transfer of infection in the 1600s but to hold a nosegay to allow the doctor the benefit of a nosegay so shielding the wearer from the noxious stench of the common world and muffle any miasma present. The sewage rested in the streets or beneath houses and was dug out when the cesspits overflowed. Drinking water was dodgy at the best of times and for many limited by visits to communal pumps, and then only at certain times. Waste was collected from the streets sporadically and often recycled.
Remember, when you clap for the doctors and the NHS on Thursdays the other workers who make the whole of society hold together. They should not be invisible.