[Closed] Essential worker heroes who are not NHS

2) Postman

Supermarket workers.

3) supermarket workers

Anyone in a care home. No PPE to speak of (the NHS has first dibbs) and the virus is running rampant through some of them as a result.

4) farmers & food producers

5) public transport workers

Social Care, every home carer, care home worker, manager, scheduler and support staff. Total unsung hero', poor cousins of NHS, always have been, now more so than ever

Emergency services

HGV drivers

Delivery Drivers

Carers

Shop workers

Pharmacy workers

The guys who keep the internet tubes working.

Frank Sinatra has it x1000. A criminally undervalued and underpaid job.

Not a worker of this moment but this man <doffs hat>

https://twitter.com/captaintommoore/status/1248681439417249795

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-52278746

Teachers aren’t getting much of a mention? My wife has kept her school open to care for key workers kids as well as supporting parents doing their best at home. Her staff are setting and assessing pupils work and doing their best in a bad situation. Even sorting vouchers for kids receiving free school meals has been difficult!

ElShalimo
Member

4) farmers & food producers

Thanks, thats me, but apart from the occasional contact with another person at just under 2 meters I'm just doing the job I have always done.

I have many friends who are working face to face with CV-19 patients every day and I'm including my friends in social care as I often think they are often more at risk as no triage has been done most of the time.

As a teacher, I'm not sure we're heroes right now (although there's no doubt that most are doing as much as they can to hold 'normal' together for their students (and in turn their students' families) right now. We're not saving lives but we are trying to minimise some of the disruption and it's knock-on effects for when we do get back into some recognisable routines in a few weeks/months.

Personally, I'm just today starting to realise where our real role might be heading. I'm a Head of Year and have just been told that one of my students has died, potentially from C19 related issues (underlying health problems and compromised immune system). Trying to help their friends (and their families) through this would be tough enough at the best of times, but doing it 'remotely' is going to be properly difficult and is going to maske our eventual return to school just that little bit more problematic and disorienting for the students in my care.

As for the OP question? Anyone who by virtue of their job is put in a situation where they cannot observe social distancing, etc. deserves our full recognition, understanding and support.

As well as the delivery drivers, bin men, posties, farmers, and all the rest of the unsung heroes can I nominate my staff and all the folk working with disabled youngsters and adults. Many of my guys are from overseas including Germany but choose to stay in Scotland. I’m incredibly grateful and very proud of them all.

Defence solicitors.

Supermarket workers are exposed to a level of risk second only to front line NHS staff. All day thousands of people breath, cough and sneeze on them. They’re cruelly underappreciated.

And the utility workers, the shelf stackers, the council administrators, the people working twice as hard to contingency plan for their organizations, the plumbers still turning out to do emergencies, blue light services, hospices, the teams still filling potholes, the security services teams still following the nutjob wannabe terrorists

As soon as you create a special group you upset someone, modern life is complex very interconnected and we all only see a small part off it

And half the people clapping on a Thursday night think they are an exception to the guidelines, hypocrisy is a national pastime

Me !! lol.

Power station workers. Very busy for us.

Cycle shop workers obviously . Try selling a bike without getting within 2 metres of the customer.

The Temporary Workers - All the creatives who made or are in all the entertainment everyone has turned too to stop them going mad, who are now stacking shelves and delivering food and amazon supplies, costume departments making Scrubs, or repurposed their stores for logistics and all the technical industries like motor sport and sail manufacturers making equipment and masks.

Public Transport Employees.

Undertakers, and the who have to go in a clean up when someone has died. That's grisly work at the best of times, even more so now.

Thanks to all those who mentioned care workers. I work in a facility for those with physical and learning disabilities, and it's been stressful the last few weeks. We've managed to keep everyone healthy so far, but we're constantly on the alert for anything that might let the virus in as there are so many vulnerable people here.
Some of our people don't really understand why they're not allowed out, or to see their friends in other parts of the community, or get visits from their family, and we have to keep them occupied and cheerful while this is going on. Plus our shifts are all over the place as people are staying off at the first sign of illness, so we get unexpected double shifts or sleep-ins happening all the time.

So far it's all good, but I could do with a break, and of course we are constantly nervous of what might happen - that takes its toll.

Without wanting to dilute the cheer for the NHS I think it is a blunt instrument. A couple of friends working in a children’s ward report some guilt on Thursday nights as not only have they seen no Covid 19 in their working life they say they are actually less busy than normal. Twiddling thumbs as the ward is the quietest they have seen it in their careers.

Only a fraction of the NHS work on ICU or on the wards that are dealing with covid patients before or after their time on ICU but they are the gold standard heros at this time. The hours they are pulling and what they have seen will haunt them for years. In normal circumstances family are normally around to shoulder some of the burden of being the last person to spend time with dying people but not at the moment.

Supermarket workers are exposed to a level of risk second only to front line NHS staff. All day thousands of people breath, cough and sneeze on them. They’re cruelly underappreciated.

I’m going to take a tiny issue with this too. They are doing an amazing job dealing with us, the panicking dullard public and keeping us doing the right thing. But I am sorry, this risk element is bollox and a result of very short term imagination. The harsh reality is that before this is over the vast vast majority of us (apart from the shielded vulnerable put in isolation for the next 18 months) will get it. And get it once. By the time this has finished the risk factor of getting it and then being one of the few for whom it is a significant health problem will be exactly the same if you are Dave who works on the till in Tesco or Trevor the call center worker.

Wake up people - those people still deemed essential whilst millions of us hide away to flatten and lengthen the curve are doing an amazing job but they are in no more danger from this than the rest of us. We will be getting it soon enough too. If you are squirreled away currently and obsessively hand washing every time to take the bin out just in case someone else has touched it, good for you - you are helping to stop our covid wards and ICU get overwhelmed but you are not preventing yourself getting it - just delaying the inevitable.

Hmmm so if you stand back and look at it nearly everyone is an essential worker in one way or another.

Perhaps the way we look at other people should be something we take away from this.

Food retail workers
Bus drivers
Social care workers

I’m not sure why a lorry driver or farmer are doing anything they wouldn’t normally....other than farmers are driving their tractors stupidly fast

All those businesses and people who switched up to doing everything from making / providing essential supplies and services. Everything from masks and meals to hand gel.

Steve the milkman featured on last night’s BBC Look East.

All those businesses and people who switched up to doing everything from making / providing essential supplies and services. Everything from masks and meals to hand gel.

Are they really heroes or just using spare capacity to keep occupied, make money, and chip in ?

Unpopular opinion.

Ministers and government workers. They are carrying huge amounts of stress and the finger points right at them. It’s easy to berate the decisions you don’t like but hard to make them. I suspect many are working long hard thankless hours.

The STW Hamsters are putting in a hero's shift

IT middle managers keeping the forum full of stuff to amuse me

@convert

I’m going to take a tiny issue with this too. [paraphrasing: we’re all going to get Coronavirus so It doesn’t matter that thousands are being exposed to excess risk]

This is hugely problematic. No one knows what the ultimate strategy will be, but it seems the plan is to delay delay delay until a vaccine is available.

But even if your premise was correct, the idea that we shouldn’t try to protect people from the virus is crazy. We don’t know at this stage what effect initial viral load has on disease severity but it’s certainly plausible that higher initial viral load —> more severe disease.

Perhaps all those doctors moaning about PPE are wrong?

Whatever, I’m a doctor and I’ve seen Covid patients, albeit fewer than many. It’s a weird mix of fear and anxiety and a duty to help people without displaying that fear.

I am not an virologist so take this with a pinch of salt but I actually worry about picking up the virus from the hospital milieu, not during face-to-face interactions with infected patients. When I see patients I’m concentrating intensely on avoiding any droplet contact, washing hands etc. Then I leave the room and have to touch the notes, laptops, doors etc. I worry about carelessly touching a contaminated keyboard and picking it up that way.

The point of all that is that anyone who gets enough exposure to joe public is at risk. And they’re being paid badly and have very little PPE. A few weeks ago we took our food shop completely for granted. Now it’s something we’re hugely grateful for.

So, speaking as a doctor, I absolutely want to applaud all the shop workers and bus drivers and police(wo)men and social workers and probably a million people I’ve forgotten to name.

Social workers - MrsMC on duty today to go and visit dysfunctional families who are falling apart due to the strains of lockdown, domestic violence, substance abuse etc etc

Another shout to the civil servants and local authority staff who are trying to process creaking benefit systems to try and help those not getting paid now. Remember they are not personally responsible for the rules, the systems or the processes.

Yep its the Supermarket people for me.

Very high levels of contact with lots of people and on minimum wage.

I make a point of telling them I appreciate it every time I go.

When I was queuing up on Saturday it really hit home to me that people hit hardest by all this are the poorest paid.

Prison officers.

Civil servant - particularly the customer facing ones in DWP/HMRC.

I know people in both and they are working flat out to try and get people the money that has been promised and help. Huge volume of extra claims and queries. Entire call centres need to be set up for remote working. Lots of hard work gone in.

I’m going to take a tiny issue with this too. They are doing an amazing job dealing with us, the panicking dullard public and keeping us doing the right thing. But I am sorry, this risk element is bollox and a result of very short term imagination. The harsh reality is that before this is over the vast vast majority of us (apart from the shielded vulnerable put in isolation for the next 18 months) will get it.

I see where you're coming from, but you're ignoring the fact that if you get it now there's a far greater chance that you'll be sent to an overwhelmed hospital with a poorer standard of care (due to lack of resources, not for any other reason!) than if you catch it in 6 months time when the hospitals have been flooded with C19 resources and there's a huge amount of experience learned on how to most effectively treat the disease.

This is hugely problematic. No one knows what the ultimate strategy will be, but it seems the plan is to delay delay delay until a vaccine is available.

But even if your premise was correct, the idea that we shouldn’t try to protect people from the virus is crazy. We don’t know at this stage what effect initial viral load has on disease severity but it’s certainly plausible that higher initial viral load —> more severe disease.

Perhaps all those doctors moaning about PPE are wrong?

Whatever, I’m a doctor and I’ve seen Covid patients, albeit fewer than many. It’s a weird mix of fear and anxiety and a duty to help people without displaying that fear.

I am not an virologist so take this with a pinch of salt but I actually worry about picking up the virus from the hospital milieu, not during face-to-face interactions with infected patients. When I see patients I’m concentrating intensely on avoiding any droplet contact, washing hands etc. Then I leave the room and have to touch the notes, laptops, doors etc. I worry about carelessly touching a contaminated keyboard and picking it up that way.

The point of all that is that anyone who gets enough exposure to joe public is at risk. And they’re being paid badly and have very little PPE. A few weeks ago we took our food shop completely for granted. Now it’s something we’re hugely grateful for.

So, speaking as a doctor, I absolutely want to applaud all the shop workers and bus drivers and police(wo)men and social workers and probably a million people I’ve forgotten to name.

As I understand it (2nd hand from my sister, who works at Guys and is now leading the future antibody assessment role out for London and the SE) whilst in common parlance the 'viral load' terminology is in this case incorrect and if we are talking about the risk of being around contagious people (with or without PPE) we should be talking about infectious dose. Regardless, she says that all the science she is working with and been briefed on (whilst at Guys and leading a dept there she is a PHD type of doctor rather than a clinician medical doctor, with a background in immunology and genetics) indicates infectious dose will come out as pretty irrelevant for CV-19 with regard to either severity or infection rate.

PPE is obviously massively important for hospital and care workers dealing directly with infected patients but that is far more to to with their skillset being of finite supply and we can't afford to have any more than necessary out of action.

I see where you’re coming from, but you’re ignoring the fact that if you get it now there’s a far greater chance that you’ll be sent to an overwhelmed hospital with a poorer standard of care (due to lack of resources, not for any other reason!) than if you catch it in 6 months time when the hospitals have been flooded with C19 resources and there’s a huge amount of experience learned on how to most effectively treat the disease.

True - we will have learnt a load in months and that may help. But the current 'overwhelmed' (fortunately we have not yet got to the point where every icu bed is occupied) is going to be the new normal for some time. True, if we keep millions and millions locked down you could empty the wards but economic and social pressures will have at least some of us out and about before that happens and the fallout of that will keep them topped up.

No mention of fleet care and mechanics. Someone had to keep the ambulance, supermarket delivery vans and other key workers vehicles on the road

HMRC workers that don't normally do call-centre type work will be on the frontline from Monday. Training is happening this week for these people. If you need to ring in remember the person you are talking to is sat at home and wants to do their best for you.

(Hope that you don't get through to someone you know as a friend as they will be unable to process anything for you. Pension and job at risk if they do).

This isn't me.

I am going to say civil servants too - in particular colleagues who are still going in and working on data modelling, pretty much around the clock. I really wish I could help them.

This is why I've found the NHS-fawning a little uncomfortable over the last few weeks. It's not just them, and there are so many other people doing an equally challenging job who are basically being shunted to the side.

Care home workers are the big one that stands out. Likewise HGV drivers who are being being turned away by services who have closed their showers and toilets, even though they're the ones moving food and PPE around.

Many big businesses are pushing the discounts for NHS staff line while completely ignoring the people who are working on minimum wage with no overtime, pension contributions or job security. Any discount offered by a big business is simply a risk-assessed marketing opportunity, and I think it's worth bearing that in mind.

Did anyone mention Utilities workers?

We all need clean water, sewerage, gas, electric and the most basic of human rights - high speed broadband !