COVID-19 has not only inflicted upon us a phobia for a dreadful disease but also it has rid us of the age-old Ghanaian humanity and even decency.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, social media has gone agog with reckless stories about people, especially public officials, contracting or not Covid-19.
The often concocted stories are so gleefully put out that their originators make it look like contracting the disease is an abomination, a mark of irresponsibility on the part of the afflicted. This is the source of the senseless stigmatization by some communities of persons who have survived the disease and discharged from medical facilities.
Recovered Covid-19 patients are treated like discharged psychiatric patients or lepers, conditions of both cases which are reversible with appropriate interventions.
So much pressure is being brought to bear upon this irresponsible behaviour of shunning recovered persons. There are many attributes of incivility stigmatization of recovered Covid-19 patients.
Last week, the issue of whether or not the health history of persons should be made public made the headlines, another symptom of our growing inhumanity. The health authorities dismissed the demand for these as not the norm.
This basic knowledge about matters of health history being made private and not for public consumption is unfortunately lost to many. Some radio stations relish such subjects and would spend so much time on them to satisfy the yearnings of their listeners who relish them definitely. It is crude and reprehensible to give such graphic descriptions of the health history of personalities.
These days, people are more concerned with video shots of accident scenes than saving the lives of the injured. This is not Ghanaian nature.
Social media has provided the unfortunate impetus for the privacy of people to be infringed up as we are beginning to witness these days.
Following the death of Sir John, somebody went to the extent of describing the last moments of the man. Was that necessary? It was not and we think that as a people we must begin to be decent in our attitude towards society and restoring our good old values.
There are good reasons why announcements of deaths should not be done the way we are seeing it done today.
Those who rush to announce deaths have sometimes suffered embarrassments for their busybody approach to such issues when such announcements turn out not to be true.
The misfortune of one person should not be exploited for fun because such mishaps can befall those who jump into them the way they do.
All deaths today are Covid-19 deaths as well as hospital admissions. Before the pandemic, there were admissions and in some cases patients were put on oxygen. Today, however, such developments are Covid-19.
Those who perpetuate these reprehensible conducts are damaging our communities and must be smoked out and shamed at all times.