Coronavirus couriers take test samples around London
Ben Gee carries the coronavirus all over London.
A bicycle courier, he zips from the city’s hospitals and clinics with medical samples of the virus, taking them to laboratories for processing.
He faces a two-fold fear: exposure to the virus and whether he will have a job after the outbreak.
The British government considers medical couriers to be essential workers during the pandemic, but Gee faces being laid off when it is over as the outbreak has hurt the other business of the diagnostics firm he works for.
Thousands of other “gig economy” workers, including ride-hailing service drivers and food couriers, are also torn between safety and sustenance.
As Britain’s economy stalled when the country went into lockdown on March 23, sending unemployment to a two-decade high, they have scrambled to keep working.
“There’s a lot of anxiety,” Gee said. “Everyone else was going in one direction, staying at home. And I was going in the other direction.
You just don’t know if it’s something you’re going to catch.
“I can’t afford to get the virus and be off sick because I’d only get the statutory sick pay, which is £94 (RM500) week.”
Gee and his colleagues say they haven’t been given adequate protection for going into hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices where they collect swab samples to be tested for the highly contagious virus.
He feels unprotected when he sees the equipment worn by staff at the facilities he visits, including a temporary drive-through test site.
“They take samples from doctors and nurses driving through. Once they’re done, they hand us a big bag of ... suspected Covid-19 samples. And there I am in my thin gloves and little cotton mask, meant to transport this back to our lab. It made me feel very uneasy.
“We’re talking about the potential for spreading the virus. We are going into hospitals and clinics. And later on in the day, we’re going into cancer hospitals, fertility clinics and elderly wards,” Gee added.
While attention has focused on the risks taken by front line medical workers, over 100 of whom have died in the UK from Covid-19, many other workers also face danger.
Britain’s Office for National Statistics found that security guards, chefs, cabbies and bus drivers all had higher coronavirus death rates than healthcare workers.
The riskiest jobs are low-paid, insecure and ineligible for a government furlough programme that is temporarily paying 80% of the salary of eight million British employees.
Many gig economy workers only have welfare payments to fall back on. Claims for Britain’s main welfare benefit soared by 69% in April to 2.1 million, the highest level since the 1990s.
While most stores and restaurants remain shut, some food outlets have continued to offer delivery, providing some work – and risk – for drivers like Hanna-Beth Scaife.
Scaife has often delivered to homes where “there would be a notice on the door saying, ‘Please step back, leave food at the door. Do not knock. We have symptoms’”.
“I don’t think when you order your takeaway, you realise what kind of risk your driver is putting themself at,” she said.
Gee and Scaife belong to the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, which has campaigned for gig economy workers.
The union is challenging Gee’s employer, The Doctors Laboratory, which said this month that it planned to fire 10 of its 140 medical couriers, including Gee.
It says the company also failed to provide adequate protective equipment and refused a request by couriers to be tested.
The couriers are now voting on whether to strike.