For wary couriers in London, virus samples carry extra risk

LONDON — Ben Gee carries the coronavirus all over London.

A bicycle courier, Gee zips from the city’s hospitals and clinics with medical samples of the virus, taking them to laboratories for processing.

Gee faces a two-fold fear: exposure to the coronavirus 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 because 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, also are torn between safety and sustenance. As Britain’s economy stalled when the country went into lockdown March 23, sending unemployment to a twodecade high, they have scrambled to keep working despite the risks.

“There’s a lot of anxiety,” Gee said as he paused between deliveries. “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,” he said.

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 virus. Their employer gave them gloves, cotton masks and hand gel, but Gee says the supply runs out quickly.

He feels unprotected when he sees the equipment worn by staff at the facilities he visits, including those at a temporary drivethru test site.

“They had the full visor, the gown, the gloves — very much the full kit,” he said. “They’re taking samples from doctors and nurses that are driving through. And then once they’re finished, they’re handing us a big bag of suspected COVID samples. And there I am in my thin gloves and my little cotton mask meant to transport this back to our lab. It made me feel very uneasy.”

Gee said he is not just concerned about his own health.

“We are going into hospitals and clinics. And later on in the day, we’re going into cancer hospitals, we’re going into fertility clinics, we’re going into elderly wards,” he said.

While attention has focused on the risks taken by front-line medical workers, more than 100 of whom have died in the U.K. 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 health care workers.

The riskiest jobs are often low-paid, insecure and ineligible for a government furlough program that is temporarily paying 80% of the salary of 8 million British employees.

As Britain slowly eases its lockdown, the streets are starting to fill up again.

Gee worries that he soon won’t be able to socially distance on his daily commute by train.

And he says talks with the company over the layoffs have stalled.

Despite his anxiety, Gee says he feels lucky to have been working during the outbreak. “With all the chaos going on around us, we had the streets to ourselves,” he said.