Global News June 27 2021

 “You’re gonna die,” one of my mates texted, followed by the Edvard Munch scream emoji. When I clicked on the link, I saw what she meant: according to the Office for National Statistics, male security guards were the professional group most at risk of dying from Covid-19.

I forwarded the link to the other blokes on my shift, then went back to opening doors with my elbows and checking hallways for the nearest wall-mounted sanitiser. It was June 2020. After three months of being on duty in a pandemic, my palms were already so dry that I could have sanded down decking barehanded.

I’d never even heard the words “key worker” until the first lockdown last year, let alone understood that I could be one. Nurses and supermarket workers, sure. But security staff?

In lockdown, key workers have had privileges and faced dangers. During the first wave, my daughter could still go to school because I was a key worker, while most of her friends suffered weeks of amateur tutoring by distracted parents. On the other hand, I had to do a job where physical contact with strangers was a daily inevitability.

Like other employees who can’t clock in from the sofa, the virus has never been far from my mind. Early on, when we thought transmission by objects was a high risk, I worried because I touched a thousand door handles each shift and signed out so many keys to cleaners and contractors that my hands smelled metallic, like I’d emptied a fruit machine.

I’ve worked as a security guard on a university campus in the south of England for 14 years and I’ve been a licensed bouncer for seven. We work 24/7, getting involved in everything from first aid to fights to blocked drains to nocturnal essay advice to pulling drunk students out of hedges.

Since Covid struck, the role has been even more varied than normal. Almost as soon as the pubs were forced to close, we were on the lookout for ninja booze dealers trying to sell alcohol to the students still on campus. At the same time we were having to argue with lecturers claiming “emergency access” to collect their ergonomic keyboards.

A few night guards on our campus were shot at with fireworks launched by bored local teens on e-scooters. “It’s worse than Basra,” one ex-squaddie half-joked, especially with the added risk of infection as you chased the kids away from the halls of residence.

Universities fully reopened on May 17 this year, but by then it was almost the end of term for most students, so it has stayed fairly quiet. Now guards like me are wondering how many outbreaks we’ll get come September when the new wave of freshers arrives or whether life will go back to a semblance of how it was pre-Covid.

In many ways, being a security guard and bouncer is the role I was destined for. As a teen, I realised one day during a physics lesson that I didn’t have the focus for my dream job (astronaut). My back-up dream job — lighthouse keeper — got phased out the year I left school. Security guard/bouncer seemed a pretty good match. I could shed some light on a rough landscape, see the ships in safely.

My mate’s text briefly made me wonder if I’d made a mistake. But I couldn’t wrap my head around the science. Why was our Covid death rate — 74 per 100,000 men in England and Wales at the start of the pandemic — higher than that for workers we assumed were most exposed to the risk of infection, such as frontline NHS staff? Female nurses were 15 per 100,000, male ones 50. Perhaps they were the ones getting the best protective equipment, fastest.

One important factor may be the high number of security guards from black, Asian and other minority ethnic (Bame) groups: 26 per cent, versus 12 per cent of all workers, according to the Trades Union Congress. Research has shown that Bame groups are up to twice as likely to die from Covid than white people like myself.

“The ONS themselves made clear that there were a range of factors that might make a person particularly vulnerable to the virus, such as age, underlying health conditions and ethnicity,” says Michelle Russell, acting chief of the Security Industry Authority, which regulates the UK’s private security industry.

Russell highlights how security officers have been “on the front line in the battle against the Covid crisis” in hospitals, in vaccine and testing centres, keeping food chains going, in warehouses and premises. “I recall last year walking through a very empty Covent Garden on the way to a meeting — the only people I met on the way were security officers,” she says. The figures for dead male security guards from March to December were even worse: 101 per 100,000 men, against 31 deaths per 100,000 for the general population.

One of the risks we’ve encountered on campus is navigating the boundaries around providing welfare. Previously, on getting a lecturer’s late-night email asking if we can unlock a music room so that a stressed-out student can relax with some drum practice, we’d have been happy to help. Now this means co-ordinating with the housekeeping rapid-response team to see if they’re able to sanitise the block before and after use.

Right now, every morning after picking up my radio, master keys, bodycam and face mask, I check the database of quarantines in halls of residence. We need to know which level of personal protective equipment to wear should we be called to an argument or a lockout in university accommodation. Even those basic things have become complicated.

One day last year an aggravated mum gatecrashed the campus, desperate to collect belongings from her daughter’s room. The girl had returned home just before the first lockdown and had been living out of a rucksack for months. The visitor ban at the time meant that the mum should have been asked to leave the grounds. But seeing how lockdown was impacting both her and her daughter’s welfare, we broke out the wipes and visors and gave them passage.

Outside of nine-to-five, it’s security staff who deliver food parcels to anyone on the student residents list who is isolating (even if we couldn’t get an online shopping slot ourselves). We don our grocery delivery outfit — visor, sanitiser, plastic apron, gloves — then grab essentials from the refectory freezers.

Gallows humour has always been one of the most important ingredients of my job. You can’t talk a stoned student off a scaffold tower and have him insist he’s doing an astronomy practical without seeing the funny side.

But sometimes the humour won’t shut off. When I was reading the death-stat text to my girlfriend, our six-year-old daughter overheard me joking about my cremation arrangements (specifically, at which point I wanted “Movies” by Alien Ant Farm to play) and asked me if I was really going to die. “Well, everyone dies sometime,” I replied. “Being alive forever would be boring.” I was stalling for a more comforting answer.

“But will you die of Covid?” she asked.

I showed her how good I was at washing my hands.

“So why will guards die?” she said.

I had to think before I answered that one. Even with scientists and the ONS on the case, I still couldn’t give a clear answer. Industry publication This Week in Facilities Management speculated that our deaths could be in part due to “encountering conflict when trying to enforce Covid-19 guidelines”.

The main conflict we’ve encountered so far is parties. Students taking health, social care or teaching degrees were allowed to remain on campus during lockdowns. Most of them behaved themselves — you can’t get out of bed for a dawn placement if you’ve been up until 4am crushing empty beer cans against your forehead. But a few hosted some very raucous “study bubbles”. Others, more worryingly, saw their mental health suffer for following the rules and going without company.

It’s a good job I come from a household that’s well trained to spot danger signs. My girlfriend is a key worker in a school for kids with special educational needs; some of them have been dealt a grim hand. She often comes home with deeper bruises than me because social distancing goes out the window when you’re trying to stop an unsettled child from attacking his classmates. Luckily, we’ve developed a couple’s coping strategy. When you get in from work, you’ve got 10 minutes to get it off your chest. Whoever’s less bruised makes the tea.

If a year on the frontline of a pandemic has taught me anything, it’s about the importance of setting examples — specifically, who we let set examples. I was as browned off as the rest of the country when Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson, refused to apologise in May 2020 for having broken lockdown with a jaunt in his car. Lockdown seemed to fall apart after that. Within days, we were seeing more people on the campus CCTV.

I’m supposed to set an example in my job. In future, I’ll make sure I take my cues less from people who’ve got the power to dodge accountability and more from my fellow suckers left to clean up the mess. Covid has made my responsibilities as a guard even clearer.

Maybe our increased duties over the pandemic will make others see us differently. This March, there were ugly scenes when security at Chelmsford Tesco were overwhelmed by a maskless shopping spree. I hope regard for key workers improves, especially as lockdown restrictions are lifted, but also that frontline staff go back to being less visible, rather than punchbags for people’s frustrations.

It’s summer now, but I can feel September approaching: virtual open days are taking place and our estates team is carrying out repairs ahead of student arrivals. If I’m on duty come moving-in day, I’d love to chat with the freshers and tell them that, despite us looking like armour-plated traffic wardens, we are here to look after them.

A few students hosted some very raucous “study bubbles”. Others saw their mental health suffer for following the rules and going without company.

One lesson we can all take from a year of stop-start lockdowns is that humans are fast adaptors. If someone had told me two years ago that I couldn’t get my shopping without a bikini on my face, I’d have assumed it was a student union SHAG Week party gone wrong. (That’s Sexual Health Awareness and Guidance.) But as I escort another technician into our medical training block, or carry a box of visors for lecturers, I’m confident we can get through Covid. It’s not like we haven’t faced deadly viruses before.

“On average, there have been three pandemics per century for the last five hundred years,” says Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. “The 1918 flu killed many more people than the first world war, but that wasn’t really known at the time. Most of the pandemics through history have been utterly forgettable; Covid-19 is the first to happen after the internet revolution.

“There won’t be one morning when we wake up and think, ‘Hooray! It’s over!’” says Spinney. “But life will gradually shuffle back to something approaching normality.”

I’m not sure what normality might look like, but there’s a mantra I’ve been using whenever I wake up low on energy: glass half full. Despite the apparent death risk and the students who set off fire alarms and having to wear a mask for 13 hours a day, I really enjoy my job.

I get to help people. I get a selection of torches to play with. And I’m not back on a building site trying to share a portaloo with three hungover Scousers. In those days, I’d curse the fact my brain couldn’t handle Nasa’s entry requirements and I couldn’t escape into deep space.

Now when I’m surrounded by a hundred hangovers after shots-for-a-pound night, space is just a memory. Covid has taught me what I’ve long suspected: we’re all here to look out for each other and the human touch goes a long way. Just don’t forget to pick up your mask first and keep the windows open.

The Financial Times

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