Zubair

Gender: Male
Ethnicity: Pakistani
Background: Zubair is 46 years old and is Pakistani. He is married with a child and is a local authority council worker. Zubair received help from a Muslim charity when he had Covid. They delievered him hot meals everyday so he did not have to worry about grocery shopping.

Zubair first heard about Covid in 2020 from the media. His initals thoughts were, okay that’s in China Just before the first lockdown in the UK was announced, Zubair’s employer had a conversation with him about isolating at home due to his long-term health conditions. A couple days after the lockdown was announced, Zubair went outside to get some groceries and started to feel unwell. He said that his symptoms were a high fever and loss of smell, which at the time was not on the NHS list as a symptom of Covid. At the time, he was living with family so decided to isolate in his room.

When Zubair rang his GP he was prescribed antibiotics. At the time, it was not possible to test himself for Covid because no such test was available. Zubair’s wife also started to have a high temperature, although it was not as high as his own. Other than taking antibiotics, Zubair put Vick’s balm into hot water and breathed in the steam, and took a lot of paracetamol.

As Zubair and his family were isolating they could not go outside to get grocieres, so he started to do online grocery shopping. He also had help from the council to get everyday essentials. These items included bread, potatoes, baked beans, and a lot of tinned vegetables. Zubair also remembers a local Muslim charity who were delivering hot meals to his house everyday.

Zubair reflected on the challenge faced by people trying to isolate in overcrowded homes.

Age at interview 46

That is an issue with, like, you know, living, you know, BAME community. The households, they are obviously sometimes are overcrowded, mostly, so… And in my case, it isn’t so. You know, but if anybody else would, if it’s overcrowded you get more sick, obviously other people get sick as well so, that does affect everyone else. And then they can’t self-isolate any more, you know, because they haven’t got anywhere to self-isolate.

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Zubair used a pharmacy delivery service to get medications and received his prescriptions very quickly.

Age at interview 46

So, the pharmacy they have a service, they deliver to you if you’re not well. So, they did that actually for my medication, normal medications, for the whole family they did that, for quite a while, so if we need any medications, your GP will send that to the pharmacy, and then you ring the pharmacy up. They will deliver either same day or next day. Very good service.

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Zubair had used paracetamol since childhood to manage fever and headaches.

Age at interview 46

I remember it because obviously as soon as you fever you just take paracetamol. So that’s the thing we’ve been doing since childhood, right? Fever, headache, you just use paracetamol, and it just, you know, gets you down.

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Zubair found home-based working a positive experience.

Age at interview 46

It’s fine, you know. No problems for me, you know, because you have all the technology to, like Teams. So we use Teams at work, so you can chat, you can do calls. So no issues, you know, and I think they, home working should have been done years ago. But obviously nobody did that. So I think they’ve learnt, everybody’s learnt, you know, there is a cost saving for everybody, like your employer and for employees, time and cost savings. And I think makes it easier as well. Less traffic out there maybe, you know. Good for environment, right, pollution. So, in many ways I think it’s helped everyone, but maybe in in some ways it hasn’t helped some businesses right? So, it obviously you have to look at it from our point of view, from my point of view it has helped me, to do work because the work hasn’t affected, so we’re doing more work actually than we was in the office.

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