Covid19 Diary : Part 5

I should start updating this blog every day, as so much happens in a short space of time these strange days. I've forgotten half of what I meant to post.

I looked at the glorious weekend weather forecast last Thursday, and wondered how my fellow Victorians would behave in the sunshine. Given that New Yorkers had flooded public parks, and UK residents had ventured up mountain and down dale during their recent warm weekends, would locals here do the same? Sure enough, our beaches quickly filled up with groups of non-distancers. The socials and professional media pointed the finger of shame, causing councils and state government to bring down the ban hammer. Beaches are forthwith closed unless you're on your lonesome and mobile; no sitting on the sand allowed. If I predicted this from the weather forecast, I'm surprised no-one in government did the same. Maybe they did, and let things run their course. The unspoken 'herd immunity' policy.

 However, the lens of shame is haphazard; they could easily film at any of our supermarkets and shopping centres and show crowds continuing to flout social distancing rules. I went for a Saturday morning cycle through the 'burbs and watched (from a distance) punters leave a busy Preston market with only one or two bags of shopping at the weekend. Surely you'd stock up for a week or two if you were serious about following the government edict about not leaving the house unnecessarily? Queues formed outside popular coffee shops in Thornbury. Aldi had a line outside the door at 9.30am, I presumed they were limiting numbers in the store; but then they mysteriously allowed everyone in at once.

Child care centres are still open, despite the protests of workers, but schools remain shut for the foreseeable future. Odd thoughts run through my mind; will empty businesses they be overrun by rats?  Did someone remember to pick up all the school chickens and assorted classroom pets? What happens if there's a big storm, as so many schools have leaky roofs?


As a response to the beach scenes at the weekend, the government has enacted Stage 3 restrictions. Stage 3 is pretty much the same as stage 2, except gatherings are limited to two people as opposed to ten. That's the model currently employed in Germany, which has over 50,000 cases but a tiny death rate. People are still allowed to exercise, work, travel by public transport, order takeaway food and shop. We're not supposed to leave the house unless we need to. The amount of businesses that have stayed open continues to surprise me. I've posted about this before, but why is a tropical fish shop or a clothes store considered essential? A dry cleaners? They're still open a five minute walk from my house. I guess we can't buy live fish online, but most other goods can be delivered. I used to buy clothes online all the time, until I became a nudist.

Car traffic is still reasonably heavy along my closest  major thoroughfare, Bell Street. Maybe folks are just escaping the house for a bit on. Train, tram and bus usage has really fallen away.

Today the government have announced that 6 million workers are entitled to $1500 a fortnight unemployment benefit. That constitutes a pay rise for many people. I'm not sure why the figure is so high, I suppose the government needs us to continue to buy shit we don't need to feed the  precious beast called 'The Economy.' At the moment we're not going to buy much beyond food and booze. Is the plan that we save up our cash, put the economy in the freezer, and have a massive splurge to restart it in a few months.  A remaining 5 million working Aussies don't get these benefits, for reasons beyond me. Foreign workers, unless they're from New Zealand, get nothing. I don't know how they're going to get by.

The government has now provided $320 billion in assistance packages. Commentators have broadly welcomed the measures, but no-one seems to be discussing how we are going to pay for them when all this has finished. When the UK and Ireland bailed out the banks after the Global Financial Crisis, those countries had years of fiscal tightening. Public services bore the brunt of the cuts. Are we heading for Austerity Australia, with closed down libraries, families fed by food banks, cuts to pensions, and increased child poverty?  With the next election far off and a  Liberal-National party right wing government in charge, the rich may suffer less than the poor. I'm not holding my breath for the government to ask our billionaires and wealthy banks to play their part.

I fear that remote working may become the norm in some industries after this has finished. Some commentators see this as a boon, offering choice and flexibility. I'm concerned that workers home and work life balance will suffer. The lack of social interaction will increase loneliness.

The CoVid-19 infection rates in Victoria look pretty good on the surface. There are now 821 cases of COVID-19 in Victoria, 56 more than yesterday; 29 people are in hospital, including four in intensive care; four Victorians have died. The government policy is to 'flatten the curve' but according to  Professor Tony Blakely, an epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, the minimum number of daily infections we can expect by mid-June is 100,000 per day! He's the expert.

https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-modelling-shows-the-government-is-getting-the-balance-right-if-our-aim-is-to-flatten-the-curve-134040?fbclid=IwAR34FVA8I4XurFVVCX355KNZlMo0l-bK8Ls7tfKifFmQzZN42admoL3gPW0

Co-Vid19 Diary : part 4

My daughter Josie got very ill in 2017 and I had to pretty much live in the ICU ward of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. Her heart got attacked by a virus/bacteria , possibly the flu, though we'll never know because she was too damaged to take a biopsy. At one stage she had forty doctors working on her. She was put on a special treatment called extra corporeal life support (ECMO) that requires 24 hour, extremely vigilant care from a specialist team of doctors & nurses. Machines do the work of your heart & lungs & circulatory system because your whole body has been overwhelmed by a virus. There were a few patients on ECMO but not many because it's incredibly expensive & labour intensive. When Josie was first brought in, the doctors in ICU debated the wisdom of even bothering to treat her because she was so far gone from the heart attack. Some of the doctors thought she should be left to die; others thought she was pretty hopeless but she should be given the ECMO chance. Thankfully the latter won the day. Some coronavirus patients in the UK are currently on ECMO; it probably costs a million pounds a day per a handful of patients. If you are in the UK, thank you so much for paying you taxes & national health insurance. You saved peoples lives, and you do so every day. Some days they had to treat patients in the corridors in the children's hospital because they'd run out of beds. The RCH in Melbourne is one of the leading children's hospitals in the world; it largely functions because of the amazing charitable donations Victorians give every year. Thank you Victorians. You saved my daughter's life. You pay for her continued cardiac treatment..... One day two doctors and four nurses had to work frantically busily, yet with an eerie calm that only comes with experience & training, to save a teenage boy's life in the ICU corridor. Actually when I say save his life, he may well have died because you don't talk about that stuff in ICU. I did look into his mother's eyes and it's a look you don't want to see. Then again, she probably saw the same look in my eyes, because it was there every day as my daughter struggled between life and death after the virus destroyed a large part of her heart function...

When you die from coronavirus there won't be any family there. You'll die alone and the last faces you see are strange doctors and nurses. You'll be conscious right up to the end, because the virus overwhelms your lungs and heart before your brain dies. You'll be like a sick animal surrounded by other dying bodies; dying bodies with the smell of shit and piss in your nasal passages as they gasp for your last breath. You'll drown on your own phlegm. The doctors and nurses will be so exhausted and overwhelmed they will not even text your family to tell them you have died, because there are so many half-dead corpses and bodies all over the hospital they can't even identify them. Your body will be put on the back of a truck at night and tumbled into a grave in the next town. No-one will mourn at your grave. I found this out by watching the news from Europe this morning. They don't tell you this on the commercial news because it is too upsetting for you.

I am telling you this not shame you or scare you, you will be scared in a week's time. I am telling you this because you can still change.

In Wuhan, China you do your shopping in gloves/mask; come home; leave all clothes/shoes outside your door; spray shopping with disinfectant; unpack shopping;, soap your body and hands thoroughly, shower, put on new clothes. If you are reading this and think it sounds a bit strange, consider where you were 10 days ago.

Covid-19 Diary: Part 3

CoVid-19 update Part 3: We had our last day of school today, for the foreseeable future. There were no students, only teachers. I had a crash course in google classrooms. It's an excellent platform that could be used by many industries. PE teachers across the globe are providing home based activities. I'll magpie some of their ideas & provide some of my own. Some of our kids' parents aren't Australian citizens, have lost their jobs and have no source of income. There was talk of one family living at the school & showering at the parish house. I hope it doesn't come to that. There must be thousands of families in the same boat. Our principal doesn't know if there will be a school if this goes on all year. We only have around 110 students. We might get merged with another Catholic school, especially as there a few with low enrolments in the area. We already have a leaky roof and the $2000 fees most families pay goes towards maintenance & bills. My boss always manages to act and sound upbeat when delivering bad news, which I quite like, but sometimes the serious import of his words only hit you hours later. I won't bore you with social distancing blah blah. It's getting better, though not in my staffroom. Many nail salons, massage shops and hairdressers aren't allowed to open past midnight tonight. We have an abundance of small convenience stores, ethnic supermarkets and health food emporiums in the inner North, I guess most of those are staying open. The two local op (charity) shops were open and trading well today. Hairdressers are allowed to remain open as long as your haircut doesn't last more than thirty minutes. Mine lasts five, but I cut it myself so as long as I don't have the virus I won't pass it onto myself. I went for a cycle ride at dusk tonight and was surprised at how many salons remained open. I suppose you have to look your best when you are drowning in your own phlegm. How now am I going, I hear you ask? That's a difficult question to answer at the best of times. I realise that I've been moaning on about others social distancing and not practicing it myself. That's because I'm a special type of person known as a 'hypocrite' and I have a special hypocrite's license from my local council. Hahaha but seriously. I have been behaving a little cavalier; the situation has been surreal and made me giddy. While I was still teaching I didn't see the point as I was surrounded by germy kids. Now I am taking things seriously. I try to cycle everywhere rather than walk. I've got my little blue latex gloves and a mask for when I do my shop. I'm going to do a big shop that lasts for days and will stay away from Preston Market, which is still bloody open. Suddenly child free,I have decided to go nocturnal; there's less temptation to leave the house at 4am, the current hour of the clock. My mental state is fine, nothing bad has happened. Yet. Is it the calm before the storm? I'm hopeful we can "flatten the curve," the graph of infection rates. I went for a lovely bike ride yesterday up to Reservoir and along the Darebin Creek trail. I will keep at this until I'm told to stop. That might be quite soon, as infection rates are rising steeply. I cycled past Centrelink and saw the long line of people waiting to get in. As many have noted we haven't seen anything like this since the Great Depression. The government are still having an each-way bet on the virus. They are keeping many schools & businesses open from fear of a total economic collapse. I have wondered from the start if they were going down the route of herd immunity, and I don't believe that's off the table. This was confirmed by the deputy chief medical officer, Professor Paul Kelly, on Monday 23rd March. Speaking on the ABC he said: "If we go into lockdown as many people are suggesting we do now... It's until we get the vaccine," Professor Kelly said. Most experts predict any vaccine is 12 to 18 months away. If Australia were to pause a total lockdown or temporarily reduce it there would likely be a resurgence of the virus. The nation cannot "take it's foot off the brake." And Professor Kelly described herd immunity as an "alternative" to a total lockdown, but said Australia was not pursuing the controversial strategy "at the moment". Tonight I ate spiced chickpea and potato stew. I would give you the recipe but I pretty much made it up. None of you have asked me for my curried rice recipe so here it is: Fry some onion in a pan, add garlic and ginger, add spices like cumin powder and coriander and curry powder. Then throw in a big handful of frozen peas. Previously you will have cooked a cupful of rice in your rice cooker, throw that in and stir it round. Cook an omelette with eggs from your chickens. Mine are laying three a day. Chop it up and put it on top. Cashews and flaked almonds may be added to your taste. Chilli sauce optional. If the apocalypse happens substitute these ingredients - RICE: fingernails GARLIC/ONIONS - any bulb e.g tulip iris PEAS - chewed up grass or weeds rolled into a ball NUTS - crushed insects EGGS - you can steal these from birds nests like magpies or gooses. Peace and love, Peace and love x PS DO NOT google articles about the Spanish Flu, especially the ones that talk about the three waves of illness. Though this is interesting : whiskey was one of the main cures (when isn't it?)

CoVid-19 Diary : Part two

Last Thursday and Friday, the 19th and 20th March 2020, I worked as a casual relief teacher at two different schools. On Thursday I was at a state school, where I was employed to move around a few grade 5/6 classes to cover the teachers' planning day. On Friday I covered an absent music teacher at a fee-paying, all boys private grammar school.

The state government school had no hand sanitiser, but some teachers had set up washing stations if their classroom had a sink, using liquid soap and paper towel. The students were encouraged to wash after coming in from play, but not before eating food oddly. This wasn't a uniform approach; if the classroom didn't have washing facilities it was left up to the students to scrub up at an external sink. Few did.

The private school had big bottles of hand sanitiser in every room, and students lined up to use it before entering the room. However, neither school practiced social distancing. The kids, especially the younger grades, engaged in plenty of physical contact. Hand washing isn't as effective if you don't keep away from others.

At both schools, the teachers in the staffroom were sharing tables as usual, talking all their bla-bla about bla-bla. By the way, teachers rarely talk about kids in the staffroom. Only newbies do that because they haven't learnt the protocol yet. We need a break from the little darlings.

I caught public transport home on the Friday, a bus followed a tram. The passengers weren't the recommended 1.5m from each other. God knows how many covids live on the button that opens the doors.

 I've been watching the trains come and go across the way from my house; while they're less crowded they're still running with plenty of passengers. High school students were milling around the station, and hanging out in the cafes and shops.

At the weekend I went down to Preston Market and found plenty of shoppers pushing through crowds to pick up fruit and veg bargains at the end of the day. I shot this video:

Over the weekend the state government here in Victoria shifted their position.   Schools, restaurants, bars  and gyms have closed from midday on Monday 23rd March. Or at least they were supposed to; it's 6pm and many businesses including a massage shop & a cafe remained open an hour ago when I went for a (self isolating) stroll.

There were still many shoppers within bumping distance in our major supermarkets. It feels like normal social distancing rules don't apply if you're shopping. Again, none of the checkout staff were using sanitiser between transactions.

Despite our PM asking for a halt for all but essential travel, there are many cars on the roads. Many many cars.

Construction sites are still open. Work has slowed down in the last year, but there atill major projects happening in my suburb and beyond employing thousands of staff.

The rates within Australia are now doubling every three to four days, according to the national broadcaster ABC.

1640 x 2 = 3280. - 3 days
3280 x 2 =  6560 - 6 days
6560 x 2 = 13120 - 9 days
13120 x 2 = 26240. - 12 days

Given the behaviour I see on the streets, I can't see Australia beating the projected trend. These are only the confirmed cases; a lack of testing kits may mean the actual infection figures are much higher.

Schools have been closed to students, but the remainder of the week has been declared 'pupil free,' meaning that teachers should still front up to work. There are around 45,000 teachers in the state system alone. I haven't seen evidence of effective social distancing practiced by the profession. This decision may prove costly.

My daughter was very ill when first born & spent six weeks in the intensive care unit in 2017. That was a year with a bad flu, and the medical staff were stretched thin on bad days. I'll never forget the day a few urgent cases came in at once, and then they airlifted this poor kid in from Frankston and desperately tried to save his life in the corridor as his mum looked on. It takes quite a few doctors and nurses to save a life in ICU like that.

When you hear a stat like 'only 0.1 cases of the flu are fatal,' it's because we've got doctors and nurses who can treat the condition quickly and effectively . Mortality rates for any kind of illness are higher in less wealthy countries; they don't have our standard of healthcare.

If you get advanced sepsis, have a heart attack or a car accident, who is going to treat you when all the beds are swamped with Co-vid19 cases?

I already feel terribly sorry for all the doctors and nurses out there. You need a clear mind and steady hand to work in ICU. It involves delicate, complex procedures and the staff will be forced to perform them while exhausted and ill. Every doctor and nurse may become an ICU specialist at the height of the outbreak. This is happening in northern Italy as I write. 

Of course, this doomsday scenario may not happen thanks to the intervention of our government and our adherence to rules. But with people travelling on public transport, browsing in shops and bumping up in supermarket queues, it may be too late.


My prediction is that large parts of Melbourne will be in strictly enforced isolation in ten days time.

I just made curried fried rice with peas and eggs for dinner and it was bloody great.

CoVid-19 Diary : Part one

By design or incompetence, the government CoVid-19 involves mass infection & subsequent herd immunity. Here's why:

I live opposite a railway station. For the first time I can remember on a weekday, there were empty spaces at the station car park. I could see that there were many commuters on the passing trains. They weren't crammed in to the gills as usual, but they were sitting side by side on seats. That's not social distancing.

I arrived for work at school and attended a staff meeting at 8:30am. At the meeting we were told that after school professional development (aka meetings) was banned. Around the table no-one used hand sanitiser or practiced social distancing. At the end of the school day we didn't have a meeting, but had a group meditation instead, where someone handed round a box of lollies that almost everyone reached into before passing it on.

My wife Alice texted me at 9:00am to tell me that there was a Prime Minister's press conference on at 9am. Whilst teaching a sports session to the Preps, I covertly listened to our dear leader telling us that schools had to stay open to avoid costing  "tens of thousands of jobs".

"The impact on the availability of health workers? A 30 per cent impact on the availability of health workers is our advice. That will put people's lives at risk," Mr Morrison said.

As he was speaking, I was watching my five year old charges practice the opposite of social distancing. Kids this age push, hug, wrestle, jostle and play fight. No adult is going to stop that for more than two minutes.

"So let's keep our heads as parents when it comes to this."

Jobs only matter to the living.

There was a bottle of hand sanitiser at the front desk at school, and I had one in my pocket, but no student had one. At lunchtime, I suggested they wash their hands; about four out of fifteen ran their hands under the cold water of the drinking fountains for about 10 seconds. The rest ignored me. 

Many went to the toilet throughout the day. I don't even know if there's any soap or hand towels in there. I try to avoid the kids' school toilets at the best of times, they look & smell like something from the last hours of a particularly loose music festival.  Kids don't practice good hygiene; kids don't practice any sort of hygiene.

Throughout the day they were touching not only each other, but the playground equipment, their schoolbooks, desks, door handles etc. The idea that kids can't get CoVid-19 seems bizarre. They might show less symptoms, but who ever heard of a disease that only targets adults? Can you think of a single example of human illnesses that are only suffered by adults? Why would a virus behave like this? A recent small study suggested that it can remain viable in kiddy shit for two weeks, even if the child is symptomless.

Studies also suggest that Co-Vid-19 can survive on plastic and stainless steel surfaces for two to three days. If that's the case schools will soon be hiving with the stuff, if they aren't already

Watching the parents pick up their children at the end of the day I observed no social distancing, between fellow parents or the milling students.

This evening, I took a walk around the streets of my inner-northern Melbourne suburb of Preston.  It wasn't as busy as usual, but it was far from a ghost town. 

Several massage shops were open - how should one practice social distancing when receiving or giving a massage? 

There were four bars and restaurants operating; none of the patrons seemed to be practicing any form of social distancing. 

I popped my head into the local pokies joint. The restaurant was fairly busy and there were a few patrons in the gaming room. Given that the virus can live on plastic surfaces for days, one imagines that the play buttons on a machine must harbour the microscopic.

I then went up to Woolies supermarket on Plenty Road. Many shelves were empty, but not enough to deter shoppers from frantic shopping. The checkout staff weren't wearing gloves, or used hand sanitiser between transactions. No-one cleaned the eftpos machines or self-service checkouts. There was no effort at social distancing. 

I walked up Plenty Road and stopped for a whiskey at my local. The bartender handled my cash, poured my drink before moving onto the next customer. I met a friend and sat outside in the smoking section, where a large group was crammed into the corner.

I watched people use ATMs and climb aboard trams which could be harbouring the virus. Does that sound alarmist? Science doesn't agree.

If you're practicing social distancing, that's great and I don't want to deter you. However, a large part of the population are not. Schoolkids certainly are not. They won't while they are at school, or anywhere outside the home. Kids don't come straight home from school and leap into bed. They are a part of the community. Keeping the schools open won't isolate them.

"Oh but Singapore kept the schools going...." some may say. Yeah nah but....Singapore's approach is very different to ours. Diametrically opposed. Read about it in this NY Times article.  Stereotypically, Singapore is a more conformist society than us freedom-loving Aussies. Or should that be community minded, in contrast to our selfish individualism?

I am resigned to catching CoVid-19.  I could quit my teaching job and isolate at home. But that would mean someone else would have to go in and replace me. What if that person has underlying health issues or elderly parents? I'm a reasonably healthy forty-six year old. We're in a quasi-wartime situation, and if the powers that be want the schools open, I consider it my duty to turn up and look after your kids. I hope I can avoid serious complications and avoid a hospital visit.

If you want to avoid catching the illness, stay away from me. I'm not bothering to socially isolate. There seems little point. If the government was really serious about this illness, there would be health officials on the streets monitoring our pathetic hygiene practices. They are leaving it up to individuals to do what they think is best, in true small-government neo-liberal fashion.