Coronavirus - thegoodwills.com

A garden of viruses

Dear reader, please wear a mask and don rubber gloves before reading this none-too-subtle discourse about viruses and how little medical science knows about the common garden variety.

Since I tested negative to Coronavirus, after sitting in the car for two hours on December 28, alas, I still feel like shit. Excuse the language but there is no more apt description. Those lacking in empathy might dismiss it with “Oh it’s just a cold – build a bridge and get over it.”

Not that simple, sorry. There are more than 200 different cold viruses, and despite medical science’s skills in almost every other department, we don’t have a cure for any of them. The common cold virus lasts six to 10 days and the best advice is to stay in bed, or at least stay home until you feel better. There are many remedies which arguably speed the healing process and they include plenty of sleep, plenty of fluids, exercise (which seems counter-intuitive), and other more desperate measures like eating a raw onion and listening to jazz for 30 minutes.

I felt great on Christmas Eve, cooked pizzas for the family, tried to find something intelligent to watch on TV and failed. Went to bed early.

Christmas Day I woke with that post nasal drip thing – you know the one? Within hours my nose was running and I was going ‘ah-choo f***’, spreading germs around the house. I participated in Christmas lunch, feeling gradually worse as time went by. Boxing Day was bad.

“Perhaps you’d better go and get tested,” advised my sister-in-law, the nurse.

I did so on my return home, knowing I’d have a shorter wait than people were experiencing in Brisbane, where we spent Christmas.

While this was going on, reports were dribbling in that our Christmas lunch guest were succumbing to ‘#ahchoof***’. I got a negative test result within 24 hours so that was a relief. Or was it really?

I still felt like shit and Christmas lunch guests, including SWAGACF, were feeling equally miserable.

Cousin Alice rang to say she’s sorry she missed Christmas lunch (in isolation awaiting a Covid test), which proved to be negative. My brother-in-law started referring to me as ‘the East Coast distributor’.

As many people found out, there was something ‘going round’ at Christmas.

I chatted online to a friend who was dreading catching whatever was going through his tribe of grandchildren. Later he texted:

“I’ve got the wog – about to get a RAT test. Result in a bit. Timer on. And…Negative.”
“You were on the spot by proxy at this historic event.”

I spent much of the past week in and out of bed, binge-watching Succession and marvelling at the acumen of Shakespearean actor Brian Cox as the amoral, ruthless media baron. I also spent time wondering how I got this thing. Didn’t I wear a mask when going anywhere? Didn’t I wash my hands assiduously?

The best advice to avoid the common cold is just that – wash your hands after any contact with anyone or anything. Avoid contact with people who have the common cold. Ah, the tricky one. How do we know they have the common cold? They could be asymptomatic, as I was on Christmas Eve.

Through almost two years of dealing with a potentially deadly pandemic, it’s fair to say that the media, and medical science to a lesser degree, has been less focused on other viruses.

Having said that, researchers did note the sharp drop-off in influenza numbers in 2021. This phenomenon may well have been due to the general population taking Covid precautions.

In the August edition of the Australian general practitioners magazine, ‘newsGP’, it was noted that a year had passed with not one single death due to influenza.

Professor Ian Barr was frank when asked if he ever imagined the current situation; just 435 notified cases (to August 2021) and no hospital admissions.
Barr, who is Deputy Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute, said: “No. It’s amazing. Never.”

Professor Barr says the absence of influenza is a positive, although he also points to a number of other respiratory illnesses beyond the rising number of COVID-19 cases.

“I think fighting one virus at a time is quite enough for the general public. I don’t think we should get too complacent. There are other viruses circulating and depending on which State you’re in, those viruses are circulating at different levels.”

For context, in Australia there were 21,005 notifications of laboratory-confirmed influenza by August 2020 and 35 deaths. In 2019 there had been 214,377 and 486 deaths. (One explanation I read for this situation is that many deaths from influenza happen in Aged Care homes – the increasing emphasis on hygiene resulting from the Covid epidemic has had the effect of reducing the number of influenza deaths.Ed)

On January 6, 2022, Australia had 330,289 active Covid cases including 32,312 in Queensland. Before Christmas we had bugger-all.

I’m spending a lot of sick-bed time consulting Dr Google. If you want to minimise the chances of getting Covid, head to Tasmania. The Apple Isle and the Northern Territory have the lowest cases numbers in Australia, although at this time of year the climate is more attractive in Tassie than in the NT.

There were only 785 cases in Tasmania on Monday, increasing to 3,653 yesterday but well below the 268,787 cases in NSW and Victoria, the States you drive through to get to Tassie.

As an island State, though, one can fly directly to Tasmania, with only one border check. In WA, closed borders explains its low tally of 74 cases. The prosecution rests.

It fell to me then, viruses aside, to go on an emergency shopping expedition. I rationalised it thus: past the contagious stage, wearing a mask, washing my hands. What could go wrong?

On my last quick trip to buy juice, tissues and toilet paper, I witnessed an exchange between two customers (who apparently knew each other well enough to drop their masks under their chins).

“It’s all a bit much, eh?”

“Yeh, this flu’ll get us all eventually.”

One old bloke tendered a limp-looking ten dollar note. The (masked) checkout person picked it up in the manner of someone removing a gecko from a windowpane.

Then I went home and Dr Googled some more, finding along the way a study done in Germany which says listening to music can help heal the common cold.

Dance music, soft rock and jazz were genres most favoured to increase the levels of antibodies in the bodies of those listening to such music. (The jazz will drive me out of the room, thus achieving the aim of isolation. Ed.)

Research by the Max Planck Institute in Germany concluded that certain types of music boost the immune system and help to decrease the level of the stress hormone cortisol. Enthused by this research from 2008, latched on to by radio DJs and pop culture writers, I put together an appropriate playlist.

Our music advisor Franky’s Dad listened to the playlist and replied:

“This playlist gives an insight into the way a virus can addle the brain.”

“I see that you’ve been guided by the theme of illness & medicine,

“It’s a bewildering mix of genres though!”

FD (who also has the wog) contributed If I Could Talk I’d Tell You. Anyway, we agree – avoid listening to your favourites when unwell.

This eclectic playlist of 25 tracks – not all about feeling poorly – includes a pithy little ditty from our album, The Last Waterhole. I recommend Don’t Crash the Ambulance, not for the image it conjures, but as a piece of political history, with George W Snr advising the next president: “Watch and learn, Junior. Watch and learn.”

Germ Boy’s Mix

Hoarding, Free Vaccines, Panic Buying

Hoarding-vaccines-panic-buying — Image of COVID-19 by iXimus from Pixabay

Life goes on, amid news reports of panic buying and hoarding, as reporting of the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to terrify the masses. We have seen manifestations of this terror in the past fortnight with an (ongoing) share market correction, led by the US and blindly followed by investors in Australia and elsewhere. So far it is no more dire than the corrections during the GFC. The popular theory is that global share market investors fear the effect the coronavirus could have on business, imports and exports and the ever-valuable tourism market.

The seven-day share market correction was followed at home by reports of panic buying of non-perishable groceries. Shelves were cleared in supermarkets, amid assurances by retailers that their supply chains were solid. Hand sanitiser is at the top of a curious list.

Toilet paper was one of the items bought in bulk, prompting one Australian supermarket chain to limit sales of dunny rolls to one four-pack per person. Social media gurus have been busy making memes of Aussies swathed in dunny paper, speculating about what sorts of things one needs to hoard, assuming the worst (global contagion, financial mayhem, collapse of law and order).

I looked but could not find references to food or toilet paper in this list from a survivalist website. There are lots of solid tips about water filtration, fire-lighting, charging batteries (with solar), emergency lighting, fishing equipment and a multi-use gadget called a Spork. Oh, and they list a variety of weapons for hunting and self-defence including a crossbow.

By happenstance, last week I picked up a battered copy of The First Horseman by John Case from a public library sale.

The plot involves a virologist (and a journalist), who is trying to locate and exhume five miners who died of Spanish Flu in 1918 while working in the Arctic. The bodies are buried in ice, so the plan is to harvest the hopefully preserved Spanish Flu virus and develop a vaccine. You guessed it, there’s a bad guy; a megalomaniacal cult leader who thinks there are too many people in the world.

As I continued to read The First Horseman, cases of coronavirus increased world-wide. As of 1^st of March, there were just fewer than 80,000 cases in China (3.5% death rate) and some 7,000 cases in other countries, with a death rate of 1.4%). In Australia, the number of reported cases rose to 41. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously said the mortality rate of coronavirus varies from 0.7% to 4%, depending on the quality of healthcare and the urgency of the response in affected countries. This week the WHO upgraded the mortality rate to 3.4%, which brings us back to comparisons with the Spanish Flu which had a mortality rate of 2% to 3%, although it afflicted some 500 million people around the world. Author John M Barry put it in perspective when he said in his book The Great Influenza that the flu killed more people in 24 weeks than HIV/AIDS did in 24 years.

A major study done by Chinese researchers said that 80.9% of people diagnosed with Coronavirus exhibited mild symptoms and recovered. Only 13.8% of cases were described as severe and only 4.7% as critical. The highest fatality rate is for people aged 80 and older, at 14.8%. The majority of people who died suffered pneumonia-like symptoms.

Pneumonia is a lung inflammation caused by bacterial or viral infection. (Have you had lunch yet?).The air sacs fill with pus and may become solid. Inflammation can affect both lungs.

Patients usually spend a few days in hospital hooked up to intravenous antibiotics and oxygen/nebulisers to help them breathe. Some forms of pneumonia are contagious. You didn’t know that? Yes, it spreads the same way as the common cold and other viruses.

Pneumonia in the elderly happens fast and the prognosis is poor. The elderly are more susceptible to severe pneumonia, which has a mortality rate as high as 20%. Of the 2.6 million pneumonia deaths in 2017, 1.13 million were aged 70 or older.

Egad! Now where did I file that letter from the medical centre – the one offering (free) immunization for pneumonia? Yes, it’s true; there are advantages to crawling over the peak of the hill, past the 69 sign. I am eligible for a bone density scan ($125), a shingles vaccine ($217) and a vaccine against catching pneumonia ($133), free of charge.

I recommend this reliable website to track the escalation of coronavirus. Of the 52 Australians diagnosed with the virus, 22 have recovered, two have died and six (including health workers in aged care facilities), are the only patients who did not have a recent history of travel to high-risk countries.

It’s not so easy tracking the health of the global share market.Global investors are second-guessing themselves, ignoring Tuesday’s rally (after a seven-day selloff which hacked 11% off the value of the market). On Wednesday, the all ordinaries index was down 113 points after Tuesday’s Reserve Bank interest rate cut. It bounced back again on Thursday by a similar amount and yes, down 111 points on Friday morning.

The volatility is a finger in the air to the world’s central banks, which seemingly colluded in a co-ordinated campaign to cut rates. The conundrum for investors is this: invest in term deposits or bonds and let inflation erode your capital, or trust the share market to claw back value, restore confidence and keep paying dividends.

Despite the clear fact that losses on a share portfolio are paper losses unless physically sold, a major market correction triggers certain events.

The young and brave who hold ‘geared’ share portfolios probably faced a ‘margin call’ last week. Gearing means borrowing money from a financial institution to buy listed shares.

The main catch with borrowing money to buy shares is this: if your portfolio (valued say at $100k), drops in value to $85k, you, the borrower will have to find $15,000 in cash to cover the lender’s risk.

A major study of investors carried out by the Australian Stock Exchange concluded, inter alia, that only 5% borrow to buy shares. Nonetheless, in a survey asking investors this very question, up to 60% of those aged between 25 and 44 seemed keen on the idea.

The other event triggered by a share market collapse is that those retirees receiving part pensions from the government have to report what Centrelink describes as a ‘change in your circumstances’.

So if your part-pension is calculated on assets, you duly report a 10%-12% decrease in the (paper) value of your share portfolio. This should increase your part-pension proportionately. As usual, if you don’t sell, nothing changes apart from the balance on a spreadsheet.

So, of these two global contagions, which will first be healed?

As the ABC’s Alan Kohler pointed out, despite the correction, Australian shares are still over-valued. My take on the share market volatility is to say that when a market is down 200 one day and up 120 the next, day traders are making a killing.

But market volatility is a risk in itself as the fear contagion wafts down to Mums and Dads investors, who all may decide to hide it under the mattress.

As for the coronavirus, senior citizens’ organisations are taking modest steps to ensure their constituents (the age group most at risk) follow simple but effective rules to avoid spreading viruses.

I actually think this set of rules ought to apply in general, adding: “If you are sick, stay home until you are not.” (To which the bolshie Ed aka SWPT adds, that’s one of the many problems of a casualised workforce- even if you’re sick, you can’t afford to stay home – ‘do you want germs with that?’)

Tales of quarantine and homelessness

quarantine-homelessness — Image: Nurses wearing surgical masks during the 1918 Spanish Flu’ pandemic which killed 15,000 Australians and millions worldwide. State Library of Queensland CC

Had it not been for the coronavirus outbreak (the WHO calls it COVID-19), few Australians would have known of Manigurr-ma, a purpose-built accommodation village 30kms from Darwin.

Manigurr-ma, or Howards Springs as it is zoned by Australia Post, was built in 2012 at a cost of $600 million as part of the Ichthys LNG gas project. Developed by infrastructure company Aecom for the multinational INPEX consortium, the village can house up to 3,500 people in 875 accommodation units, each with four rooms. There is a 1,750-place dining hall, a commercial kitchen which can produce 10,000 meals per day, a licensed tavern, a cinema, medical centre and laundry.

For the next fortnight or so, the village will be home to 266 Australians evacuated from the coronavirus epicentre, the Chinese city of Wuhan. Despite assurances that the risk to the general public is minimal, Howard Springs residents are making their opinions known.

After the LNG plant at Howard Springs became fully operational in 2018, the village was closed, after housing 3,500 construction workers at its peak. In May last year, Ichthys LNG Pty Ltd transferred Manigurr-ma to the Northern Territory government at a ‘peppercorn’ rental. A spokesperson for the NT Government told FOMM a ‘have your say’ campaign was carried out last year.

“Proposals were received from a range of parties, including public feedback for the future use of the Village and its assets.

‘‘The various submissions will be considered in the final decision by the Government about how the site and its assets will be used”

FOMM notes that the proposal required submissions to be “commercially viable”.

Given that a shortage of housing is a key issue for Darwin’s homeless population, I hope someone threw that particular hat in the ring.

Quarantine, from the Italian Quarante (meaning ‘forty’), has been around since Old Testament days. The word referred to a rule introduced in Venice that all ships suspected of harbouring people with infectious diseases stood offshore for 40 days.

Several small islands off Venice known as Lazarettos were established in the 1600s when plague was rampant. Some of these off-limits islands were later converted to mental hospitals or convents. But as far as the general populace were concerned, they were, and still are, ghost towns.

Most countries had a place where people with leprosy or plague were banished. China had a well-established policy from 600 AD to detain plague-ridden sailors and foreign visitors, preferably at sea.

North Brother Island in New York’s East River was used for decades as the site of an infectious diseases hospital. A reporter from the New York Post who was recently taken on a guided tour of the now-closed station wrote that the island’s remote location was deemed perfect in the 1880s for a hospital to treat contagious smallpox and typhoid patients.

“Mary Mallon, who earned the name Typhoid Mary by passing the disease to 51 people while working as a cook in Brooklyn and Long Island, was its most infamous tenant. She displayed no symptoms herself, but was quarantined until her death in 1938.”

Sydney’s Quarantine Station at North Head (Manly) took in immigrants who had fallen ill (as well as some residents). As the authors of a book published in 2016 found, some recovered and were released. Some never made it out.

‘Stories from the Sandstone’, published in 2016 by the University of Sydney’s Peter Hobbins, Anne Clarke and Ursula Frederick, chronicled the history of Sydney’s Quarantine Station. The title of the book comes from archaeological discoveries of inscriptions carved into sandstone by some of the 16,000 people kept at North Head between 1830 until its closure in 1984.

In the mid-1880s, infectious illnesses like smallpox, tuberculosis and scarlet fever were common and there was even a recorded case of bubonic plague in 1900. As Dr Hobbins says in the book, as a result of extensive immunisation programmes, effective antibiotics and improvements in the public health system, infectious diseases do not decimate the population as they did in the 1800s or even during the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

The most visible (and possibly the largest), quarantine station in the world in 2020 is the cruise ship Diamond Princess, moored off Japan with its 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew ‘couped (sic) up’ as an ABC report had it, until time dilutes the fear of contagion. Princess Cruises this week confirmed reports of 39 new coronavirus cases aboard the ship, berthed at Yokohama.

“We are following guidance from the Japan Ministry of Health on plans for disembarkation protocols to provide medical care for these new cases,” the website update states.

The Diamond Princess had been due to leave the Japanese port of Yokohama on February 4, but cancelled the cruise on advice from Japanese health authorities.

The cruise ship’s situation fits the definition of ‘quarantine’ – preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

The key difference between Coronavirus (now known as COVID-19) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is that people with Coronavirus are infectious before exhibiting symptoms. This may explain the comparatively higher numbers of people contracting the disease and the overly-cautious approach to quarantine here and abroad.

A Medical Journal of Australia report compiled after the SARS epidemic had abated in 2004 demonstrated the effectiveness of Australia’s border screening. Of the 1.84 million arrivals into Australia during the study period, 794 people were referred for screening to the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. Of these, four travellers met the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition for SARS. None of these people were confirmed to have SARS.

The media loves contagion stories about as much as it drools over earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and croc and shark attacks. Are they beating it up? Time will tell. Whatever you read on social media, as of February 13, 2020, 15 Australians had been confirmed as being infected with coronavirus. Five have since recovered.

As usual, the trail of research leading into the history of quarantine stations lured me away from the point I wanted to make.

When the Northern Territory has 12 times the national average incidence of homelessness, how is it there are 875 living units sitting vacant near Darwin (for at least 18 months)?

NT Shelter estimates that 16.5% of Territorians under 16 are experiencing homelessness. The system seems unable to cope, with Shelter’s findings that 48% of people get turned away due to a ‘lack of resources’.

As Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded, we are no closer to Closing the Gap. The policy was announced in 2008 with noble intentions to help bridge the gap between health and welfare outcomes for indigenous compared to non-indigenous Australians. There are no simple answers to the fact that 90% of the Territory’s homeless are indigenous. As a Triple J story revealed, a survey of non-indigenous people in Darwin revealed a lot of ignorance about ‘long-grassers’ – indigenous people who sleep rough.

Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation’s random survey of 300 people found the majority romanticised the notion of sleeping under the stars. Only six people identified a lack of housing, failed public policy and the impact of assimilation and integration policies as reasons for homelessness.

When the last person at Manigurr-ma is cleared to leave, it would be an interesting exercise, at the very least, to trial the centre as a homeless shelter. After all, though homelessness is not contagious, it does have far-reaching effects.