Tag: Masks

Covid- it’s everywhere

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Washing line 2022 Willfried Wende – www.pixabay

On a quick shopping trip this week, it seemed that every second person was wearing a Covid mask, even though there is no legal obligation to do so. Friends, relatives, neighbours and friends of friends are either in isolation because of a positive RAT test or actually have Covid-19. There’s been a nasty flu getting around South-East Queensland at the same time. The only way to tell one from the other is to take a Rapid Antigen Test.

The statistics are a bit scary. The only saving grace is that the Omicron variants are said to be ‘milder’ than the Delta strain which was rampant in 2020.

As of this morning, Queensland reported 45, 824 active cases, including 6,366 new cases in the previous 24 hours. There were 907 hospitalisations and 14 patients in Intensive Care Units. There have been 73 deaths (people who died with Covid) this week alone.

There are many unanswered questions about this third wave of the Omicron variant. Like, how come we haven’t had it? Knock on wood. Or why do some people get “long Covid’’ where symptoms persist for months?

If you look at the historical charts, you have to wonder why governments decided to take their collective feet off the pedals of the crowd control machine.

On December 16, 2021, Queensland had 17 cases (a weekly average of 9). Then we opened the borders, relaxed the mask mandate and other rules like contact tracing which had thus far kept the virus out of Queensland.

By January 17, 2022, new cases had spiked to 31,056. While numbers have since fallen away, the State reported 32, 355 new cases (between July 11 and 15), with hospitalisation rates between 800 and 900.

Cumulatively, Queensland has now recorded 1.63 million cases (equates to 32% of the population) and 1,388 deaths. So much for Omicron being more infectious but less serious than Delta.

Queensland’s chief health officer John Gerrard has been quoted that catching Covid is “inevitable”. Ironically former chief health officer Jeanette Young, now Governor of Queensland, was also taken down by the virus.

Did you know that the entire Queensland Maroons rugby league team held a fan day in Warwick last week? The visit started with a sold-out dinner on Tuesday night with guest speakers including Maroons coach Billy Slater. Next day there was a street parade, breakfast in the park, coaching clinics for children and then the Maroons had a training session at the local footie oval. A few days later, two members of the team, Cameron Munster and Murray Taulagi tested positive for Covid and were unable to play in the decider on Wednesday.

I did notice that team members wore masks as they mingled with the thousands of fans who turned out to meet and greet.

Which brings me back to people wearing masks – in the street, in cafes, shopping centres and pharmacies. The latter used to insist on customers wearing a mask, but without the muscle of a state-mandated instruction, they can only make polite suggestions.

Remember the days of close contacts and contact tracing? The border closures, closed-down cafes and bars? Apart from hospitals, organisations with a Covid policy and employers, it seems you don’t have to prove you are double vaccinated. Hardly anyone checks to see the green tick on your phone. I was only asked to do so twice on a three-week trip to Tasmania in April. We did find you had to wear masks on public transport in Victoria and Tasmania (as you do in Queensland, although many do not wear masks).

An approved style of mask is your first line of defence to avoid being infected by Covid-laced aerial droplets. Second line is to stay home as much as possible.

The people I feel for are those who cannot avoid being in close quarters with other people (aged care homes, prisons, detention centres etc). It is now well known that residents in aged care are vulnerable; not only because of their living circumstances, but also because most are 75 and over and in the high-risk category.

Nationally there have been 2,881 deaths in aged care homes since the pandemic began in early 2020 and 2,580 residential aged care facilities have had an outbreak during that time. It’s probably misleading to include those two facts in the same sentence because the mind goes: ‘Hey, that’s an average of one death for each facility.’  
The Guardian reported yesterday that 100 aged care residents are dying with Covid each week, with more than 700 current outbreaks. The industry fears that two-thirds of aged care homes across Australia may be grappling with outbreaks over the next six weeks.

Amid reports of a Covid outbreak on a cruise ship anchored in the Brisbane River, I went looking for places in the world where the virus had been contained. Unhappily, the virus has caught up with some of the 10 or so island countries which, until the end of 2021, had managed to stay safe. They included Nauru, which went from zero cases in late 2021 to 40% of the population being infected. Nauru, as you may or may not know, is ‘home’ to 129 asylum seekers, most of whom have been on the island since 2012.

The World Health Organisation confirms that there are currently 121 new cases in Nauru and a cumulative 6,237 cases (and one death) since January 2022.

Citing global numbers, the WHO says that as of July 11 there have been 552.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 6.34 million deaths. As of 2 July 2022, a total of 12.03 billion vaccine doses had been administered. As for the United States, 87 million cases have been recorded since early 2020 and 1.02 million deaths. Donald Trump, we’re looking at you.

Compare that with Australia – 10,515 deaths since the first cases were seen in February 2020.

This takes me back to an early report from Seattle, the US city that gave the world the TV soap opera ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. A community choir had met for a rehearsal in the early days of Covid when nobody knew what we were dealing with.

As Live Science recalls, 52 people were unknowingly infected with Corona virus at a choir practice in Mount Vernon, Washington. The event led to the deaths of two people.

The practice happened on March 10, roughly two weeks before Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued a ‘stay home stay healthy’ executive order, barring social gatherings and non-essential travel.

That story shocked Australian choral singers. Most community choir directors I knew decided to cancel rehearsals for the foreseeable future. We mucked around on Zoom for a while and had a few tentative practices outside, but it just wasn’t the same. Eventually in 2021, as case numbers began to fall, choirs and orchestras started rehearsing again under controlled circumstances.

Experts told us that singing in a closed room was a sure-fire way to catch the virus – 20 or 30 people spraying droplets everywhere. Nobody said anything about 52,000 people in a footie stadium shouting and screaming for 80 minutes. Yes, it was an open-air event, but even so, those patrons walked in and out of the venue, used the public toilets and struggled back and forth along packed aisles, spilling beer and spreading potentially lethal aerial droplets around. Because Queensland won the State of Origin series, there was lots of hugging, kissing and selfie-posing. Then they all got on trains and buses, noisily singing the team song on the way home.

Don’t get me started. (Yes, but ‘we’ won – wasn’t it sweet? Ed)

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Buying masks for a masked ball

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Image: People queuing to buy face masks, San Francisco 1918. Wikipedia CC

I was cruising the supermarket aisles in search of Rapid Antigen Tests and P2 masks when a young woman opposite did that eye flash thing (above her mask). I was astonished – this last happened, what, in 1996? It’s quite a feat to demonstrate interest in the opposite sex with eye movement alone. Usually the mouth is used too, with either a shy smile or a naughty smirk.

The woman in question moved past, to her partner who had been behind me all the while. They moved on to the nappy aisle.

Time to take my temperature again, although this week I’m decidedly better. Before we get into a discussion about masks and how strange it is to see almost everyone wearing one, a small correction. Last week in my fevered state, I added an extra digit to the Covid cases numbers for Tasmania. It was 3,665.

As the majority of us are wearing face masks for the foreseeable future, what are the best masks and how should one go about preserving their integrity? When, dare I ask, is some entrepreneur going to launch a 2022 version of the 18th century masked ball? These lavish social events were popular in Europe (Venice) and later in the UK (where the decadence got dialled down to a cup of tea and a biscuit level). You could drink standing up, too.

You’d have to adapt the costumes, though. In those days the preferred mask left the mouth uncovered (all the better for conversation and naughty smirking). One of the more common masks employed at these events was a sequinned eye mask mounted on a stick, so the damsel could hide behind it (if flirting), or maybe avoid the attentions of a rancid squire.

This could be a good time to observe that for nearly all masked comic book superheroes, the mouth is always visible. Most superheroes wear eye masks (with no visible pupils.) This, and the skin-tight costume (first popularised by Lee Falk’s The Phantom in 1936), are the popular hallmarks of superheroes.

Batman and Robin supposedly wear masks to hide their true identity, so even observant people will never see wealthy philanthropist Bruce Wayne in the street and go “Omigosh – it’s Batman.”

Back in the real world, circa January 14, 2022, you can walk past someone you know quite well, not recognising them behind the ubiquitous face mask.

“Crikey! Is that you, Barry?”

“Mhww fwhff gruff.”

The challenges facing two or more people trying to have a conversation while wearing a face mask has resulted in the Chinunder, a word I made up, which is what it implies.

Many women, it seems, prefer the little black face mask. Men in general and as usual, have no sense of fashion or flair. Some make their own masks (I did see someone with a hanky tied across his nose and mouth, like a baddie about to hold up the stagecoach).
While medicos will tell you a plain surgical mask is preferable to a bandanna or a mask with an exhaust vent, it (was) OK to make your own. You just need two or three layers of cloth, an adjustable bridge (for those who wear glasses), and elastic to hold the mask close to your face.  A timely ABC report this week, however, has experts saying the cloth mask is worse than useless and instead we should wear N95/P2 masks.

This is despite the N95 masks I bought from a hardware store (for $4 per packet), clearly states ‘not for medical use’.

More information on cloth masks is available through the Infection Control Expert Group

Whatever. If you wear hearing aids, take great care when removing your mask as there is a 50/50 chance one of your hearing aids will go ‘ping’ into the nearest hedge or shrubbery.

If you don’t make your own, what kind of mask should you buy? The benefit of N95/P2 masks is they can be bought at hardware stores or chemists and can be re-used.

But even the simple job of shopping around for an appropriate mask carries risks. Chanteuse, an avid FOMMer, commented on an ABC interview with an epidemiologist, who was asked what you should put in your ‘someone in our house has COVID’ prep kit.

The answer included disinfectant, gloves etc plus two RATs  per inhabitant, a thermometer and a pulse oximeter.

“I reckon you’d get COVID in the hours and hours you’d spend traipsing from shop to shop trying to get your hands on the last three,” Chanteuse said. Traipsing, now there’s a word.

Corona virus, as we know, can spread through droplets and particles released into the air by speaking, singing, coughing or sneezing.

A survey by the Melbourne Institute found that nearly 90% of Australians support the use of masks in public places to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Approval was also high (93%) for the 14-day quarantine period for people diagnosed with Covid.

According to a team of academics from Bangor University writing in The Conversation, mandated mask-wearing is not just something prompted by Covid-19.  During the Spanish Flu in 1918, the Blitz in Britain in 1941, and the smog outbreaks in the UK from the 1930s to the 1960s, mask wearing was promoted as a patriotic act.

“However, the media’s scope in the first half of the 20th century was mainly limited to government-approved posters and newsprint in the 1910s. By contrast, today’s media landscape – especially social media – allows for individual and personalised voices to be heard to an extent unthinkable in earlier decades.”

Now, of course, we have Freedom rallies, people campaigning against lock-downs and mandates, scribbling slogans on footpaths… It’s nothing new – see Anti Mask League of San Francisco 1918.

If you see someone in public who is not wearing a mask, resist the temptation to try and change their mind. Avoid them like the plague, if you will, on the assumption that they are also un-vaccinated.

Which leads me to speculate about those masked superheroes who do such amazing things (while doubtless spreading viruses everywhere). Comic artists of the day must have decided that a black eye mask conveyed the necessary gravitas. Lips are drawn to look kissable.

Comics were banned from our house when I was a child – Blyton good, Phan-tom bad. I could never figure out why this ban was in force since our daily newspaper (which was in the house), commonly ran three or four comic strips including Andy Capp, Dagwood, The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.

Despite the household ban, I was a big fan of Phantom, Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Never Dies. He’s still going in 2022. But The Phantom does not have superpowers – it’s a multi-generational story which has fed the myth of immortality. As the story goes, phantom babies are born in the Skull Cave in Bangall* and raised by wolves (and their mother, Diana Palmer). Devil and Hero stand by, not the least perturbed by the change in the pecking order.

“Diana! Not another girl!”

Successive Phantoms always seem to be gym fit and fearless, which means they have avoided jungle diseases like dengue, yellow fever and African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). Perhaps Mr and Mrs Phan-tom take the kids to the clinic in town for vaccinations?

As they say of the 21st Phantom (disguised as Mr Walker, wearing a hat, sunglasses and heavy overcoat (on a humid night in darkest Africa):

“The Phantom can be at many places at once” (old jungle saying).

*Fictitious African country.

And a joke for the ladies: Masks are like bras- they’re uncomfortable, you take them off as soon as you get home and if you see someone without one, you notice it. Ed