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Covid- it’s everywhere

covid-masks-pandemic — 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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Angst in the time of Covid

polio-cholera-covid — Image: A young girl is given oral polio vaccine – Wikimedia CC

Amid reports of doubters who (still) believe Covid is fake news, this week we examine the history of public protest and vaccine hesitancy in times of contagion.

Those 3,000 or so people who mingled on Sydney’s streets a while back, protesting against the Covid lockdown, protesting about vaccines – it’s nothing new.

In the early 19^th century, Joe Public was getting riled up by the spread of cholera and the seemingly poor response by doctors and authorities. There was similar dissent shown when the UK government sought to make the smallpox vaccine compulsory in 1854. There was an ‘anti-mask’ movement during the Spanish Flu and much stigmatisation of polio victims in the first half of the 20^th century.

While the threat of cholera has been eradicated in countries with good drinking water and sanitation, there’s still a lot of it about in parts of Africa and Asia.

Cholera is a severe diarrhoeal disease which, if left untreated, can kill within hours. It is commonly transmitted via food or untreated water, particularly in countries with poor sanitation. Even now if you are travelling to Asia or Africa, your GP will advise getting vaccinated.

And here, dear reader, is where the great divide starts; the inevitable chasm between the majority who accept the science and medical advice and those who don’t. There are those who think the Covid vaccine is a plot to de-populate the planet or a conspiracy to control our minds by implanting microchips. Mine has already succumbed, as you can tell.

The first cholera epidemic (1831) emerged in Russia then somehow moved to Scotland, causing considerable angst and consternation. Just absorb this snippet from Wikipedia and put it in the context of Sydney’s Covid lockdown (and protests).

“A major riot took place in Aberdeen on 26 December 1831, when a dog dug up a dead body in the city. Some 20,000 Aberdonians (two-thirds of the city’s population, although this number has been criticised as an exaggeration), protested against the medical establishment, who they believed were using the epidemic as a body-snatching scheme similar to the Burke and Hare murders of 1828”.

In the summer of 1832, a series of cholera riots occurred in various towns and cities throughout Britain, frequently directed against the authorities, doctors, or both. Of the 72 cholera riots in the British Isles that year, 14 made reference to body-snatchers (“Burkers”).

Burkers were people who believed that medical authorities were acting in co-ordination with the State to purposefully kill and reduce the population (weeding out the poor and weak). Sounds outlandish now, eh?

Despite oral vaccinations being in widespread use, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 499,447 cases of cholera and 2.990 deaths in 2018, spread across 34 countries. About 75% of cholera cases were attributed to Yemen. As the WHO observes, cholera is most likely to re-emerge and spread in countries affected by war and civil unrest and/or where infrastructure has been damaged by natural disasters.

If you roll back 102 years to the Spanish Flu pandemic, it is not hard to uncover instances of public unrest. They ranged from people stigmatising those who had the virus to complaining about having to wear a mask in public.

Historian Humphrey McQueen says mask wearing was strenuously enforced in New South Wales.

“The demand for masks was so extensive that to prevent profiteering, the Commonwealth Government declared butter muslin and gauze to be `necessary commodities’ within proclaimed areas.”

Opponents of mask wearing saw them as breeding grounds for infection or as sapping the community’s ‘vital force’. A ‘Bovril’ advertisement alleged that anti-influenza masks were ‘like using barbed wire fences to shut out flies’.

McQueen said there was widespread support for inoculation throughout the country. By the end of 1919, 25% of people in in New South Wales had received two inoculations against Spanish Flu.

“Melbourne’s socialites reputedly arranged `inoculation parties’ where the guests ‘got the needle’ in turn to slow music and a prize was awarded to the shapeliest arm.”

Vaccine hesitancy is no surprise to David Isaacs, Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Sydney.

Writing in The Conversation, he explored the topic from smallpox through to the Covid vaccine.

“In 1853, concerned by pockets of poor uptake of smallpox vaccine, the British parliament introduced the Vaccination Act, making infant smallpox vaccination compulsory.

“Mandatory vaccination fomented opposition, something we should remember if considering making a modern vaccine mandatory.”
Protests quickly emerged, with more than 80,000 vaccine dissenters marching through Leicester carrying banners, a child’s coffin and an effigy of Jenner.

Eventually, the success of Jenner’s smallpox vaccine silenced the anti-smallpox vaccination movement.

I sometimes look at the smallpox scar on my arm (1955) and wonder why people were so scared of something that could spare you from a disease more contagious than Covid-19, with a 30% mortality rate.

In the first half of the 20th century, the ‘silent killer’, polio (infantile paralysis) swept quickly through the US and other countries.
The US was desperate for a polio vaccine and it got one, but not without an early setback. Virologists Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk, competed to develop the first polio vaccine.
Salk’s vaccine, made from killed polio viruses, was ready for a large clinical trial in 1954.

Five companies applied to mass produce the Salk vaccine, four major pharmaceutical firms and one Californian family firm called Cutter Laboratories. The trial results proved the vaccine worked, so vaccination began in 1955.

But within two weeks, children who received the Cutter vaccine (but not the vaccines made by the four other companies), started to develop paralysis. Of the 200,000 children given the Cutter vaccine, 40,000 developed polio, 200 were paralysed and 10 died.

“The polio vaccination program stalled due to the ‘Cutter Incident’, but the fear of catching polio was so great the public was soon reassured the other vaccines had not caused polio,” Prof Isaacs wrote.

I don’t remember being told this story as a child in the 1950s, lining up in a New Zealand schoolyard for the polio needle. New Zealand was as badly affected as Australia, with five polio epidemics from 1914 to 1954, resulting in many deaths and people my age being left with a lingering legacy.

Polio Australia says there are 400,000 Australian survivors of the childhood polio epidemic. At its peak between 1944 and 1954, the virus killed 1000. The highly contagious virus, spread via faeces and nasal mucous, resulted in poor people and those living in overcrowded situations being stigmatised. Then as now, outbreaks were dealt with by closing schools, borders and public facilities like swimming pools. Victims were quarantined and newspapers published a daily tally of polio cases and deaths.

Prof Isaacs compares these stories with the public concern which arose in 2020 about the Covid vaccines, primarily because of the risk of blood clots. He concludes with the ‘greater good’ argument.

“In Australia, a concentration on individual risk at a single point in time ignores the benefits to the community of widespread vaccine uptake.

“History tells us the public can tolerate risk of harm from vaccines when the severity of the disease warrants the risk.”

I don’t know about you, but my second AZ shot is due tomorrow. I’ll run the risk.

More reading:

The Cutter incident

Polio – an ever-present risk

polio-risk-covid — An iron lung, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London: a patient inside a Drinker respirator, attended to by a nurse and a doctor. Photograph, ca. 1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Polio is my counter-cyclical topic to kick of a new year that everyone hopes will see the Covid-19 global pandemic kicked in the arse. That’s Australian lingo for vanquished, eradicated, snuffed out. Despite hopes that the Covid-19 respiratory virus will be globally defeated through a programme of vaccinations, it is unlikely to cover everyone who needs it, this year or even next. So let’s be informed by history.

My generation will recall the arrival of the polio immunisation team at their local primary school in the 1950s. ‘The Jab’ was administered to all children as part of a mandatory scheme to eradicate poliomyelitis (polio) from New Zealand (where I grew up). NZ, like Australia, had virus outbreaks in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Polio is a viral disease that affects the spinal cord and nervous system, primarily in children and adolescents. Globally, the disease has been 99% eradicated, after an immunisation programme started in 1955. Yet, as health authorities warn, even though the disease has not been seen in the US since 1988, it would take just one live case to be imported to re-start the viral cycle.

I warmed to this as a FOMM topic after reading a few chapters of Alan Alda’s charming biography ‘Never have your dog stuffed’. Alda, who contracted polio as a child in the 1940s recalled, “The country was in the throes of an epidemic. People were afraid to go to public swimming pools or theatres for fear of contagion.”

His parents utilised a controversial treatment advocated by Australian nurse, Sister Elizabeth Kenny. The treatment involved application of heat packs and manual stretching of limbs. Though controversial at the time, the Kenny methods were absorbed into what we now know as rehabilitation medicine.

Despite Alda’s graphic description of the painful application of heat packs, he credits the Kenny treatment with not developing paralysis or the characteristic withered leg common in polio victims.

Even though his doctor had declared him no longer contagious, young Alda had few visitors. He related how one child came to visit for a short while, sitting across the room on a wooden chair.

“Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about this, how kind he was to visit me. I also noticed he didn’t come back.”

Serious polio cases were often subjected to lengthy periods in an ‘iron lung’. An iron lung was a bed inside a metal box with a cushioned opening where the patient’s head protruded. The machine helped patients breathe mechanically until such time as the virus subsided and they could breathe on their own.

Survivors who were left with a withered leg were fitted with a caliper to help them walk. Serious cases ended up in a wheelchair.

It is estimated that about 30% of those affected by paralytic polio could be vulnerable to Post-Polio Syndrome in later life. Occurring about 30 years after the initial infection, PPS causes progressively worsening muscle weakness in limbs affected by the disease.

To demonstrate that polio (like Covid-19) can affect anyone, many famous people were affected by the disease:

Actor and humorist Michael Flanders (of the duo Flanders and Swan) spent much of his life in a wheelchair after contracting polio in 1942. As you can tell by this splendid parody of Mozart’s horn concerto, Flanders did not let polio dominate his life, short as it was (he died in 1975 aged 53). Given the dire nature of this topic, I recommend this performance of “Ill Wind” as light relief.

My favourite songwriter, Joni Mitchell, developed polio and spent much of her childhood at home, where she discovered a talent for art and music. Joni developed her distinctive range of open tunings on guitar and dulcimer to compensate for an arm weakened by the disease. Polio might also explain her friendship with another Canadian songwriter, Neil Young, also a victim.

Australian songwriter Joy Mckean has worn a caliper since developing polio in childhood. In the documentary Slim and I, she tells the story of how she came to write Lights on the Hill, one of her husband Slim Dusty’s enduring songs. As Joy tells it, in the days when she and Slim criss-crossed the continent, the dip switch of most cars was located on the floor, to the left of the brake pedal. As her left leg was paralyzed, Joy had developed a method of moving her right leg across to dip the lights and back to the accelerator. It puts lines like these sharply into context:

These rough old hands are a-glued to the wheel
My eyes full of sand from the way they feel
And the lights comin’ over the hill are a-blindin’ me

Many other well-known Australians were struck down with polio as children, including the late media tycoon Kerry Packer, radio presenter John Laws and former Deputy PM Kim Beazley.

Packer was at boarding school in 1945, aged six, when, as he recalls, “one morning I got out of bed and just fell flat on my face.

“I had polio and rheumatic fever and was sent straight down to Sydney. They put me in hospital there for about nine months in an iron lung.”

Although there has not been a locally acquired case in Australia since 1972, the country has a polio response plan in place. The ever-present risk of the disease being imported could trigger the plan. Although wild poliovirus-associated paralytic poliomyelitis has not been reported in Australia since 1977, an imported case was reported in a man who had traveled from Pakistan to Australia in 2007.

British new wave rocker Ian Drury was a polio survivor. The disease left him with a withered leg and arm and other disabilities. That did not stop him forming a band (The Blockheads) and penning pithy songs like Sex’n Drugs’n Rock’n Roll, Hit me with Your Rhythm Stick and Reasons to be Cheerful.

Drury, a disabled man with a poor opinion of the International Year of Disabled Persons, wrote Spasticus Autisticus in 1981. The lyrics are directed at the campaign, which he saw as patronising and counter-productive.

“So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
    And thank the Creator you’re not in the state I’m in
    So long have I been languished on the shelf
    I must give all proceedings to myself.”

This could be loosely adapted to a post-Covid scenario; someone lamenting how Covid has left them with weird after effects, or how the world’s way of dealing with the pandemic has dealt them a bitter economic blow.

It’s not hard to imagine Australian health authorities developing a long-term Covid response plan, as they did with polio.

As we know, all it takes is one case, imported from somewhere else, and the contagion starts all over again.

Happy New Year, then!

Lyric extracts from www.lyrics.com

Note from the Editor- don’t blame me – I said: “Why don’t you write something fluffy for the start of the year?”