“I dream of eggs,” said one caller. “Nothing fancy, just being able to sit in a café and order eggs.”
I’ve heard others bemoan the absence of football, or their golf game, or the simple act of hugging their grandkids.
Rugby League is, of course, way ahead, dreaming of restarting the season before you can say kebab-on-a-park-bench.
As the number of Australian COVID-19 cases dwindles, the talk is increasingly about whether we’ve flattened the curve enough to start easing up on the restrictions.
And fair enough. Recently, unless you were in the wrong aged-care facility or busy removing your digits with a meat slicer, you could be forgiven for thinking the risk is over.
At my GP practice we’ve tested dozens and dozens of people. Apart from two early in the outbreak, we’ve had no further positives for weeks. In a perverse way, it’s almost disappointing.
We read of frontline workers around the world sweating into their PPE, saving lives where they can, soothing the dying and listening, exhausted, to the applause from the balconies. Meanwhile we’re all geared up in our scrubs, tele-healthing the shit out of people’s anxiety.
So, time to get back out and play?
If only.
It’s been said before and it bears repeating — we know so little about this virus.
Maybe, just maybe, it will behave itself. Show us a weakness somewhere that we can exploit with a drug treatment. Remain stable long enough for us to find a vaccine that not only works, but continues to work.
Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 will be generous enough to allow our immune systems to produce antibodies that are both protective and persistent. Enable us to issue “immune passports” to those who’ve met and defeated it, sure in the knowledge that they are now safe.
Maybe it will decide, as viruses are wont to do, that killing its host is not a great strategy for its own long term survival and so tone down the lethality a notch or two.
That’s a lot of maybes.
Even as an inveterate optimist, I can’t accept that the little blighter will be so obliging. Far from being able to relax, I believe that this whole catastrophe has only just started. We’ve done an amazing job suppressing the virus here in Australia, but still it lurks in the shadows.
The Brooklyn meat works cluster in Melbourne’s west came to light early because of the injury to one of the workers.
Without this, how much more delay might there have been, and how much further might it have spread? And if the virus was hiding there, what about elsewhere? We can’t rely on people taking a boning knife to their thumbs before they’ll get checked out.
The answer is test, test, test, hence our current drive to swab thousands of healthy people.
I have no answers about the future. But I do believe that the world is in for a very long haul managing this.
My biggest fear is that we haven’t even begun to see what might happen in poorer areas; in the slums of India and the favelas of Brazil, the refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Social distancing when there’s one toilet for over a thousand people? Hand hygiene in the absence of clean water and access to sanitiser? Ventilators? Some African countries have none at all, so our spares could come in handy, but who will operate them?
I’d love to be back watching the footy, playing tennis, out eating eggs. I miss having my family come for dinner, but I’m not going to complain. My wife and I call that “inconvenience talk”. Inconvenience that hundreds of millions around the world can only dream of.
What’s a bit of social distancing and chapped hands compared to lying in ICU with Clive Palmer trying to force hydroxychloroquine down my throat?
I don’t dream of eggs. I dream of still being alive next year.
A good start in NSW would be to send tests to every school. Since teachers are back to school, bum’s in seats come Monday, why not test all 70,000 of them?
Hopefully you are only bulk billing me for this consultation because if I was paying the full amount a refund would be demanded.
Sorry Itsarort, my comment was meant for the good doctor. Not you.
No worries
Dep’t has changed it’s mind; NOT back to ‘bum’s in seats come Monday’.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t flattening the curve all about controlling the spread so that health services weren’t overrun?
What is happening now is the process of reduction of the number of active cases. While there are still active cases I would presume that the potential for another outbreak, unless all active cases are completely isoltaed.
How (dismally) correct you are Dr Carr.
As plagues of the past have repeatedly shown the poor die, and in this case the poor are the still undeveloped world, and the poor of the most neoliberally governed countries. The very places where the rich are more safe, and they wish the poor to get back to work and die, along with their elderly parents.
Meanwhile nothing is being done by our current Gov. to lessen the climate emergency, and nothing much about the drought or the bushfires.
I’m so happy, always look on the bright side of life dedum dedum ….
Nothing is being said about terrorists, six months ago they were the worlds biggest threat to civilisation, perhaps the virus killed them all.
Hi! Tony…thanks for that…the best laugh I’ve had all week!!!
:))
Singapore acted early to suppress COVID-19 with the numbers of infections and deaths low until early April.
The virus then found the city’s weak 300,000 plus low paid migrant workers living in crowded hostels.
By April 5, there were 145 COVID-19 cases detected among these migrant workers and by April 30, it had blown up to almost 14,000.
Currently we have a large number of foreign students in Australia who have just lost their jobs and now can’t support themselves and are forced in shared and possibly crowded premises in order to pay the rent.
With very little income or financial support for these students this could possibly be our COVID-19 second wave.
Whilst our Governments are not financially supporting them are they testing them regularly?
“Social distancing when there’s one toilet for over a thousand people…” Been there. In that situation you don’t go “to the toilet.” If it’s the slums you go in the gutter. If it’s a rural village you go out in the fields.
And in Sydney all that sewage is flushed out to sea, untreated.
That’s why swimming at Bondi is described as going through the motions.
Well at least you can get a kitchenette with the dunny in the middle of it, close to the sink n fridge, in Surry Hills Sydney, for only $380.00 a week now ..