The following was written and sent to Australia Post's "Dear Australia" project.
Today is
the 13th of June, 2020. There have been 7290 cases of COVID-19 in
Australia, with 102 deaths. There are presently 405 active cases – 403 of these
are classified “mild”, two are “serious or critical”. Roughly 1.75 million
COVID-19 tests have been carried out. We’re in Level Two of re-opening. In
Queensland, this means that up to 20 people can gather indoors and outdoors.
Restaurants and cafés are open, non-contact and outdoor sports are permitted.
Schools are open. Social distancing is still in place, and there are additional
precautions, like giving your name and contact details at a restaurant.
Unlimited travel within Queensland is permitted. The Queensland border is still
closed; if you return from interstate or overseas, you must quarantine for two
weeks.
I am 45
years old. I was born in Perth, grew up in WA, moved to Brisbane in 2002. I was
in some form of education from 3 until 27, including a year as an exchange
student in Brasil. I worked full-time until my eldest was born, part-time until
two years ago, and now I am on the school P&C, the Kindy management committee
and I volunteer in the community. I started a small business last year. I speak
two other languages (Portuguese and French). I am relatively introverted, I
don’t like large crowds or noisy places and I think that the last time I went
to a large sporting event was an ice hockey game in Montreal 15 years ago.
My husband
and I met at university. We were friends for a couple of years, dated for
another two and got married in April 2000. He has been my best friend for nearly
half of my life. We worked for the same
mining company for years, including three years in Quebec. He speaks French. He
is a qualified Kung Fu master and has his own Kung Fu school. He is more
introverted than me and also dislikes crowds. He plays guitar and bass and
enjoys live music, preferably at small venues.
We have
three children, who were all born in Brisbane.
We all have first names that start with the letter M. Our daughters are 10 and 8, in Years 5 and 3
at the local state school, our son is 4 and at a community kindy. The girls do several after-school activities
– drama and singing for them both, violin and art for the eldest, tennis,
guitar and Kung Fu for the younger.
We live in
the western suburbs. My husband catches the train to his work in the city. The
children’s school, kindy and activities are within walking distance. Our home
is a renovated Queenslander, four bedrooms, two bathrooms – we bought it nine
years ago. We have a mortgage, but it is
almost paid out. We have one car and don’t drive much – our car is 8 years old
and has done under 60 000 kms.
The last
few months have been an unusual affair.
In early March, I was talking to a friend and looking at some statistics
around COVID-19 transmission and infection rate. We both have science backgrounds – she’s a
vet and I’m a chemist (scientist who studied Chemistry, not a pharmacist). This showed how quickly a health system could
be overwhelmed and how many people (with and without COVID-19) could die during
a mass outbreak because the hospitals didn’t have the space to treat them all
at the same time.
March was disconcerting. The government was saying, “Schools are the
safest place for children!” Schools, however, are not just for children. How many of the teachers and staff were
high-risk to COVID? How many of them cared for an elderly parent, or a partner
with a compromised immunity? There
seemed to be a limited concern for the staff, and more concern for the need for
“essential workers” to send their children at school. School was being discussed, by the government
at least, as a glorified babysitting service, not as an important pillar in our
community, staffed by people whose particular skills were essential to the
continued improvement and betterment of our society.
Our eldest
daughter’s birthday is in March, and she asked for a party with six friends –
pizza and a movie at our house. We made
a deal with her when we sent out the invitations – if school was still open
when the party rolled around, it could go ahead. If school was closed, there would be no
party. We discussed this with her
friends’ parents; we all figured that they were together every day at
school. No parents came into the house
when they picked up and dropped off their girls – we were already socially
distancing.
My husband
started working from home in March.
Catching public transport every day at peak hour meant that he was in confined
quarters with many others twice a day, so working from home was safer. Within a week or two, his office was shut and
everyone directed to work from home.
At school, there
were policies that limited contact.
Assemblies became virtual, interschool sport was cancelled, all school
sports days were postponed. Parents were
asked to limit time on school grounds.
Parent-teacher night was changed to a telephone call with or an email
from your child’s teacher. It was very
different to “normal”. By week 9,
attendance was down at least 30%. I had
already decided that I was keeping my kids home in week 10 when the state
government announced schools would be pupil free. Children of essential workers and at-risk
children were still able to go to school.
Even with the late notice, there were still online resources available
for the kids for week 10. My girls loved
the fact that they could use laptops to do their schoolwork. My son, also home from Kindy, decided that
puzzles, drawing and cars were his “homework”.
The school
holidays were not too different from normal – my husband was working (albeit at
home) and we’d had no plans to go anywhere.
We didn’t do a few of our usual things – there was no train ride into
the city, no visit to the museum, no trip to the Botanical Garden.
The first
five weeks of Term 2 were planned to be pupil-free. The teachers at my girls’ school did a
remarkable job of organising five weeks of online learning, including video classes,
blogs and chat boards, as well as weekly uploads of their work. Several after-school activities moved
online.
Due to the
decreasing COVID infection numbers, Queensland schools reopened for Kindy, Prep
and Years 1, 11 and 12 at the start of week 4.
This sent my youngest back to school, while his sisters remained
learning at home. Two weeks later, they
were back at school as well.
School is different
now. Apart from school staff, adults are
not allowed onto school property. We’ve
had to run P&C meetings online because we can’t use the school’s staff
room. Kindy will allow you into the grounds to drop your child off and pick up,
but you can’t stay more than a few minutes.
All activities, incursions and excursions are cancelled for the
term. Childcare, out-of-school-hours
care and kindergarten fees are all being paid for by the government.
This is how
things have changed in general. For us personally,
the impact of isolation has been minimal.
We don’t go out all that much, outside of school and activities, so
having to stay to ourselves was not difficult.
Our home is
large enough that we can each have our own space. The kids have their own bedrooms; my husband
set up his office in his music room, so at the end of the day he will shut down
his laptop and pick up a guitar and play for 30 minutes or so. He has had to forgo Kung Fu (he’s been
studying this for over ten years) and temporarily close his school, which was
disappointing – he’d only opened in late January, and by mid-March, he was
closing it up. His school will reopen in
ten days.
We have a
decent sized back yard, and the weather is warm enough that the kids are
outside a lot. We have a great set of
monkey bars (with swing and trapeze) that they love. They have plenty of toys, lots of art
supplies, books galore. When they are
bored or need a change of scenery, there are three parks within walking
distance. While they weren’t allowed to
use the playgrounds, they could run, climb trees, ride their bikes. Our delivery services continued with only
relatively minor delays – over the two months we were at home, my online
shopping included new bikes, art supplies, pet supplies (the kids have guinea
pigs), books, seeds and garden products, food, wine.
Our
youngest daughter had her birthday in isolation. We have promised to host the sleepover party
that she wanted later in the year. The
owner of the local toy shop personally delivered one large box of presents I’d
ordered, and helpfully hid them downstairs so that our daughter didn’t see
them.
In addition
to her birthday, isolation also included my birthday, our 20th
wedding anniversary and Mother’s Day, all within a three week period. My birthday was celebrated by a home-cooked
meal and home-made gifts (my husband gave me a very cheesy fake gem and
promised me a necklace when he could shop again). For our anniversary, we ordered a delivery
meal from the local French restaurant and a fancy bottle of wine online. And Mother’s Day was breakfast in bed (made
by the children) and various craft activities (provided by their teachers;
creation supervised by Dad).
We were very
lucky. My husband’s work did not stop,
and neither did his pay. There has been
no impact to his salary, his benefits, his overall income. While our food (and, let’s face it, wine)
costs have increased a reasonable amount, he’s not paying for public transport
every day or buying lunch. He’s saving
at least an hour in transit time, and he is still getting the same, if not
more, work done.
We were
also in a fortunate situation when the pandemic hit. We’re all in good health and rarely get
ill. None of us have any chronic
conditions or allergies, and we live in a safe area with reliable power, water
and internet. We have two laptops, so
our daughters could both be online schooling at the same time. We almost own our house, we have a reliable car
and the ability to buy essentially anything that we need or want. I routinely keep at least three weeks’ supply
of dry goods, so we were unaffected by panic buying. There is a grocery store, a bakery, a
greengrocer and a butcher within a five minute drive, all of which remained
open. I’ve used the same grocery co-op for
years – they delivered our fruit, vegetables, dairy products and dry goods on a
Tuesday. We had only just returned from a trip to Western Australia, so we’d
seen all our immediate relatives recently.
I have
friends and family all over the world, including places that were (and still
are) badly affected by COVID-19. My
Brasilian friends and family are still mostly in lockdown, my friends in Europe
are still home-schooling their kids part time.
One of my best friends lives in the Netherlands, and when her elderly
father went to hospital with an unrelated illness, no one could visit him or
stay with him. I have a friend in
upstate New York whose three children are all involved in theatre, singing and
performing. Between the three of them,
they had six separate performances cancelled, performances they’d each spent
months rehearsing and preparing for.
Another friend, a single mother on Vancouver Island, lost her
minimum-wage retail job and had to work out how to pay rent and buy food while
homeschooling her two young kids.
It was a
weird, disconcerting time. We were
worried about all the potential what-ifs and watching the COVID numbers go up
made me dread a future where the hospitals were overwhelmed, or at least at
their limit. But this did not happen,
and slowly, it started to feel ok again.
It doesn’t feel normal, won’t ever feel quite the same again I guess,
but things became more promising, more hopeful.
ANZAC Day, standing at the end of my driveway with my family, watching
the people on my street light up the dawn in remembrance, was the perfect
example of this hopeful promise.
The one
hard time that we had was something that would have been a challenge even
without COVID-19. When we flew to Perth
in January, my Nan was in hospital for an operation. We saw her the day after we arrived in Perth,
just before the operation. She was
cheerful, chipper and frankly annoyed at being cooped up in a hospital with
“all these sick, old people” (her words, not mine). The operation went well and she was home a
few days later. We visited her three
times; she was tired, but in good spirits.
And then she had a stroke. I saw
her three more times after that; I don’t think she even knew it was me. When we left, I knew that I had seen her for
the last time.
My Nan died
on Easter Sunday. She’d led a beautiful, happy, wonderful life. She died when
COVID restrictions were in full force – I couldn’t have flown to Perth without quarantining
at either end of the trip. Her funeral
was allowed ten mourners. Ten mourners
for a woman whose life had touched so many.
Ten mourners for 93 years. Ten
mourners, when under any other circumstance there would have been hundreds of
people to bid her farewell. My kids and
I watched her funeral online.
It could
have been so much worse. In many other
countries, restrictions would have meant that no one was allowed with her – she
would have died alone. The rules here
allowed for family to visit on the day she died. My mother and father, my aunt, both my
cousins and my sister all saw her, kissed her goodbye, told her that they loved
her. She was surrounded by her family in
the last moments of her life and she died with my mother and my aunt holding
her hands, my cousin sitting with them.
I think our
government did a good job controlling the outbreak. The initial easing into restrictions led to
some confusion – people weren’t sure what they were allowed to do. And things changed quickly – one day they
were saying outdoor gatherings of 100 was acceptable; a few days later, it was
50, then 20. New Zealand’s approach of
high-level restrictions all at once was easier for people to understand and to
follow – ours was a bit confusing at the start.
Schools were my other point of contention – the federal government was
making statements about why they should be open, but control rested with the
states. It seemed that the federal
government were trying to make the states do what they were told, and
ultimately the states made decisions based on the situation within their own
borders. I think the actions taken by
the Queensland government were useful and helped decrease the severity of the
situation.
The other
aspect that Australia has handled well, particularly in the latter part of the
outbreak, is testing. Initially, testing
was only available if you’d been overseas or had close contact with someone who
had. Now, if you have even vague COVID
symptoms, you can get a test. Two days ago, I woke up with discomfort at the
very back of my mouth. I called my
doctor, explained my symptoms and he replied with, “It’s close enough to a sore
throat. I’ll send you through a
pathology form.” He gave me the address of the closest drive-through testing
facility and emailed me (and them) the form.
I drove there (two suburbs away), had the test done and was on my way
home in ten minutes. The results (negative)
were texted to me and my doctor within 27 hours.
So, Dear Australia, this was me during a global pandemic. Far luckier than most, but still impacted by it all. It was a strange and unsettling experience, and it will have far-reaching consequences. It will be interesting to see who we are and where we’re at in a year, five years, twenty years. Right now, we’re just coming out of the end of it, with plans in place to “get back to normal” (with social distancing). What our new normal will be is anyone’s guess.
