Dear Australia (Take Two)

Today is the 18^th of March, 2021.  It’s roughly a year since the craziness of COVID started.  This time last year, I’d promised my daughter she could still have her birthday party if schools stayed open.  They stayed open for another week; she got her birthday party.  School closed a week later and stayed that way for eight weeks.

To date, there have been just over 29 000 cases of COVID-19 in Australia.  909 people have died from the virus.  Today, there are 2012 active cases, none of which are serious or critical.  In Queensland at least, all of those cases are in hospital quarantine.  The majority of these cases are returning travelers whose cases were detected while in the mandatory two weeks of hotel quarantine.

Vaccinations have started in Australia, focusing on health workers.  My sister (a hospital pharmacist) and her husband (a doctor) both got their first shots in the last two weeks.  Rollout for older Australians starts on Monday.  That will take care of my parents and my in-laws.  The rest of us will be waiting until Phase 2b, probably September or October. 

Things are getting pretty close to “normal” here.  Well, COVID-normal. It’s still virtually impossible to leave the country, and there are tens of thousands of Australian citizens and residents still trying to get back into Australia from overseas.  There are caps on the number of arrivals per week, because there are limits on the number of hotel rooms that can be used for hotel quarantine.  I don’t imagine that there will be significant overseas travel for at least another year or so.

In our local area, everything is operating – shops, restaurants, cafes, schools, churches, events.  There are still limits on numbers at events, with hand sanitizer everywhere and online check ins at various locations to aid any required contact tracing.  Parents are allowed back into schools – assemblies can be attended, classroom volunteers are welcomed and school fetes are being planned (albeit on a smaller scale and with COVID-safe plans in place). 

However, there is still that jumpiness, that sense of danger lurking in the background.  A doctor at a local hospital tested positive last Friday, having been exposed to a COVID-positive patient two days earlier.  As a precaution, access to all hospitals was limited, and nursing homes and care facilities were shut to visitors.  Masks were required in hospitals immediately.  Following a previous community transmission, greater Brisbane had a three-day shutdown, with a mask mandate for two weeks.  When Western Australia had a similar case, they shut down the southern part of the state for five days, including starting Term 1 a week later than scheduled.

In all of this, however, we’ve been lucky because we’ve had a lot of advantages that other places don’t have.  Firstly, we’re an island.  A very, very big island, mind you, but an island all the same.  We can stop people getting in very easily – all that was required was to stop international flights and ships arriving. And while we are a big island with lots of generally unmonitored coastline, we’re also a long way from mostly everywhere, so trying to arrive in your own little boat and sneak on in is not particularly easy.  Our population is relatively low for the size of our country – roughly 25.5 million people in a country that’s only 22% smaller than the US (population 328 million).  People tend to live in houses, not apartments, and not all of our homes have good insulation and central heating and cooling.  The average Australian had their doors and windows open much of the time.  COVID-19 also started in Summer here.  Australians live their lives outdoors in Summer.  While some of us might go to crowded beaches (I’m looking at you, Bondi), just as many (if not more) head off camping or fishing someplace more remote (and there are a lot of remote places in a country the size of Australia).  And all of these things made for less potential exposure to the virus that in other places, where people may live and work in smaller areas in locations with a much larger population.

And then there is that other helpful aspect about Australians – in general, if we’re asked to do something reasonable, we do as we’re asked.  Yes, there are some people who’ve protested mask-wearing or standing on the distance markers or whatever, but most Australians just follow the instructions.  As an example, when greater Brisbane was locked down for three days, we were asked to wear masks when we left our home.  At all times.  Which meant while exercising outdoors, while driving your car, while waiting in a queue.  If you weren’t standing within the property lines of your home, you were wearing a mask.  I went out for a walk on the afternoon of the second day.  I wore a mask.  Every single person I saw (over the age of 12) was also wearing a mask.  Every person in a car, whether alone or with others, was wearing a mask.  I heard a fair amount of complaining about masks being annoying, mind you, but everybody followed the instructions.

So, Dear Australia, a year into Living With A Pandemic, thank you to everyone who did what they were asked.  It means that we’ll get back to “normal” levels of interstate travel sooner (and maybe even be allowed to leave the country and return one day in the not-too-distant future!).  It means that we’ll be able to keep our elderly, our infirm and our people with other illnesses safe and well. And it means that we can keep going about our lives, enjoying our families and our communities and the activities that unite us.  Thank you, Australia.

On being prepared

 We live in an area where heavy rain, violent storms and flash flooding are relatively common.  The period between late October and mid-April is referred to as “storm season”, and there are years where it is not abnormal to have a hot, sweltering day morph suddenly into an epic thunderstorm, with a side order of hailstones.  The temperature can drop by ten degrees Celsius in a couple of minutes, it goes from sunny to black as pitch in minutes, and we can get up to 100mm of rain in a twenty-minute storm.

The year we returned from living in Canada, our final flight into Brisbane was diverted to Sydney because of a storm.  We could see the lightening out of the plane windows; when we were finally allowed to return to Brisbane several hours later, we saw the damage caused on the taxi ride to our accommodation.  The taxi had to take the long way home, due to flooding in a couple of tunnels and underpasses.  That particular storm caused millions of dollars damage in a group of suburbs, destroying homes with its strong winds and torrential rain.

A month after we moved into our current home, there was a massive flood, which inundated many of the suburbs around where we live.  Our suburb is bordered on three sides by the Brisbane river, and the water came from the river breaking its banks in some places, by the creeks flooding and by water coming back up from storm water drains.  Our home wasn’t flooded, but the nearby power station was, meaning that we had no power for six days.  Several friends had significant flooding in their homes – one basically required an entire rebuild of the ground floor.  Essentially the entire Brisbane CBD was flooded.  Parks all over the city were unable to be used for months due to possible soil contamination due to sediment washing into them during the floods.  The Army was called in to assist with the clean-up.

Another time, driving home from work with my two daughters in the car, a storm hit suddenly.  The rain was so heavy that I could barely see, but there was nowhere safe to stop, so I crept along at a crawling pace, windscreen wipers on their highest setting, headlights on high beam.  We made it home safely, the storm ended abruptly about ten minutes later.  We had an average month’s worth of rain in the 25-minute storm.

The week later, a similar storm started up.  This one came with heavy rain and stronger winds, and a large amount of hail.  When the winds brought down two of our deck screens within a minute, I took the children downstairs to the only window-less place in the house – the hallway.  We sat on cushions on the floor and read stories while the storm roared.  My husband arrived home from work just as it was ending.  Even though we have a garage with an automatic door, when he walked into the house, he was dripping wet.  He’d arrived home to find large tree branches down over our driveway, and he’d had to get out of the car in the pouring rain to pull them out the way.  He said he’d had to turn around three times on his way through our suburb because of fallen trees.

Another time, the tail end of a cyclone made its way across the state, drenching Brisbane in 330mm of rain in about 36 hours.  Schools were shut for two days because of the risks posed by the heavy rain.  It rained so much that the soil was totally waterlogged, and we had deep puddles in our back yard for two or three days afterwards.

Every year at the start of storm season, there are multiple ads (from state and local government, insurance companies, banks) reminding people to prepare for the season.  Suggestions include reviewing your insurance to make sure you’re properly covered, trimming trees and clearing debris from your yard, parking your car under cover to prevent hail damage, having 2 – 3 days’ worth of dry goods and water in the house and having candles, batteries and battery powered torches and radios on hand.

In addition to having lived in Brisbane for 15 of the last 18 years, I grew up in the north of Western Australia, where cyclones are common.  Cyclone season warnings were similar – have food and water on hand, be aware that the power will almost certainly go out and you’ll need battery powered lights and radios, and it may take some time (days, even a week or so) for services to be re-established and it may be days before trucks with food supplies could get through.

When I was a kid and a cyclone was heading our way, there was rarely ever panic buying.  Everyone kept non-perishable food and batteries around.  People might need a few extra batteries, or they might buy a little extra something (particularly fresh fruit and vegetables or bread), but no one ever raced out to buy everything in the shop the day before a cyclone came through.  Pretty much everyone had what they needed at home, and everyone knew that if you ran out of something important, your neighbours would certainly help you out.

And so we cut to nowadays.

Even with all the reminders, whenever there is a (big) storm warning or potential hazard, people will race out and buy far more than they need.  Even people who already have all the things they’ll need at home.  It’s almost like the panic one person feels when they realise there’s not enough <insert item here> at home and they race out to buy is catching, and everyone is suddenly “infected” with the need to buy more.  Just before big storms here, certain things (like bottled water) sells out fast. 

Now, in a storm or flood, sometimes we do lose power (and potentially clean water) for a while.  Sometimes it is impossible to get to the local supermarket because of physical barriers or dangers (trees down, flooding).  Sometimes, the supply trucks can’t get through.  So there is something more to the “panic” associated with that type of situation because you may indeed find yourself out of something critical (like drinking water) with limited ability to get more.  This, of course, does not explain why there is still massive panic buying whenever COVID shutdowns occur.

Let me point out – years of living where natural events can impact access to food and water supplies has ingrained in me the need to have enough non-perishable food and water for at least two weeks.  Quite frankly, it’d be boring food by the end of that two weeks (with some potentially crazy food combinations required as the supply dwindled down), but we wouldn’t starve, nor would we die of thirst.  If there was still power (and my freezer remained in play), we could probably manage another week or two.  I’ve never panic bought anything in my entire life – I have always bought a few extras of things (pasta, rice, tinned goods) until I built up an appropriately sized “stockpile” of dry goods.

Early last year, when the potentially enormous impact of COVID was becoming apparent, I did pay a little more attention than normal to what I kept at home.  Normally I don’t bother with a lot of frozen meat or vegetables – buying fresh is always easy where I live.  I did stock up on those sorts of things to ensure that we had two weeks’ supply, and I bought extra milk to freeze as well.  By the time lockdown went into place where I live, during that period of time where people were fighting strangers for the last rolls of toilet paper, we were barely leaving the house and definitely not going anywhere near supermarkets.  Strangely enough, the feeling that I should be panicking (and panic buying) was strong, even when I looked through the cupboards and fridges and freezer in my house and saw what we had available to us.

A few months ago, when we had a three-day lockdown, it happened again.  Lines of people waiting outside of supermarkets, limits implemented immediately on some items.  Supermarkets were not going to close during the lockdown, nor were we prevented from going shopping (with a mask on).  But still people panicked.  And again I felt that undercurrent of “you need to panic!”, even though I was perfectly certain I did not.

Maybe it’s because life has become so organised and orderly and easy now.  We can make a call (well, use an app most times) and get food delivered within a short period of time.  We can order our groceries and have them brought to our door.  We can have the book we want right now through an e-reader, or the movie we want to see by purchasing it through our tv.  When we search for something that we want nowadays it’s from the couch in our living room, scrolling through the pages on our phones.  We can do all manner of things reliably from the comfort of our home without even speaking to another person.  If we want to go away somewhere, we do, booking tickets and accommodation via apps and websites, finding the things that we want to do and fitting it into when we want to do it.  And COVID stopped a lot of that.

Travel was gone.  Deliveries weren’t as reliable or as quick.  Things were out of stock and not restocked immediately.  We couldn’t have the things we wanted straight away, and we’ve forgotten what that’s like.  And so when there were suddenly restrictions (one packet of toilet paper, two tins of beans, one box of pasta) we all started panicking that nothing would be available anymore.  The irony of all of that is that if we’d just stopped with our panic buying for a week or two, the shops would have been able to fully restock and we could go about our normal business (with masks and social distancing, of course).

The general ease of our lives pre-COVID made the restrictions to attempt to control the virus seem much harder than it would have even twenty years ago.  Generations before us have lived through world-changing events without the panic that we experienced.  Even if we were prepared in terms of having enough food in the house, none of us were prepared for the impacts of something like COVID.