Tag: coronavirus

Looking after your own

Published on by Sam HeardLeave a comment

We are living in a moment when there is evident risk to every soul on earth. We worry for the people we love if not for ourselves. My good friend, young and healthy, has just spent a week in hospital and 4 days in intensive care in a personal battle with this virus. It is a depressingly passive experience lying with plastic lines and tubes, depending on oxygen, coughing discretely when others are around. All the while alone, removed from family and friends. Dying was a real possibility. We talked about it on the phone. The virus spread and wreaked havoc in her family. Her three children had both parents in hospital for a few days, all separated and unable to help each other. This was in Australia in a street near you.

Behind the face shields in intensive care, others hovered, their eyes concerned, concentrating but creasing kindly when looking into another. A gloved tap on the arm, and patience with the endless shuffling of bedpans required by a person whose dignity lives only in facing this dark unmeasured threat to their life. It is a kind of love. These caring people matter immensely. To all of us. Time will inevitably take quite a few of us to the edge of this slippery chasm held back by special people decorated only with gowns and gloves and masks. There will be no one else.

Meanwhile the children danced and played with some delight with a visiting aunt who, recovering from the disease, found herself taking care of energised children who were not allowed out. Their young bodies unaffected and one, despite coughing a little like the rest of the family, could not manage to give a positive swab to the persistent masked visitors in gowns. Like other children around the world, they were somehow protected from its power; the younger, the stronger even if afflicted with other conditions. Cryptonite of youth.

It is a wonder of this condition that the deaths that occur mirror almost perfectly the ‘natural’ rates of death in the community. It is for this reason that despite reaching 4,000 deaths in Italy, this virus had not taken a single life under the age of 30. The problem for all of us is that this ‘natural’ curve of human attrition is delivered over a period of 14 days, and the other health problems facing us do not go away. It is a massive impost on health care and society and a disaster facing us all. But it still has this compassionate element – to take we older folk in stark preference. We, who want nothing more than for our children to outlive us.

Health care workers, paramedics and aged care workers are now the farmers in the drought, the police on Saturday night and the firefighters of the summer. We are needed desperately, our attention, our care and compassion. We will be needed for sometime and it could be dangerous. Some are going to catch the virus. It is going to be tough, but it is going to be much tougher for the older members of our professions. The haunting image of an aged care home in Spain, abandoned by carers who may themselves have been sick, must guide our future.

I hear some of my colleagues saying they did not sign up for this, or they have a young family. This is stark. The younger you are, the safer you are. Society needs young health professionals to step forward and engage. Your older colleagues will be there with you but there will be no equality when the virus hits. This is a real test of civility, of commitment to society.

We sit under a cloud of adversity, wondering what will become of us, of our loved ones. Will we come through this, will we all survive? But we are your own. Please take care of us.

Who knows who blows?

Published on by Sam HeardLeave a comment
Could we greet each other in a way that meant we kept 1.5m apart?
Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

Few of us blame the Government for this virus pandemic but on a dreadful day when Australia has twice as many new cases as China (and a 60th of the population) we have to ponder whether we have done enough. Peter Wener in the Atlantic points to a major issues in the USA such as, “… the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.” It sounds a lot like us. Five hundred people getting together at the moment is NOT safe. It is very hard to get tested, and we are being told it may be more difficult.

We have seen TV presenters, film stars and politicians come down with the virus. These people certainly mix with more people than we do day to day, but there are not many of them. So if we extrapolate back from their numbers and determine the rate of infection we will arrive at figures many orders of magnitude above that being reported. Let’s face it:

It is infectious, it is deadly and we need to stop it.

Economic predictions of impact are unlikely to be accurate and should not be listened to. Minimising the spread of the virus will have the most positive economic impact. Short, sharp, severe. Norman Swan has been getting air time to promote more health of the nation approaches. If we stop the growth, we can reopen schools and kindergartens. We can probably keep schools open now for children of emergency workers, health workers and other services that are understaffed.

Most of all we need to consider testing. At the moment we are testing a lot of worried people and groups of people who are in contact with an infected case. If we take a community view rather than an individual view and extreme social distancing is in place, we can check one member of a potentially infected household with symptoms and declare it positive or negative. That household should then be supported at home. Children are likely to be infected very quickly and have no difficulty. The disruption of treating individuals in this situation is massive and quite likely to lead to asymptomatic people thinking they are clear. Household members over 70 in infected households can be removed if asymptomatic and offered alternative accommodation if they do not have the virus after brief quarantine and testing.

Small towns with limited movement in and out can test the first locals with fever, and no travel or contact, as sentinel cases. If the sentinel febrile person is negative then we can assume safely that other fevers in that community are almost certainly negative for a period – perhaps the next seven days. This will be especially important when we add the usual winter viruses to the mix. Obviously any new arrivals with symptoms must be tested.

Regions, such as Central Australia, Cape York and Northern Western Australia (and many others) lend themselves to a regional community approach with community-based testing. The experts on our nation’s 60,000 year old cultures are at grave risk and require extreme measures of preservation. This requires checking all arrivals into the region (which is often one or two roads and an airport or two) and testing any of these who are symptomatic or develop symptoms over the next 14 days. We can tell them when we check them at the regional boundaries. In two weeks they become part of the “viral control” community. We will need sentinel testing in communities, perhaps one or two tests per week. The extraordinary thing in Central Australia is that this will require less than 100 tests a week. If we can “bank” the saved tests, we will be able to carry out contact tracing in the way Singapore has done.

If we are short of tests, lets think about how to use them effectively. It is time for extreme social distancing. Whatever we are putting in place, we need to know where the virus has spread.