Monthly Archives: March 2020

Letter to an Old Friend

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Friend,

I write to you from quarantine. My wife and I have been ordered to isolate ourselves. 

Old friend, you and I are old. We have passed the threescore and ten years of the Psalmist. A short time ago we were heading confidently full steam ahead for one hundred. So we proposed. So life seemed to promise. But now, this virus.  

Man proposes, Virus disposes. The virus has disposed of thousands. In Spain overnight, three hundred. Overnight in Italy, 800. I’ll write that more plainly. Three hundred persons. Eight hundred persons.At the start of the year all eleven hundred would have been steaming ahead. I imagine them looking confidently to the future as recently as the start of the month of March. By the close of the equinox all were dead. Few will be those who follow their caskets to their burial.

While going about my work in the past weeks I’ve found the most worried people have been those with the least to fear. Young parents have been terrified for their young children. Truly that suffering has been unnecessary. For most people younger than forty, COVID-19 is a milder illness than the ‘flu. I have heard of no deaths of children anywhere in the world. That should bring blessed relief, but although those facts are widely known, the fear for their young extinguishes parents’ peace of mind.

Curiously, we old ones need fear not so much for our young, as from them. The theory runs that children are unhygienic creatures that act as vectors for this novel virus (they certainly do that service for the influenza viruses), and they endanger and infect us older, more vulnerable subjects. That is why I am writing.

If you are over seventy, go inside now, close the door. Shun your children, ban the grandchildren. Ours is the age group in which most of those hundred of persons died. Ours is the sector at greatest risk of the pneumonia that fulminates and kills. Ours is the group who will not receive respirator treatment and Intensive Care when those services are rationed.

This is cautious advice that might later be seen to be over-cautious. As the W.H.O. Chief of the Ebola response advises, ‘Go early, go hard’ when it comes to responding to pandemic. There will be no second chances for us once we catch this catchiest of germs.

My wife and I passed a weekend of grotesque denial of the love between us and our grandchildren. Encounters were fleeting, spatial remoteness was enforced, no-one kissed, no-one cuddled. Time and again, puzzled children approached instinctively, loud voices repulsed them. Astonished, the children felt every instinct of love denied; and the deniers were precisely those wrinkled figures who ever doted and dandled. Suddenly loving behaviour was wrong.

My resolve wavered. My wife, the softest being in our family constellation, commanded austerity. One of my children has a newborn; we cannot visit, cannot cuddle, cannot relieve exhausted parents at 2.00 in any morning. Our daughters, both recovering from surgery, wait on us, rather than the reverse. The fibres of parenthood are warped and strained by fear of a new virus. And it is precisely those deprived adult children who direct us: go inside, stay inside, keep the world away. ‘‘We’d sooner miss out on you both for weeks or months than miss you forever.”

Old friend, I won’t be with you this Friday for lunch. We won’t see each other at the coffee shop in the mornings. Our house of worship is forbidden to us. Seeing each other as faces on a screen is a cold change after years, after decades of warm touch. I don’t know when we’ll be together in those old ways again. I reckon our best chance of those old pleasures again, some day on the far side of this fear and horror, is cold resolve today.

Until then, old friend, until then,

Yours at a distance,  

Howard

Moments of Reprieve

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In times far, far darker than ours, Primo Levi called these, ‘moments of reprieve’. The Nazis set up the death camps as places where morality would be inverted. It was dangerous to be good. Every man for herself. We saw that here in the all-in toilet-paper wrestling.

But there’s a softening abroad, a gentling of human intercourse. We wash our hands today, not of each other, but for each other. Commerce has slowed, people have time, give each other time. Working here in the central business district of a great city, I find us breathing our minutes and our days as folk do in a country town.

In the foyer of a giant apartment building, in a far distant town, this notice appeared:

Its author is seven-year old Dash Unglik, of New York City.

A User’s Guide to the Novel Virus

By Posted in Life 5 Comments

Be Comforted

No lesser authority than the President of the United States of America has declared: Coronavirus is a hoax

It’s a Democrat hoax.

Fake news.

PANIC

You’ll never be lonely

You need 15 minutes within one metre of an infected person to contract the virus: therefore, book a short appointment with your doctor, undress in the car, and get out of there within 14 minutes.

Same advice applies to dentist, physio, chiro, osteo, and sex worker.

Do you know whether or not you actually have COVID-19?

Your doctor doesn’t know either.

To can find out without a test kit, just book an extended appointment.

Unfortunately during lockdown you will be unable to pay any bills.

Only kiss your enemies. The worse you like them, the better you should kiss them.

An Inlet, a Lagoon

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In a tsunami of reports about health, that arrive in an age of anxiety,

in a rising ocean of uncertainty

that’s inundating our islands of calm, while families driven from Idlib watch their babies freezing to death for want of shelter,

as oil becomes cheap,

as savings are savaged,

as panic feeds on panic,

as the old lack all words to comfort,

as the young tremble for the future,

as the future overtakes the moment –
some thing good,

some moment of balm, some relief, an inlet, a lagoon of quiet joy:
this baby this entire new person this changer of lives
three kilograms and a handful of grams – of life

make her great-grandmother squeal

and squeal again, and again

with astonishment

Nana, surely you know by now, babies are born!

Nana, you had two of your own,

They each had three of their own, The day came when those six

Brought forth babies of their own.

Nana, why do you squeal,

what’s to astonish an old lady of ninety-three?

A baby, that’s to astonish

That’s to amaze, to heal, to comfort, to inspire,to thank God –

and to love.

Something Old, Something New

By Posted in Life, Medical, Opinion Tagged , , , , 3 Comments

Two epidemics: Covid-19 and Community Panic Disorder.

We are feeling our way. This is new territory for all. The last time was in 1919, when the epidemic of Spanish Flu came, burned itself out and left scarsin memory. It’s those same scars, and earlier ones, back to the Black Death and beyond, that we are feeling now. In 1919 we needed someone to blame: that time it was the Spanish, this time the Chinese.


New experiences every day, new government edicts, new behaviours. Our governments are leading, not following public opinion. This blog has never before found anything kind to say about our governments. (I missed an opportunity to praise our leaders for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.) I offer praise now. According to the experts in public health, those appointed to advise government, no-one in power is playing politics with their advice. Government offices send daily bulletins to doctors, bringing us up to date. We are segregating corona suspects from non-contagious patients.We’re doing this methodically and with sensitivity. Contingency planning for various crisis scenarios is advanced. The planning has been rapid, decisive, bold. The War on Drugs has not made us safe; the War on Terror has made us less free; but the War against COVID-19 makes sense to me.

What have we learned? The Coronavirus numbers suggest the following: Infectivity is high, mortality is low. COVID-19 is easily caught and generally safely survived. If you are old your risks are higher.If you are a child or a baby your chances seem better. This is unexpected and so far unexplained.We can expect the numbers of infected persons in our community to mount and to mount further. So far Australians are far, far likelier to encounter a person with influenza than coronavirus infection.

What follows?

I think it’s a numbers game.

Think before you travel.

Don’t go to Iran (corona) or to Syria (bombs).

If your immune system is poor or if you are old, avoid peak hour public transport, avoid mass gatherings, including at your house of worship.

Work from home if you can.

If you develop a fever or flu symptoms, CALL UP YOUR LOCAL DOCTOR before arriving. Don’t just lob.

Don’t read the newspapers. Yesterday the national broadsheet called it the Killer Virus. That is unhelpful and misleading. And of course, irresponsible.

Trust the advice of the Chief Medical Officer.


Be thoughtful about contact with your touching professionals.These are your barber, your manicurist, your physiotherapist, myotherapist, osteopath, chiropractor and sex worker. And your doctor.We professional of touch take the greatest risks and are potentially the most dangerous to you.


Finally, kissing is a high-risk act. Do it only in emergency. Handshaking is forbidden in NSW. Various alternatives have been suggested. One is the mutual forearm grip, where your palm rests on the inside of your shakee’s elbow. Now that we are urging everyone to cough into the elbow recess, this grip offers you the best chance of a handful of fresh snot.

Which Epidemic?

By Posted in Life, Medical, Opinion, rascism Tagged , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Here are some facts about Australia’s epidemic.
In 2019, Australia had 300,00 proven cases of influenza. The true number of cases was probably in excess of 900,000. (The numbers of cases exceeds the number of tests, because most doctors recognised the flu without sending off swabs for laboratory confirmation. Further, not all flu sufferers saw a doctor.)
Since the start of 2020, there have been 12,713 PROVEN cases of influenza in Australia.

8000 Australians died of influenza in 2019.

In the course of the Vietnam War we lost 521 soldiers killed.
Those are the facts of our true epidemic. In 2019 despite the epidemic, despite the death toll, you could buy toilet paper, you could buy pasta and rice.In 2019 no-one panicked.In 2019 no-one thought of boycotting Chinese restaurants.
In 2019 we had no panic and we had no recession.This year we have a limited outbreak of a viral infection which is less contagious than influenza. Xenophobia comes into full flower.In our formerly happy country we now have an outbreak of racism. Chinese restaurants stand empty.
The swastika flies in Wagga.

Coronapanic

By Posted in Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , 5 Comments

Ever since 9/11, we in the West have lived in a climate of anxiety. I am one who sees much of the anxiety as confected. Leaders have responded to serious events with alarming rhetoric. Our media have obliged with headlines that enhance the ambient anxiety. And unofficial media respond with ungoverned hype. And so we tremble.

The news of the climate ought to alarm our governments more than it does. I think our kids get this right.

The economy has gone to the bathroom and hasn’t returned.

And now this. By this I mean THIS. I mean the Coronavirus outbreak.

No-one but a fool would say there’s no cause for concern. We know that; we’ve heard that from the fool in the White House.

In Anatomy, the corona is the rim around the glans penis (aka the nob). We know who the nob is.

Is there reason to panic? Many have decided they should panic. Supermarkets are crowded, while the shoppers in Collins Street have thinned.

No-one knows how serious the coronavirus epidemic will become. This blog will report on what it sees. In my clinic some patients are seeking advance prescriptions in case medications become unavailable. If/when this becomes common, medications will certainly become scarce

I close with two modest predictions: firstly that panic will feed on panic; secondly, that this blog will pop up on your screens more frequently.