The Pandemic! Pt.3: Omni-Cron

This is the third of a three-part retrospective on the Covid-19 pandemic. I wasn't expecting it to stretch to three parts, but apparently I had a lot to say. It was written specifically for my nephew, who was very young at the time, but it's open to anyone else who might be interested. All views expressed below are my own and are not to be treated as medical advice or any other kind of advice, really: I maintain that I am fully qualified to hold an opinion, as long as I remember that it is, indeed, just an opinion. Enjoy.

Covid-19 was a real disease with real consequences. 

(Source).

I'm jumping back on this soapbox because, again, there are some among us who deny that it was a big deal, or that it was even a reality at all. I invite those people to peruse this sobering little vignette, which appeared on Lawyers, Guns & Money, early in the pandemic. It quoted a firsthand account to the New York Times of what it was like to actually catch covid:

The second day I was sick, I woke up to what felt like hot tar buried deep in my chest. I could not get a deep breath unless I was on all fours. I’m healthy. I’m a runner. I’m 33 years old.

In the emergency room an hour later, I sat on a hospital bed, alone and terrified, my finger hooked to a pulse-oxygen machine. To my right lay a man who could barely speak but coughed constantly. To my left was an older man who said that he had been sick for a month and had a pacemaker. He kept apologizing to the doctors for making so much trouble, and thanking them for taking such good care of him. I can't stop thinking about him even now.

Finally, Dr. Audrey Tan walked toward me, her kind eyes meeting mine from behind a mask, goggles and a face shield. "Any asthma?" she asked. "Do you smoke? Any pre-existing conditions?" "No, no, none," I replied. Dr. Tan smiled, then shook her head, almost imperceptibly. "I wish I could do something for you," she said.

I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping.

I want [people] to understand that this virus is making otherwise young, healthy people very, very sick. I want them to know, this is no flu.

Granted, this was from the first wave (i.e. SARS-CoV-2 classic, not a later variant), but the point still stands. The consequences of catching Covid-19 might've been quite varied, ranging from, "kills you stone dead" to, "you have to be tested to even find out you have it" (which is about as varied as a disease's effects can be, come to think about it). And your chances of actually dying might've been quite low. But in between there was this delightful world of intermediate effects, as the virus wrought havoc with the lungs and whatever other internal organs it took a fancy to. 33 is younger than I was at the time, and much fitter as well, and yet afterwards this person couldn't walk a few blocks without stopping to catch their breath? Christ that's bleak.

That meant even if it didn't take your life, the virus could still take away your life. Were you harbouring ambitions to be the first to summit Muchu Chhish? Too bad, now you can't reach the second storey without a run-up. Dream of selling out the Opera House, of belting out Musetta's Waltz while adoring fans toss roses on the stage? A dream it will stay, now the virus has reduced the bottom half of your lungs to scar tissue.

There are other things in that story that weren't happening by the tail end of 2021, of course. Your doctor smiling, for one thing. Can we even imagine how colossally overworked our healthcare professionals were during these years? One survey of 1,200 Australian healthcare workers found that 70 percent of them were showing at least some signs of PTSD. For context, the PTSD rate among members of the Australian armed forces – at a time when we'd only just pulled out of Afghanistan – was 8.3 percent. 

But there was light at the end of the tunnel. By December 2020, the vaccines were starting to arrive.

The Vaccine Strollout
Donnie from Queens did precisely one good thing¹ during his stint as U.S. President: On 6 March 2020, he signed a bill from Congress authorising $8.3 billion in covid relief, including $3 billion in funding for vaccine development. The U.S. government's offer to the pharmaceutical industry was basically, "Don't worry how much it costs, we'll cover it. Just make us a vaccine already."

(Source.)

So they did, in an astonishingly short time. Business as usual would've seen a new vaccine put through the FDA's test and approval process in five to ten years: Since this was an emergency, they got it done in just 18 months. This was the culmination of our strategy against the virus. All the rest of it – the lockdowns, the quarantines, the isolation periods, the contact tracing – all of it had been a means of buying enough time for the pharma giants to get a vaccine together. Truly our cup runneth over, then, when they came back not with one, but with three.

The first was from Pfizer (brand name "Comirnaty"), which was given approval for emergency use in December 2020. The same was given to Moderna ("Spikevax" – Moderna has a better marketing department than Pfizer, apparently) only a week later. That is not to be confused with full FDA approval, which declared a vaccine safe for general use, instead of just being less dangerous than the virus for those in the high-risk categories: That came for the Pfizer vaccine nine months later, in August 2021, while Moderna's likewise followed in January 2022. Of the two, Moderna's was arguably better simply because it could be stored at -20 degrees Celcius, which is just about doable for a normal commercial freezer. Pfizer's needed to be stored below -70, which necessitated a big, sexy cryo unit.

Which you can buy on eBay, I just discovered (Source).

The third option was AstraZeneca ("Covishield"), a Swedo-British company² working with the labs at Oxford University. Theirs was also storable in normal freezers, but it had other issues and, well, guess which one Australia was most reliant on?

The Australian government's vaccine rollout was derided as a stuff-up, with ACTU secretary Sally McManus famously Tweeting, "We don’t have a vaccine rollout, we have a vaccine strollout" (which became the National Dictionary Centre's Word of the Year). But I can't picture it ever being anything else, to be honest. You can criticise the pigs in Parliament for buying limited quantities of mostly AstraZeneca, instead of covering their bases with Pfizer and Moderna as well, but I don't know how available those actually were at the time. As I said, full approval was still months away, so at its core this was a supply problem: There was an immediate worldwide demand for billions of doses, and billions of a finely-crafted manufactured good, requiring delicate machinery and highly-trained personnel to make, were never going to appear on your doorstep overnight. So as soon as the vaccines were announced, the boss hogs placed an initial order for 25 million doses, and wisely acquired a licence for medical firm CSL to manufacture more of them locally – supply chain disruptions were another signature phenomenon of covid. Outsourcing, offshoring and just-in-time delivery seem wonderfully efficient until Head Office realises, too late, that the more slack they take out of the system, the less spare capacity there is to compensate when things go wrong. And things will always go wrong. Like, for example, when your most available vaccine turns out to cause blood clots.

After tens of millions of AstraZeneca doses had been administered in the U.K. and Europe, it was found roughly 1 in 100,000 people would suffer a thrombotic complication. That is, they'd develop a blood clot in the brain, with a small subset of those people actually dying from it. By mid-March AstraZeneca vaccinations had been suspended as too risky, and ultimately, out of 13 million doses administered in Australia, there were 173 cases of clotting and eight deaths – not many in an absolute sense, especially when it was still safer than just barebacking the virus (which could also cause blood clots, by the by), but it still too many for something that was supposed to save your life. I was glad I didn't have to take it.

It wasn't until the Delta wave that vaccinations picked up, as people started to see the jab as their "path to normality". I signed up and got my initial vax (Pfizer) in September and October 2021, both times administered by RAN personnel in their smart new Multi-Cam uniforms. Yet again I was one of the lucky ones: Some people reported side effects like bad headaches, general aches and pains, fever, fatigue and nausea, and that's before mentioning more exotic stuff like swelling and skin reactions around the site of the injection. But me? I just spent a day or two feeling like I'd been punched in the arm. Easy.

As a side note, there were other vaccines too. The Russians had a brew of their own called Sputnik V, and apparently it was pretty good, but nobody was really lining up to take it. Cynicism worked both ways, it seems: If the Russian people didn't believe Putin's line that everything was fine and the situation was under control, then they really didn't believe it when the Kremlin said the vaccine was safe and effective. Then there was China's CoronaVac, developed by Sinovac, which was pretty substandard all told (though still safer than the virus). Unlike the mRNA-based approach of the others, Sinovac had gone for a straight injection of un-activated covid particles, but a Mexican study found it was one of the least effective options out there, well behind Moderna and Pfizer (gold and silver, respectively. Surprisingly, Sputnik got the bronze, coming in ahead of AstraZeneca).

Pictured: Science (Source).

Anyway, Moderna boosters followed for me in August 2022. By then they were needed, because – what else? – it had all gone to hell in a handbasket yet again.

Phase IV: Omicron
If you only look at the gross numbers, then Omicron was the worst variant of Covid-19. What's crazy is that I bet you won't find a single person who remembers it that way. Omicron was first detected in Botswana in November 2021, and genetic analysis suggests it hadn't branched off from any of the previous variants, but came direct from the wild strain (like Stevie Nicks, it had gone its own way). One theory is that it had swapped some of its genetic code with another coronavirus, like one responsible for the flu, or had crossed over to infect mice and then jumped the species barrier back to humans. It's also speculated that it might've spent time gestating in a host who also happened to have HIV, as this would explain why it had been left alone long enough to become so mutated (no immune system to fight it, but the patient receiving enough medical care to survive).

However it came about, the defining feature of Omicron was a heavily mutated spike protein compared to the original strain. Spike proteins were the keys that unlocked your cells, and those of the Omicron strain were, a) Sturdier and less prone to breaking off accidentally, and b) Only needed to touch one kind of protein on the outer wall of your cells to activate. Most Covid strains needed to touch two distinct proteins (called ACE2 and TMPRSS2, pronounced "Tempress-2") to activate and do its thing. Omicron only needed ACE2.

(Source).

Naturally that made Omicron fantastically infectious, even by the standards of the manic Delta variant, but mercifully it also meant Omicron tended to target your upper airways rather than the TMPRSS2-rich lungs. And unlike Delta, which had proved very good at suppressing the body's immune response, Omicron activated the immune system all on its own – it was like a burgler who broke into your house, and then called the cops on itself. These two facts made Omicron much less dangerous to humans than Delta had been, and that, ironically, made it very bad news for hospital staff.

Statistically, if you have a disease that's only a tenth as dangerous as its predecessor, but spreads ten times faster, you're only breaking even: Just as many ICUs will be occupied as before, so nothing really has changed. But in reality, due to bugs in the human OS, I think you actually go backwards. The paradox of healthcare is that a less dangerous disease can actually be more hazardous overall, because all the average Baz 'n' Shaz on the street are going to hear is, "The disease is much less dangerous to you, personally." That means they're going to drop all the precautions and let the disease spread faster than ever. Remember that we were now two years into the apocalypse and people were utterly sick of it: Sick of the lockdowns, sick of masking, sick of the hand sanitiser, sick of QR-coding in and out of everywhere we went. Society badly wanted it just to be over, so collectively, by osmosis, without anyone making any kind of official announcement, they just sort of decided it was.

Put it all together, and you've got the reason Omicron probably holds a Guinness World Record for being the fastest-spreading disease in all of human history. It's also why, if you look at Worldometer today, it looks like the pandemic only starts in December 2021. Australia got its first two Omicron cases on 27 November, both people who were fully-vaxxed and had flown in from southern Africa, then entered isolation periods as required. Shortly thereafter, on 29 November, another case turned up in Darwin on a repatriation flight. After that, case numbers took off into the stratosphere and never looked back. At the start of October that year, we had roughly 107,000 cases. By November, it was 168,000. Then December hit and suddenly it was 209,000, then by New Year's Day it was past 419,000. By February the caseload had hit 2.5 million, at which point why even bother counting anymore? A lot of people misspelled it "Omnicron", but I don't think they're actually too far wrong: Like the Almighty, Omicron was invisible and everywhere at once.

And it killed a shitload of people. Remember those gross numbers I was talking about? Here they are, total deaths by variant, as of January 2024:

• First & Second Waves (wild strain): 914
• Third Wave (Delta): 1,396
• Fourth Wave (Omicron): 10,228

The months with the highest fatality counts were January (1,828), July (1,759) and August (1,444), and you'll note that each of these months exceeded the 1,396 deaths recorded during the entire Delta wave. And we're supposed to remember Omicron as the mild variant? We were fortunate that by January, roughly 80 percent of Australia was doubled-vaxxed, with a small minority boosted as well. I shudder to think what Omicron might've done in an unvaccinated population.

And it was at this point, Small Dude, in late March 2022, that you finally caught it. Your Dad was feeling under the weather, so he pulled out a RAT test, and it came up positive. I think you were home with him at the time, so as a precaution he tested you too and, yep, positive as well. When I got the news, I held my breath and waited. Your Dad reported horrible sweats through the night, fevers, headaches and joint pain – but thankfully, nothing worse. You both pulled through, apparently unscathed. Yet again, we'd got off lightly.

Meanwhile...
The WHO officially declared Covid-19 no longer a pandemic on 5 May 2023, but the date I'd call the end is 24 February 2022. Not because the dying had stopped (it hadn't), but because that was the day Putin launched his ill-fated invasion of Ukraine³ and, at long last, the pandemic ceased to be front-page news. Pandemics end when people want to move on, not when the disease itself moves on – H1N1 influenza is still with us, after all, a century and counting after the Spanish Flu supposedly ended.

The other rival for the headlines was Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, a volcanic island in Tonga that went Krakatoa on 15 February 2022. The shockwave was heard as far away as Canada, and my favourite video came from a guy on an island 73km away, who filmed the plume as it rose into the sky (blue with distance and impossibly tall), then also his barometer readings, as you could see the pressure drop ahead of each shockwave. So, you know what that means...

And then, of course, there was the rain. I said in Part 2 that Dubbo got over 900 millimetres of rain in 2021: In 2022, we broke 950. January set the tone yet again, Poppy recalling that it ruined the harvest that year. They were already starting late each day to give the Sun time to toast the dew out of the heads, and finishing early as the next evening's dewfall made the grain sticky and impossible to thresh. Then the boss came to them grim-faced and said, "Step it up please, lads. I've just seen the weather forecast." By the end of January – a month that's supposed to see around 50 mils of rain total – we'd already got 130. And that was just Mother Nature clearing her throat.

I had a dog, and his name was BINGO.

It was quite something to see the graph on Weatherzone fill up month by month. Virtually every month in 2022 it seemed we either got precisely our average quota of rainfall, or we got that average multiplied by three or four. Sadly I didn't think to screenshot that Weatherzone graph before it was gone, so I've been forced to recreate it in Open Office:

April was the worst, with traffic diverted every which way as the Serisier bridge closed, the water in serious danger of submerging it and leaving the L.H. Ford the only game in town. At one point the floodwater overtopped the sewage treatment works, forcing the city to issue a boil-water alert. Another time it wasn't raining here, but they still had to issue a flood warning because a system was still chucking it down in the Burrendong catchment area, forcing them to raise the sluice gates and release a few megalitres to avert catastrophe. The funniest story was the pro reptile handlers, who were called out to wrangle brown snakes washed out of their holes by the rising waters, snakes they described as, "Cold, tired and cranky."

The grand finale to the whole three-year shitshow came with the month of October, which was like April all over again. The rain roared down like a solid mass. Once again the floodwaters drowned the car parks behind Macquarie Street, and I got one of my favourite photographs ever, of what looks like a bucolic sunset over a lake, but was actually a turf farm.

Which is too good a shot to just give away here, so have this one instead (own work).

And then, at long last, Dame Nature turned off the taps, and the carnival of horrors finally stopped.

So what did we learn from this trauma conga line?
Honestly, not much. It'd been a bruising three years, but most people seem to've simply dropped the whole period down the memory hole and moved on. They can do that, you know. They spare themselves the energy that might be wasted on deep self-reflection and personal growth by just sort of dismissing what they don't want to know, then carrying on the same anyway. Hearts and minds like an Etch A Sketch, basically. Not a bad way to be, wish I could do it.

But if I had to sum up, I'd say Australia did okay with the pandemic. Maybe not brilliantly, but okay, though I had unusually low expectations. A couple of years before it all started, I happened across a tidbit from the First World War. The planners in London had realised any major war would be a financial disaster, so they reasoned, why not use that financial disaster to bring about victory all the sooner? So they had provisions in place in the event of war, such as banning all coal exports to the Netherlands (which was tantamount to putting coal on the Kaiser's doorstep, you see, and the whole point was to strangle the German economy). But then the war came, and the one-percenters started bleating about how much money they were losing. The war had started in August, so by September they were softening their pre-war plans, and by October they'd abandoned them altogether. Given the choice of pounds sterling or lives, Westminster preferred to spend millions of lives.

So I was genuinely a bit shocked that the Australian government (a Coalition government, even) bit the bullet and paid people to stay home. I was quietly impressed when they kept it up, too, instead of getting bored and dropping the whole programme once the first wave abated, like the U.S. did. When the vaccines came along there was no talk of lotteries of meal vouchers or any such rubbish to coerce the "vaccine reluctant" to get the jab, they simply made proof of vaccination mandatory to get into things (anti-vaxxers thought their throats had been cut, but what of it? They'd been waiting their whole lives for the government to play the red team in their self-aggrandising fantasies, it would've been rude to end their LARP session too soon). At the end of the day, in despite of the Libertarian brain rot affecting every political establishment these days, our leaders revealed they're not true believers, they still kowtow to reality. When the test came they put the ideology aside and did what needed to be done, however imperfectly, and that's a passing grade as far as I'm concerned.

Of course, ScoMo and his cronies got the boot at the next election, but he lost that one in 2019, not 2020.

All that said, if I can pass on two lessons I got out of it, the first is that you shouldn't overestimate how prepared our leaders really are. How much warning did we have that something like this could happen? Several smaller pandemics in the early 21st Century, Bill Gates doing his best Cassandra routine trying to warn us, a brilliant little movie called Contagion that I didn't even watch until it was too late... It wasn't impossible to predict that something like this could come along and turn the world upside-down. So what did we have in place ready to deal with it? Basically, just Centrelink and our healthcare system, the very things both parties had been working like buzzsaws to undermine for the previous forty years. Now extrapolate that forwards into our Climate Change-dominated future and you might begin to lose sleep. Have your tunnels dug and ready, is what I'm saying.

Also, this:

¹ Naturally, then, that's the one thing his cult disowns him for.

² What if a Swedish company was British?

³ Slava Ukraini.

The Pandemic! Pt.2: Apocalypse Bingo

Again, this is a personal memoir of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-'23. It is written specifically for my nephew, who was very young at the time, but the rest of you are welcome to read along, providing you remain quiet and don't interrupt. I stress again that this is entirely subjective, and not to be confused with medical advice – listen to your doctor, never to me. Please note that in this part I've also started tracking the deaths as well as the total cases: I don't mean to come across as morbid, and I certainly don't want to beat down upon those who lost loved ones during this time, but there are those among us who dismiss Covid-19 as not that big a deal, or even an outright hoax by a government seeking control. So the death count is there as a reminder of the real cost of the pandemic. Onward...

I first heard of Apocalypse Bingo in August of 2020, when Doug Muder asked in his blog, The Weekly Sift, whether anyone had "derecho" on their card. I'd never heard of a derecho, but it turned out to be a severe, straight-line wind associated with a fast-moving storm front. The phenomenon had struck the U.S. state of Iowa on 10 August, flattening a third of the state's cropland and leaving 200,000 people without power. Had it been an Atlantic hurricane it would've been considered a Category 2, and in a normal year, that would've guaranteed it headlines worldwide. In 2020, it was local news only.

Anyway, having established what the game is, let's roll up a card and see how we go!

Hitting the ground running, because we can cross off "Bushfires", "Global Pandemic" and "Economic Meltdown" before we even begin.

 

The Boomerang Generation
It was late August 2020 when the family came to get me (do you remember that trip, Small Dude? I'd be surprised, but you never know). It wasn't the coronavirus itself that forced me to move back home, though the reduced hours at work were a factor (the highway was spookily quiet in the early months; it picked up again later, but it was still mostly just truckies, without the usual travellers stopping for snacks and loo breaks. Such a reduced customer load necessarily meant less revenue to pay our wages, but at a 24-hour site that didn't really mean there was less work to do).

No, what broke me was Snowy Hydro 2.0, an upgrade to the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme that had been announced about a year earlier. It was a transparently cynical attempt by ScoMo to win back the seat of Eden-Monaro, after Tony Abbott lost it to Labor at the previous election (you can't brag about cutting penalty rates in an electorate full of shift workers and not expect them to give you the finger). Naturally, the first to benefit were the Coalition's core demographic: The scheme would require thousands of workers to move to the area, so the value of rental properties absolutely shot up. My landlord was already renovating at the time, and he'd offered me first dibs on a new lease when it was ready, but it was going to cost more than I could afford, so the clock was already ticking. I try not to be bitter, but the fact that he literally showed up to start work each day in a brand-new Chevy Camaro 2SS felt like rubbing in salt: "Hey, I have to bump up your rent, I have an $87,000 car loan to pay for!" I suppose it's just as well it wasn't a ZL1...¹

"Competed with the Mustang"? Please... (Source).

Thankfully, your Dad had already put me onto a servo in Dubbo hanging out the "Help Wanted" sign, so after all my stuff had been trailered home, I literally knocked off work on Friday, spent the night in a motel, drove home and then started my new job on the Monday – probably the smoothest transition of anybody ever in 2020. And that's where I spent the next twelve months or so, quietly salting away the deposit on a house of my own, and keeping my sanity by working on this very blog (long-time readers will notice that my coverage of the 1990-'92 seasons is a tad more comprehensive than for '88 and '89. I spent those years working intense six- and seven-day weeks, frequently on a rotating roster and for a time even including a single graveyard shift each week, as my sociopath of a manager had a grudge against me personally and wanted me to quit. I paid off the car, which is nice, but it's no way to live).

The only hiccough in this period was a product of the ongoing La Niña: The most violent storm I've ever experienced, which blew through at sunset on 5 December (Cases: 27,265. Deaths: 948). During my time in Coffs Harbour I survived a storm that shook the walls of my house – as in, I could put my hand against the wall and actually feel it moving – but this storm was on another level again. I'd never seen clouds that were so low, so green and moving so fast. I made the mistake trying to beat it home instead of sheltering where I was, at work, but I underestimated how quickly it was approaching and ended up having to pull over and wait for the rain and wind to subside (how I didn't get pelted by hail, I will never know). I ended up stuck in a traffic jam before the Marthaguy Rest Area, helping to clear a tree that had fallen and blocked the road (fortunately, one of the truckies had a chainsaw, so it only took about half an hour to get the traffic moving again. "Why did the truckie have a chainsaw?" is a question I chose not to ask).

No, it wasn't that green when you were there, it was even greener (own work).

Sadly, being the New Guy at work again meant I didn't get to watch Bathurst that year, but it was remarkable that there even was a Bathurst that year. Following the cancellation of the Australian Grand Prix, ideas had been floated to downgrade the event and run it as a domestic meeting for Supercars, TCR tintops and the new S5000 open-wheelers – but the federal ban on gatherings above 500 people scuppered that almost immediately. With contracts to meet and financial abyss under their feet if they didn't race, Supercars bit the bullet and forged ahead by putting all their team personnel into a "bubble" – meaning no contact with the outside world for the rest of the season, not even their own families – and running an abbreviated season of ten rounds at six venues (instead of the planned fourteen). Basically, they would race in front of empty grandstands for the benefit of a TV audience now stuck at home.

An unexpected side effect was that a lot of the drivers elected to keep their skills sharp by going simracing instead. Watching iRacing streams went a long way to filling the void left by all the events that had been cancelled (the cars and circuits might be digital, but the racing is real), and some of these iRacing bouts included match-ups that you would never have dreamed of in meatspace: Supercars champions Scott McLaughlin and Shane van Gisbergen, Australia's Indy 500 winner Will Power, Formula 1 hotshots Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz, and NASCAR royalty like Dale Earnhardt Jr and Jimmie Johnson. Watching all these legends sit down to my hobby was a little bit surreal: It was like arranging a game of Bolt Action between Manstein and Zhukov. The greatest thing I ever did for my simracing career was take a hotlap in a real racecar, because after that I finally understood what the physics engines of all those games were trying to simulate. These guys of course had a deeper understanding of the real cars than anyone else alive, so it was immensely gratifying when their clout finally convinced iRacing to fix their flawed tyre model, which the fans had been complaining about for nigh-on a decade. 

In retrospect, the extra practice on America's ovals is probably serving the Giz well (Source).

Could I have predicted that a global pandemic would virtually shut down motor racing worldwide? Possibly. Could I have predicted that a global pandemic would end up improving iRacing? Absolutely not.

So against all odds there was a Bathurst 1000 in 2020, and the sting of your Dad and I not being there was slightly mollified by the fact that almost nobody was there – instead of the 202,000 attendees of 2019, covid restrictions meant the 2020 running of the Great Race was limited to just 4,000 visitors per day, and even those had to be punters who could get to the track without breaching their travel limits. But I didn't get to watch it on TV either, as I was stuck at work, forced to follow the official liveblog on my phone between customers. That was mostly fine, except for two things: 1). I had to suffer my man Cameron Waters, in the #6 Monster Energy Mustang, finishing an agonising 2nd to Shane van Gisbergen, and 2). There was a dead mouse deep down under the counter at work, where nobody could get to it, and I was forced to endure that smell all bloody day.

We'd been fishing muroid corpses in various states of gooiness out of nooks in the store for a few weeks at that point. Pulling everything off a shelf and cleaning out the dust, moths and mouse turds had become a daily chore rather than weekly, because there'd inevitably be a mouse or two who'd munched on a bait and died back there. It was nasty enough, but as we crossed the threshold into New Year's Day of 2021 (Cases: 27,735. Deaths: 949), it was already getting a whole lot worse.

Phase III: Of Mice & Men More Mice
I can't remember exactly when, but at some point in late summer, Poppy came in from slashing some firebreaks and said he'd seen dozens of mice fleeing the blades, but no snakes. In other words, we were in the early stages of a mouse plague, and he was more right than even he ever wanted to be.

The La Niña rains of 2020 had produced nigh-perfect growing conditions, so in a shining example of Tantric farming (a concept I just made up, but am now convinced is completely real), our cockies bounced back from the drought with near-record harvests (beaten only by the bumper crop of 2016-'17). Inevitably that meant there was a lot of grain left lying around for critters to eat, and as the seasons rotated back into winter and the weather turned cold, it was inevitable that those critters would want to come inside with us, where it was warm...

Again, we had a relatively gentle time of it all things considered. Emptying our traps multiple times a day and remembering to store all food (especially bread) in Tupperware containers isn't too bad: My record was catching 17 in one night, which isn't a bad score for a single trap. It's gross and somewhat miserable to be seeing them all the time, but you cope. My workplace was harder, being full of food and also very small and, of course, still with screens in place to keep the air from moving around: Some days the stench was almost overpowering.

But we didn't get the worst of it. In some places it was an absolute horror show, whole districts swarming with vermin in a genuine economic and public health crisis. It's estimated they did up to $100 million in damage to crops (digging up newly-planted seeds, basically), and getting into food and water storage to spread their filth.

Sadly, by the time mother nature came to our aid to drown them out of their holes with more rain, we had bigger problems.

Delta
The Delta variant of Covid-19 was first detected in India on 5 October 2020. When it was identified and named on 31 May 2021, the WHO had just introduced new nomenclature protocols, requiring new covid strains to be named after Greek letters. So the original Wuhan strain was the wild-type, with the first serious mutation (identified in Britain in December 2020) soon designated Alpha. The Beta strain originated from the Nelson Mandela Bay region of South Africa in October 2020, while Gamma was from around Manaus in Brazil. These were all flagged "variants of concern" by the WHO, but Delta was more dangerous than any of them for one simple reason: Once inside a host, it multiplied much, much faster. A Chinese study found people infected with Delta could carry up to a thousand times the viral load of the original strain, meaning you were much more likely to spread it to everything you touched (or anyone you breathed on). Soon it accounted for 93 percent of all sequenced viral specimens worldwide. And by July, it was making its way here.

I distinctly remember one young woman who, refusing to wear a mask, huffed at me, "There's no covid in Dubbo!" Ha. By 5 August (34,567 cases, 972 deaths) they were finding fragments of covid DNA in the town's sewage outflow: By 10 August, the Delta outbreak of 2021 is considered to have begun. This one was notable because it was the first outbreak to include rural NSW, rather than just metropolitan areas, and because Delta was so infectious, it got out of control very quickly. It had taken us seven months to climb from 28,000 to 38,000 cases, but having got there we blew through the 50k barrier only a fortnight later. By 29 August, Australia had clocked 50,012 cases, and 1,040 deaths.

The line-up for covid testing was no joke (Source).

So Dubbo went into a snap lockdown: As in, the decision was announced nearly halfway through my shift, and it was in full effect by the time I knocked off that evening. We were back where we'd been the previous April, with the store reduced to a maximum of 5 people at any one time, masking and QR coding in was mandatory, and no leave to leave the house unless absolutely necessary. I wasn't too worried at the time, a mask helped keep your face warm. I didn't realise I'd still be wearing it in the heat of summer, six months later...

This was a problem, because despite living with this for nearly 18 months now, most people apparently still hadn't got their head around how it all worked. Contracting covid was the start of a two-week journey: Getting infected was Day One, but the crucial "finding out you had it" part only took place – at best! – on Day Five. Before then, there wasn't enough viral load in your snot for the swabs to pick it up... and that was assuming you even had symptoms, which you probably didn't – it's estimated as many as half of all covid cases were asymptomatic. That meant, by the time you got your results back, you'd probably been spreading it for nearly a week, so the only way to stay ahead of this thing was to follow the Holy Trinity:

• Wash your hands.²
• Wear a mask.
• Use your phone to scan the QR codes posted outside every public space, to check in and out again of every place you visited, facilitating contact tracing.
  

All pretty straightforward, but as I said, it'd now been 18 months and people were getting pretty blasé about it. It's probably an adaptive trait most of the time – humans habituate to everything with enough time, because most people simply can't live with a brain that's constantly on edge in a bath of cortisol and adrenaline (of course, if if you have an anxiety disorder then that's exactly how you spend your life, but I guess we're just built different...)

So I was still doing my bit and trying to shepherd my customers toward following these basic procedures, and taking note of the incorrigible grots so I could clean up after them once they left. Until you're actively looking for it, you really don't notice just how many people will absent-mindedly wipe their nose, or tap their teeth, or just stick a finger in their mouth while they're thinking. That's before I mention the really reprehensible ones, who'd do things like cough into their palm³ before handing me cash, or lick their finger to get a better grip on that banknote. Or my favourite – my absolute favourite story of this type – an elderly man who:

1. While staring into our fridges, blew his nose into a handkerchief. Okay, no real harm so far, but I'd prefer if he didn't touch our door handles or reach into our fridge with that hand (so, SO many people will pick up an item only to change their mind and then put it back on the goddamn shelf for someone else to contract, I mean pick up, later).
2. So I took a risk, and gestured to the pump bottle on our counter while gently asking if he'd mind sanitising his hands before going any further. He shuffled over to the counter, held out his hands to me and said, in shaky-old-man voice, "Aw, they're pretty clean, mate" (apparently unaware he'd just blasted nasal mucus all over them). But he complied, pumped a full dose of alco-gel into his hands rubbed it in thoroughly, and I thanked him for it right up until...
3. He then pulled out his handkerchief again and used it to wipe the sanitiser off his hands. You know, the same handkerchief he'd just blown his nose with. The mind boggles.

This was the kind of thing I was dealing with on a daily basis, and every week, I was getting more pushback. This was the state of play during Delta when, suddenly, I too landed a couple of weeks in the iso-cubes.

On 24 August, I got a message from my boss that I'd been tagged as a Close Contact. Some poor bastard had caught the virus, got tested and, before receiving his results, had been out to do some shopping, including getting fuel at my store. I have no idea who it was, but I was immediately forbidden to come to work, as I was required to get tested and then self-isolate for at least two weeks. You'll notice that they didn't wait to see if I got a sniffle before putting me in quarantine, yeah?

So off I went. The nearest testing facility was the local hospital, so I queued up (a much shorter wait than some people experienced, the line at Dubbo Showgrounds could take hours), wound down the window and said, "Ahh!" while the nurse shoved a swab down my throat, then up my nose, which burned for the rest of the day. That was it: Unpleasant, but definitely not traumatic. The rest was just waiting at home, which was kind of a relief in some ways. I'd had a weekend off for Bathurst 2019, and the only other time off I'd had since 2014 was a two-week period in the bad old days, when the Evil Site Manager deliberately left me off the roster for two weeks, pretty much out of spite (I eventually had to remind them that there were agreements in place that they were breaching, hence my aforementioned madhouse roster of six- and seven-day weeks). 

There must be an awful lot of people out there who can tell you the exact dates of their lockdowns and/or iso thanks to their Steam achievements (own work).

This fortnight was a bit like that one, in that although it was nice to be able to just stop for a while, the time off wasn't all that relaxing. Some people talk about proximity to death enhancing life, of heightening the senses and concentrating the mind. Me, knowing there was a chance (however slight) that I was a fortnight from death, I just felt numb. I spent those two weeks playing Total War: Rome II, stewing over it and (sometimes) sleeping. I didn't get anything written at all. Eventually I went back to the hospital to get re-tested, and thankfully the result was the same as the first time: Negative. I did not have the coronavirus. I was back to work by Sunday, 6 September (61,590 cases, 1,103 deaths) and, if you want a clue about how overloaded the healthcare system was at this point, consider that I got a phone call from NSW Health checking if I was okay, whether I had everything I needed, and was I on any medications that were likely to run out... on the second-last day of my isolation period. They were nearly fourteen days behind.

Twister
And then, because the game of Apocalypse Bingo hadn't actually stopped, the weather came roaring back. Dubbo got over 900 millimetres of rain in 2021, 61 of them in the first five days of January alone. Things had been a tad calmer in the meantime, but the ground had retained all that moisture, so any additional dump of rain now was going to have disproportionate consequences. So what did Mother Nature serve up next? A cluster of severe storms, including an honest-to-god tornado outbreak!

Bohena Creek tornado seen across Yarrie Lake (Source).

There'd been a tornado near Dubbo back in 2015, but that had been an isolated incident. This was different: By Australian standards, it was a super outbreak, something that hadn't been seen in this country in nearly 25 years. On the afternoon and evening of 30 September (102,433 cases, 1,335 deaths...), a system of violent storms including a couple of genuine supercells pirouetted across the skies of NSW, dropping tornadoes at Mudgee; at Bohena Creek, Narrabri; possibly near where Poppy was working that day, between Gulargambone and Coonamble⁴; and most famously, at Meadow Flat near Bathurst, which got the lion's share of media attention because Bathurst is known internationally. Another one dropped in the middle of Armidale, late at night, a fortnight later too, and there were no doubt a couple more I never heard about.

In fact, that September saw so much rain that we came close to flooding. It stopped before we became a disaster area, but it had been a very close call. The good news was, all that water finally drowned all the mice in their holes and, combined with baits actually strong enough to kill the little bastards, that finally ended the mouse plague. The bad news was, any more rain like that was going to be a catastrophe...

Pictured: Not quite a disaster area, October '21 (own work).

To be concluded.

¹ I also feel like he owed me at least a one-week rent holiday for tyres. Five separate punctures from screws and nails, at $30 each for repairs, equals almost exactly what I was paying for a week's rent. You will not be surprised to learn I take a Maoist attitude to landlords these days.

² I'd completely forgotten that the recommendation way back when all this started was to lather up with soap for at least 25 seconds, to give the suds time to attach to the lipids that made up the outer layer of the virus and literally tear it apart. To help time yourself, they recommended singing, "Happy Birthday" quietly under your breath while washing your hands. I posted a list of joke songs you could use instead, such as the long scream from Tool's "The Grudge", but what I actually ended up using was the chorus of Megadeth's legendary "Tornado of Souls". As a wannabe thrash bassist, that section is absolutely engraved into my brain, and it happened to be just about exactly 25 seconds long.

³ Sleeve, people. Cough into your sleeve. We’ve all seen the relevant Mythbusters episode: if you need to cough or sneeze, do it into your sleeve. It’s incredible the difference it makes.

⁴ I thought I saw a hook echo⁵ on the radar, and when I asked Poppy about it he said yeah, he wouldn’t be surprised if that’d been one as well.

⁵ I saw Twister at a very impressionable age, of course I know what a hook echo is.

The Pandemic! (or, how Uncle Dane became a Germophobe, Pt.I)

I first wrote about the Black Summer fires because I had international friends who I thought would be interested to hear what it was like on the ground. Posting it here on The Cutting was incidental; it was a Facebook post before that. Conversely, the Covid-19 pandemic was happening to everyone, so at first I didn't see the need to write it all down. It's only now eight months since the WHO decided Covid-19 was no longer a "global health emergency" that it occurs to me there might be some value in writing it down for those who weren't there. Like, for example, because they were too young to grasp how WEIRD it all was. People like my nephew.

So what follows is an intensely subjective account of what it was like to live through the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-'21. It is not, and should not in any way be mistaken for, medical advice – to paraphrase XKCD, if you take your medical advice from a motoring blog, you deserve whatever happens next. Listen to the doctors; trust the doctors. Otherwise, read on: This is for you, Small Dude...

Prelude: When Things Already Sucked
In 2019, your Dad and I made the pilgrimage to Bathurst for the Great Race. As you might imagine, we had an absolute blast: We took in some fantastic racing from Carrera Cup and Touring Car Masters; we met John Bowe; and we were there for an absolutely classic Great Race, as Dick Johnson Racing finally made good on all the investment from Roger Penske, and Scott McLaughlin took home the trophy they call coveted (albeit under "controversial" circumstances – Penske's notorious quest for The Unfair Advantage doesn't work to his advantage on the PR front...)

I had some concern over whether I'd leave the track alive, dressed as I was in a DJR Team Penske supporter's shirt... (Own work, not for media use.)

But as early as qualifying Saturday, your Dad was starting to say things like, "When we come back next year..."

"Whoa up," I said to him. "A lot can happen in a year." 

To borrow a line from Linus Torvalds: "I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual."

(Source).

To set the scene a little bit, that Bathurst took place in the final awful months of the late-2010s drought that left our homeland looking more like Mars than prosperous farming country (barely hyperbole, see above). That of course fed directly into the Black Summer fires, which were only quenched when the heavens opened and dropped the first major floods of a La Niña summer ("I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains..."). Yes, there was already flooding in February 2020, mostly in the mid-north coast, so 2020 was finding its rhythm as an annus horribilis even before March rolled around and the pandemic became the dominant story of the year. So with that for context...

Phase I: Flatten the Curve
January 2020 brought some headlines about a novel coronavirus spreading in China, but at first I didn't pay them any heed. It was one of Uncle Dane's own uncles who first spotted that this could be serious, posting on FB that if you multiplied the death rate recorded in Wuhan so far by the global population, then this thing could kill 15 million people. I argued with him of course, because I know everything: There'd been other disease outbreaks in the 21st Century – SARS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, even Ebola – so in my head it was pretty clear how this was going to go. For a couple of weeks the evening news would be full of footage of Asian people in masks, and then the world's attention would move on to whatever celebrity scandal was coming next, and the whole thing would fizzle out. It seemed pretty obvious at the time.

The first sign that this wasn't going to follow that script came from some Italian friends on FB. I'd posted something wistful about moving to Tuscany to enjoy la dolce vita (to be fair, that's still the plan if I can sort out the financials). They shot back that it wasn't as nice as I was imagining, citing (among other things) that the place was absolutely riddled with the novel coronavirus, especially among the elderly. The problem with a disease that spreads exponentially is that anything done before it becomes a problem seems like overreaction, and anything done after seems woefully inadequate. You need at least one place to be the guinea pig to show how bad things can get, and for the western world, that was Italy. On Friday, 12 February 2020, the country had only 3 confirmed cases of coronavirus; by the following Tuesday, it was 283, including 7 deaths. The weekend spike in cases sent the whole country into lockdown, and prompted a famous video of Italian people sending messages to themselves ten days in the past, as a way of warning the rest of the world not to wait to push the panic button.

Now, you might be thinking all of this is pretty tangential to a motorsport blog, but you'd be wrong, because it was actually motorsport that brought home just how serious the situation was. The shock that finally got through to Yours Truly came on the morning of Friday, 13 March (Black Friday, no less), with the announcement that the Australian Grand Prix had been cancelled.

Now, again, your Dad and I had been to the Grand Prix a couple of times, so we were well aware how much money was tied up in the event: One didn't simply cancel it on a whim. And indeed, news that trickled out in the following days said the decision had been an ugly, drawn-out affair. It was officially announced only hours before the first practice session, with marshals and hospitality staff already there (they'd been told to treat it like a normal workday), and fans already queueing up outside the gates (some of whom had flown in from overseas). But in fact the decision was more-or-less a formality, as a member of the McLaren team had tested positive for the virus on Thursday (seven more F1 personnel had shown symptoms but tested negative; later we would realise that disproved very little), By the time the announcement came, Kimi Räikkönen and Sebastian Vettel had already left the country, which was a pretty sure sign the race was already off. At long last, Uncle Dane began to comprehend something major was happening: Australia had already had its hundredth confirmed case three days earlier, on 10 March, so the excrement was already impacting the air circulation device.

Source.

Sadly, the handling of the Grand Prix foreshadowed the wider fustercluck across the country. Six hours after the cancellation of the Grand Prix, then-PM Scott Morrison announced that all "mass gatherings" – meaning events with more than 500 people – would be forbidden from Monday, 16 March. Even Monday might've been too late, as by Saturday night, Australia's 100 cases had become 156; by Sunday, it was 250. Soon after, the indoor-gathering ban was reduced to only 100 people, and in a move shocking and unprecedented in our modern, Globalised age, Australia closed its borders.

What followed was two weeks of government flailing to try and get ahead of the rising case load. We passed 1,000 cases on Saturday, 21 March, and by the 22nd it was 1,316. At work, I started seeing a new kind of customer – the young (-ish; they were universally Millennial like me) with cars absolutely chock full of their stuff, who were suddenly out-of-work and making a bolt for home to bunker up with their parents. Their jobs had all vanished as pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants (excluding takeaway) were closed from Monday, 23 March. The following day, all "non-essential services" were shut down as well. The queues at Centrelink stretched around the block, as all these displaced workers were forced to apply for the dole instead.

(Source.)

Through it all ScoMo looked cranky, cornered and on-edge, and no wonder. 16 March 2020 went down in history as Black Monday, as investors started to realise the virus was going to disrupt global trade, prompting a mass exodus that caused share markets around the world to plummet. In Australia, the ASX dropped nearly 10 percent.¹ ScoMo, leader of a party whose sole appeal was its ability to put the federal budget back in the black (allegedly...), faced a collapse in revenues and a hugely-inflated wage bill as they were forced, in defiance of everything they stood for, to put the entire country on welfare. Centrelink added a $550/fortnight covid survival payment for anyone who lost their job, meaning the Jobseeker effectively doubled to $1,115.70 (meaning, ironically, the long-term unemployed were able to live decently for the first time since the early '90s.). Of course, businesses got more: On 30 March, they brought in a new payment called Jobkeeper, a direct $1,500-a-fortnight payment for businesses that could show significant drop in revenue – basically, we'll prop up your wage bill so you don't have to sack anyone. Naturally, the Coalition's largesse was begrudging and bitter – one online discussion even compared it to a trolley problem where we didn't want to hurt the trolley – but in the spirit of being grateful for small mercies, this is why I'm glad the pandemic at least came along while we were under a Coalition government. If it'd happened under Labor, the whining from the Opposition benches never would've stopped.

Bear in mind though, this timeline makes it all sound much neater and more comprehensible than it really was. What it was, at the time, was a blizzard of press conferences and official announcements, often mutually exclusive and not infrequently just straight-up disinformation, either of the accidental kind (didn't quite catch which country they were talking about), or the deliberate kind (trolls gotta troll). The rallying cry was, "Flatten the Curve," i.e. reduce the reproductive rate of the virus hard enough that the number of active cases never exceeded the maximum number of ICUs in our hospitals (which at this stage really were needed, as the lethality of the virus peaked on 16 March, at over 15 percent). In this opening phase, when we were the least prepared, there was only one way to achieve that: Lockdown.

"Lockdown" was one of the signature words of the Covid-19 pandemic. It meant, more or less: "Congratulations, your home is now your prison cell." Leaving it for any reason beyond going to work (assuming you were "essential"), doing necessary grocery shopping or maybe getting some outdoor exercise was forbidden, as in you'd cop a $1,000 on-the-spot fine. State borders started to close as well, which led to my favourite piece of trivia ever: Going for a paddle in the Murray was technically illegal.

The reasons had to do with the fine print when the NSW/Victoria border was originally drawn; for some reason it had been pegged as the left bank of the river and not, as is usual, an arbitrary line down the middle.

Yours Truly was working on the Hume the day Australia went into lockdown. We heard it from a customer; my favourite co-worker and I just sort of looked at each other before she said, "Well, I might get some supplies then." One of the things she got was a tube of Berocca, which struck me as a good idea, so I got some too – you know, Vitamin C to ward off colds and all that. These are the kind of straws you clutch at when you can feel history starting to happen around you.

A lot of people remember that first lockdown especially as a miserable experience, with lots of stories about watching literally all of Netflix and wondering what to do next. "There is no pleasure in having nothing to do," U.S. president Andrew Jackson had told us: "The fun is having lots to do and not doing it." All the dynamic and interesting extraverts were climbing the walls, experiencing levels of cabin fever that had never before been seen in this country, but even peoples used to being snowed in had a rough time of it. The funniest were the Germans, who put out this ad imploring their citizens to, "Be lazy, save lives."

And Uncle Dane? I'm not gonna lie, I took a certain amount of quiet pleasure from all the whining. They were extraverts trapped in what was now firmly an introvert's world. I'd spent my entire life with things the other way around, so as far as I was concerned I was due a little schadenfreude. But then the reality started to sink in: Not only were things fine in my life, they weren't even any different. My job was essential, and pubs, clubs and restaurants had never been my thing anyway, so imagine my shock when lockdown commenced and I didn't have to do a single thing differently.

Phase II: The New Normal
By Sunday, 29 March, Australia had hit 3,898 cases, but the curve was beginning to flatten. Because here's the thing: Lockdown worked. We stopped it cold. By Monday, 20 April, there might've been 6,613 cases so far – but enough time had now passed that two-thirds of them had reached an outcome, and more than 98 percent of the time, now, that outcome was "recovered". The reproductive rate of the virus had even dropped below 1 (meaning it was on its way to petering out). Although state borders remained closed, federal borders reopened (albeit for essential business only, and anyone entering the country had to spend two weeks quarrantined in a hotel room before they could go out and do anything). From here on, outbreaks (and the resulting lockdowns) were local affairs only. Hence the new era: The New Normal.

I say "normal", there wasn't much normal about it. The funniest aspect (in a bleak way) was the toilet paper hoarding. This was pure applied Game Theory: There was no actual shortage, so there was no risk you were going to miss out... unless someone panicked and started hoarding it, in which case you had to get in quick before it ran out, creating the very shortage you'd been afraid of in the first place. Since we sold bulk 24-packs, we were a prime target for these people: At first we instituted a "one pack per customer" rule, until we started seeing whole carloads of people come into the store, one by one, to purchase one each. Eventually we had to store it out the back to keep it away from shoplifters, and impose a "locals only" sales policy – buyers had to flash their licence to confirm they had a local address before we'd sell them any. Eventually the factories caught up to demand and the panic subsided, though I have to wonder... There were stories of people filling their entire garage with the stuff, and while that's almost certainly an exaggeration, by the inalienable logic of the bell curve there must be a handful of households out there who hoarded in 2020 and haven't had to buy any since, stuck using up that stockpile ever since.

Like a bank run, only dumber. (Source).

Soon, the servo where I worked brought in new equipment: Screens to keep customers' breath off our faces, rubber gloves, and endless bottles of hand sanitiser, both at the console for my use, and by the doors so customers could sanitise as they came in (something which, oh, almost half of them bothered to do on a good day!). There were also punishing new cleaning regimes: Anything people touched regularly, like doorhandles or EFTPOS machines, now had to be cleaned every other hour. Other surfaces (and you better believe there was a checklist) had to be done a couple of times a shift. The most annoying items were the fuel dispenser nozzles, which were numerous and fiddly as hell: We eventually settled on a compromise of just hitting them with a squirt bottle and calling it done. When you consider the sheer number of sites they operated, the company must have spent an absolute fortune on surface cleaner and hand sanitiser, let alone all the screens and other junk. There were already people saying the whole pandemic was a hoax, but the fact the company spent money on new plant showed just how real it was – you wouldn't get a cent out of them otherwise.

The skin of my hands disintegrated that first winter. The initial batch of hand sanitiser they provided was quite harsh and watery, which made it quick-drying, but prolonged use – like if you sanitised every time you touched cash, and every time before you touched food, for eight hours at a time – it absolutely destroyed your skin. Some nights I actually went home bleeding.

All of this was in the service of another new term, "Social Distancing," which was a technical-sounding name for just staying the hell away from each other. That curve we'd paid such a high price to flatten had to stay flattened, so the bargain now was, "You can go back to your normal life... but within certain limits, otherwise we'll have to lock you down again." The champions of this were the people of Melbourne, who refused to comply with common sense so much that they ended up suffering through six separate lockdowns totalling 262 days. The longest of these lasted from early July to late October 2020, prompting jokes that "covid" actually stood for, "Citizens Of Victoria Ignoring Directions".²

But most people were pretty understanding, grasping that the rules were there for a reason and scrapping them would result in a shitshow like the one in the U.S. (which I won't go into here). With more spare time than usual, I started Googling to learn what I could about the whole situation. Such as:

• What are all these different names for the same thing? The virus was called SARS-CoV-2, for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Coronavirus #2. The disease caused by the virus was Covid-19, or Coronavirus Disease 2019 (because it was first identified on New Years' Eve of 2019). The broad term coronavirus just refers a variety of different viruses that target the head (Latin corona) with respiratory, gastrointestinal or neurological diseases. Early on it was often called the novel coronavirus, because of all the novels that were written during lockdown [citation needed]. 
  
• What even is a pandemic? And how is it different from an epidemic? I was slightly embarrassed that I didn't know this before 2020, but to be fair I'd never before needed to. As it turned out, the definition of an epidemic was when a disease was spreading exponentially i.e. had literally "gone viral". A pandemic – as hinted by the Greek prefix pan, meaning "all" – was when that was happening everywhere.
• Why does it always start with a bat? I'm not sure why I associate bats with pandemics, but I feel like the association predated 2020. It's tempting to attribute it to the 2011 movie Contagion, which is to Covid-19 what Morgan Robertson's The Wreck of the Titan was to the Titanic disaster. Early in the movie the MEV-1 virus is determined to have mutated and jumped the species barrier after, "the wrong bat met the wrong pig". Except I didn't see Contagion until late in 2020, and the pandemic movie I grew up with, Outbreak, starts with a monkey instead. So... half-remembered details about SARS or Bird Flu, maybe? Either way, it turns out there is a genuine link. Bats are indeed flying disease vectors, because bats are the only mammals capable of true (ie. powered) flight. The energy requirements to do this are enormous, so to deliver enough energy to the cells in their wing muscles, bats have had to turbocharge their metabolism. One of the side effects of this is that any infections that target the inner workings of the cell (i.e. viruses) likewise see their effects turbocharged. To counter this, bats have evolved a hyperactive immune system that keeps all these viral infections in check (think whack-a-mole, but in fast forward). Any virus that manages to cross the species barrier into an organism without that hyperactive immune system, however, finds itself a bit like Superman arriving on Earth and discovering its yellow Sun gives him super-powers. Thus, Covid-19.
  
• Why does it always start in China? Contagion again, but also the Spanish Flu, which despite the name was first identified in Kansas and probably originated in northern China. But our pandemic has its origins in the Middle Kingdom's brutal 20th Century. Bluntly, in the 1960s Chairman Mao's five-year plan was failing, leading to mass starvation. Since they had to feed their people something, China became one of the few countries where wild animals formed a regular part of people's diet. This led to the so-called "wet markets", where live animals were kept in cages stacked one on top of another, practically inviting diseases to jump the species barrier. The irony is that by 2020, when China was basically a First World country, the wet markets weren't needed to feed the masses anymore, existing to provide ingredients for Chinese traditional medicine instead – a boutique industry for rich people. Anyway, the early cases of Covid-19 all clustered around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, and early on I recall stories that transmission to humans came via a bat and (of all things), a pangolin.
  

Say what you like about his methods, at least Haarkon Worldclaimer looks like the Herald of the Apocalypse.

Masking...
Early in the piece, like mid-to-late March, a customer came in to work and started berating us because we weren't wearing masks. "You should all have masks on!" she said, more than once, in between lecturing us about the time her whole office came down with "gastro" (I assume she meant gastroenteritis) and she was the only one not to catch it because, ta-da, she started masking as soon as they started showing symptoms. It was clear she was in a state of mild panic, and we just happened to be the ones catching the spray, but that kind of fear was not unusual in those days. After she left I rolled my eyes and made some sort of remark about her not knowing the difference between bacteria and viruses, but that ended up more proof that I'm not always as smart as I think I am. Panicking she might have been, but she was still miles ahead of the rest of us, as we later realised. What was interesting is that she turned out to be miles ahead of the World Health Organization, too.

A thing I cannot stress enough is that Covid-19 was a new disease, one that had never existed in humans before. A lot of the overreaction in the early days was the product of the simple uncertainty of it all – would I or any of my loved ones catch the coronavirus? What would happen to us if we did? Nobody could answer that yet; nobody knew. It took some time for the scientific community to do their research and we began to know our enemy, but by late winter, we were starting to know it.

I can't find the original article – my Googling hasn't turned it up where I thought it was – but at some point I caught an article noticing that the caseload in Japan was remarkably low – even lower than here. This was a country where people in special uniforms were employed to physically stuff commuters into the trains each morning, a country where instead of a motel room, businessmen would rent something the size of a cupboard (a coffin, even), to spend the night in. The sheer density of the place should've seen the virus running rampant, so why wasn't it? What was the difference between them and us?

In a word, masking.

Vintage Swine Flu meme, c.2009.

Either because of the Bird Flu outbreak of 2005, or just for some other reason I don't know about, masking when you were sick was just part of the culture in Nippon. When you spent your life right in other people's faces, masking was more than a simple courtesy, it was probably necessary just for society to function. The payoff, now that we were in a pandemic, was clear for all to see: As of 3 May, out of a population of 25 million, Australia had 6,639 cases. By contrast, on 4 May Japan had 15,111 cases, but their population was 125 million. Clearly they had something to teach us.

Once that had been noticed, you couldn't un-see it, and by 4 July (case load: Now past 8,000) the Be Smart channel on YouTube had released an amazing video that actually showed you how well masks worked. The difference between a masked and an un-masked exhalation was almost too huge to believe.

That was enough for me: Off I went to Redbubble and ordered a trio of cloth masks (plus another one for a friend – there was a discount if you got at least four). They weren't a perfect fit, but they were better than nothing given I was working on the Hume (where I was exposed to interstate truckies coming up from the Covid hotspot that was Melbourne). They also sat against your lips and muffled your speech, which frustrated some of my customers, but I was happy to repeat myself as often as necessary. You also just had to accept that damp, faintly-fishy smell that, I suppose, is just what the inside of your lungs is like – unpleasant, but not crippling. Before long home-sewn masks were showing up everywhere, with varying levels of fit and finish, and inevitably in some cheery floral pattern. It would be a while before those iconic blue mass-produced masks started becoming available – at first they were needed by the medical workers.

The amazing thing is, it would be even longer before we found out why masking worked, and that turned out to be a tale of old mistakes and institutional inertia (the full story is worth reading, if you have the time). In brief, it took the WHO a while to notice (and accept!) that Covid-19 was aerosolised, travelling not just in droplets of mucus and saliva that fell quickly to the floor, but in the simple vapour in your breath. Handwashing and social distancing weren't enough: This virus was so infectious that a sufficient viral load could hang in a droplet in the air for several hours before infecting someone else. The only way to minimise that was to prevent it getting into the air at all, which is to say, to wear a mask. A mask would catch all that vapour while it was still exiting the lungs in big, fat droplets, as ironically, once they evaporated into small droplets they could actually waft through pretty easily. A mask therefore wasn't really protection for you – it was protection for everyone else.

Like a phalanx, it would've worked brilliantly if we'd all been doing it. But like Thermopylae, the phalanx wouldn't hold.

Ironically, the people most likely to believe the Spartans were good (for anything, at all, ever), are the most likely to've been the Ephialtes in this situation.

The true politicisation of masking was still in the future, but the people who'd soon be buying into it were already here. One of the early ones I ran into sneered that "they" told you the masks would work, so how come even if you wore one you could smell a fart? ("What are you telling me, mate? That you don't know the difference between a fart and a virus? Okay then.") But the most insistent one I ran into early on was the guy who bought my lounge set when I sold it off through the local FB buy, swap & sell. As a courtesy, I always wore a mask when people came to pick up what they'd bought: Again, I worked on the friggin' highway, so I figured if the virus was going to get into this small, out-of-the-way country town, it was probably going to be through me. And for being responsible like that, he gave me no end of shit, lecturing me black and blue even while I was helping him lift the lounge set into his ute. This was the Trump era, so I was long past arguing with people like this: I'd just say, "Oh, you're one of those, are you?" and then refuse to speak to them any further. Why waste the time? They'd just told you their opinions were all worthless.

Little did I realise this guy was basically The Hobbit and ahead of me lay a entire Lord of the Rings trilogy of abuse and conspiracy-addled bullshit. Because as I said, I was selling off my furniture, ready to move out. My time under the Snowies was coming to an end, and although the pandemic itself was unable to break my brain, the people where I was going would prove another matter...

But this post is already far longer than I expected it be. To be continued, in Part II.

¹ There were funnier outcomes as well though. The sudden shutdown of transport meant that, on 20 April, West Texas Oil Futures famously went negative, from $18 to -$37 per barrel, as storage facilities reached capacity and the next wave of tankers were still inbound. Sadly, this didn't translate to the pump, as nice as it would've been to fill up the car and then head inside to collect your rebate...

² The first word originally wasn't Citizens, it was much shorter.