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.