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.