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.