It happened last night ...
I ended up presenting in emergency last night, as a visitor, to advocate on behalf of my unconscious daughter dressed with a FFP2 mask and a pair of welders' protective glasses.
Desperate circumstances call for desperate measures :)
When I rang emergency, with my 25 years old child lying next to me unconscious for fifty minutes, hyperventilating with convulsions, and after waiting an unusual long time for their arrival (45 mins instead of 20), the poor paramedics tell me that the Royal Brisbane Hospital is now mixing covid and non covid patients in emergency.
I could not believe my ears.
The Mater Hospital did not, he said, so we opted for the Mater of course.
As for Private hospitals, despite us having private cover, and the Prime Minister saying that non-covid urgent cases should be redirected to private hospitals who do not accept covid patients, the three major private hospital next to our home do not accept serious cases like my daughter's and have refused her access systematically for a few years now. They claim they are 'not equipped' for it, the reason changes with time, but the result is the same: no access.
When you arrive at the hospital with the ambulance, paramedics are in charge of their patients until the patient has been allocated a bed in the emergency ward, which means that they have to wait in queue in front of the hospital, sometimes for hours in order to get a bed for the patient; they are put at risk as well if you mix the patients.
If you wonder where the paramedics are when you call 000, now you know.
At a rate of one presentation to emergency services every ten days at the moment, both myself and my daughter are now at risk. For my daughter, it can be deadly, she is at very serious risk. If I get it, I put her at risk as well. So, wearing the welders' glasses was not too outrageous at the end. For the first time, emergency staff was also wearing eye shields, there are not RAT tests available atm. If anything, my initiative was greeted with respect.
My daughter is now fine, but it did not go smoothly...
In my first sentence, I used the word 'advocate' because this is what I need to do when I go to emergency to accompany my daughter. I often need to advocate for her if she is not in a position to do so for herself when needed.
It is the first time I describe a hospital emergency experience, as a witness of these troubles times.
Yesterday, for example, the ambient chaos leading to finding a bed in a non-covid space was not the end of our troubles. She ended up next to the cubicle of a young adult girl who would not stop swearing loudly with her friend .... for six hours. After an hour, I asked her calmly 'to stop speaking loudly and saying the F word every sentence while my daughter was unconscious next to her and needed calm' to which she replied
'I don't give a F if your daughter is unconscious'.
I was shocked beyond belief. I asked a nurse to 'please ask her to be quiet'. She ignored me. It turned out she was a junior nurse, so she probably did not know how to respond.
Normally, I could have cried, I could never imagine someone saying something like that in such a situation, but I did not. All the tears have gone, something in my body was taking over, it was not time for tears, I was in surviving mode. I tried to concentrate on my goal. I was speaking out my goal loudly in my head, focus, focus, you want your daughter to get care in order to regain consciousness and get out of here ASAP.
So I tried hard to not let it affect me and stopped engaging with the rude girl. She went on like a dog on a bone ... for hours, I could not even give her the excuse of mental illness (we once had to deal with a schizophrenic, it was not easy with two security guards having to restrain her, but it was not her fault), no, she was simply plain nasty. She went on insulted me loudly with words I could not even understand (good). The tone was not good, I knew it was bad. Her words got muffled and more muffled until I could not hear them anymore.
I put one hand on my daughter's ear, but the nurses could not stop her.
Why?
Because she is a 'customer'. All what the nurses could do was to de-escalate the situation at all costs, that is what they are trained to do, and at no time, could they tell her that she had gone too far since the 'customer is Queen'.
The girl ended up turning the situation around saying that I was the one abusing her, asking a nurse 'for me to be expelled from the ward'! Fortunately, anyone in the ward could figure her out, and heard the insults. A doctor working on a computer was just in front of us. Insults were also randomly directed to the hospital staff.
When things calmed down, after a few hours, with my daughter still unconscious, I was called to talk to the head nurse and excuses from the hospital staff were presented to me. The nurse in charge of my daughter was clearly feeling so bad, and finally accepted my early request of moving my daughter's bed, but as I could see, with no bed available, it was very unpractical for them to do so, so I said the best thing now was probably to hurry the process of giving my daughter the pain relief we had been waiting for all that time, that required senior doctor authorisation (and they are not easy to get hold of in public hospitals), so that she could be put out of unconsciousness and that we can be out 20 min later, as is usually the case. The senior staff was busy elsewhere on a very urgent case right then, so, at the end, they astutely tried to get the girl out quickly, and apologised to us again.
I don't understand why they apologised to me, these people are heroes. I told them how grateful I was, having them working in such difficult situations. It is the girl who should have apologised, not them.
This is insane how muzzled professional people are these days. The girl has no idea she has done anything wrong, so she will continue somewhere else. Worse, she goes around presenting herself as a victim.
Last time, in another hospital, my daughter was put on a chair in the emergency ward, and slid off while unconscious. No one noticed because they were insanely busy. I caught her, just in time when they finally let me see her in the emergency ward, and I had to advocate for a bed.
This is what happens when the hospital is understaffed and chaos reigns.
Anyway, while this is not the main object of this post, this gives you a first hand real life account of the sense of chaos we are living in at the moment.
Queensland has a critical shortage of covid-tests, so people roam around the street unable to know if they are positive or not, who is positive and who is not. Nowhere is safe right now for people at risk.
I hugged someone who ended up testing positive on the 3rd. My first reaction was to get tested since we had support workers coming the following day. I would need to let them know that I was a 'contact case'. Well, 'contact case' yes, and no, since the new definition of 'contact case', this month, is that you have to have spent four consecutive hours in an enclosed space with someone. This new definition also assumes that you are 'fully vaccinated', therefore less likely to contact and transmit than during the 15 days rule when not enough people were vaccinated. This convenient truth allows the government to cut the contact-isolation period from 15 to 7 days, and this applies almost worldwide.
So now I needed to be tested. How?
The closest drive-through testing site located in the local shopping centre car park near my home had closed. Why now? This was, after all, the first month Queensland was really hit by Covid following the controversial mid-December interstate borders opening in great part forced by the Federal government.
Our prime Minister said 'your GP should be your first port of call if you have covid'. I thought this made sense, since 'at risk' patients, like asthmatics, may benefit from preventative medicines such as monoclonal antibodies or antivirals to lower symptoms, and only their GP would be able to assess properly. So, my General Practitioner practice was called, the practice receptionist acted as a barrier to protect what turned out to be over solicited GPs, and told us about the closest walk-in respiratory clinic.
We called the respiratory clinic, and were told that they only accepted to test symptomatic cases. We did not qualify. In fact I was not even a proper 'contact case' according to the definition. Yet, I am looking after someone who could lose her life if she gets hit by covid, and several support workers may lose their income if they can't come and work this week, but I do not qualify.
Ok, let's go to the chemist and get a Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) then. Nothing there either, and no estimated date of arrival. 'They will come soon', I am told. 'Are we talking about days, weeks?', I asked. 'We can't tell, perhaps two weeks?'. The chemist did not know, and this was pervasive everywhere, total void in key communication.
I went online, and clearly, there were no tests, rapid or not rapid tests. People were queuing for up to six hours with their kids under the sun, and had to give up when the late afternoon storms grounded them. If you wanted to go through a drive-through, you may have to drive a long way, wait for three hours, and the test-site could close any time when they felt overwhelmed after these three hours. The closest to our home announced they were closing at 12pm! I saw with my own eyes hundreds of metres of queue under the Queensland sun in front of the Royal Brisbane hospital emergency department doors as early as the 28th of December. Worse: the main entrance was shared by the covid-fever patients (you could come only if you had a fever) and emergency entrance patients and visitors. See below, fever clinic on the left, and red emergency sign on the far right.
I was horrified. I had to ask my daughter to stop breathing as we were passing this point to leave emergency.
So, no tests.
You would think that our state and federal administrators had planned for it: plenty of time (2 years), plenty of modellings (overseas), and plenty of non spent health care money compared to other Western democracies (2 years with next to nil covid-cases in Qld Hospitals).
Well, no.
The worse was that it could be done properly, our state was a demonstration to the world of what could be achieved with good governance. We had been so lucky with less than 10 active cases as far as early December 2021, a third of them hospitalised, but we were now bullied by a neo-liberal federal government to open the borders with no proper means nor planning to do so. One and only one state resisted: Western Australia.
What is not counted or countable does not exist ...
Incidentally, No Test means no reliable Test Numbers, no reliable test numbers means 'stats look good', parents of overseas students massively sending their kids to study in supposedly 'safe Queensland' reassured. It means shareholders reassured. I sincerely don't think it was planned that way, but you wonder, and for sure, Qld Health figures read from afar are misleading with 20K cases today. It is far more than that and exponential.
I do not dispute the need to open the borders, I understand that it is good for our economy, I dispute the lack of reasonable planning and duty of care. We could have done it correctly, we had the means, including the excellent Check In Qld QR Code app, and a compliant population trusting their (unfortunately former) Qld Health Minister, and even an innovative covid-test created in Brisbane.
This is what is infuriating. It could have been done properly.
Right now, people don't even bother register their covid status, it does not achieve much for them, obviously, even in terms of planning for the government. Good luck with asking them to get vaccinated again or any other form of compliance.
When trust if lost, compliance is lost.
With a child at risk, I was now fearing the next presentation. What would happen, would we have to share the same queue as covid-fever patients?
Well, it does not matter, people are properly vaccinated now, you may say. Well, yes and no. Most people got vaccinated with their second dose of Astrazeneca in July, August, September 2021 in Queensland but their third booster dose would be due six months later, now. Technically, until end of December at least, you were considered fully vaccinated if your second dose was less than six months old. I was allowed to have my third booster (as an early vaxed as well) on the 29th of December, exactly six months after my second dose. At the time, I was not even allowed to book my booster dose earlier and my 'vaccination status' on Qld App would be ticked (green tick) if I was vaccinated within six months until then.
We now know that the Astrazenecca second dose works only 3-4 months, which means that on the day our Prime Minister announced
'let's go on with our lives and learn to live with covid' mid December,
people were not 'really fully vaccinated', they were in their 4th, 5th of 6th month of Astrazeneca second dose with seriously reduced immunity after the third month of AZ.
The result is that it was now going to spread at a faster rate than in the US who had Pfizer.
People did not know it, they celebrated the fact we were seemingly fully vaccinated (80%+). They thought they were fully vaccinated because they were within the sixth month bracket, they trusted the PM, so they went nut partying between Christmas and New year after two years of frustration, especially young adults who had most suffered socially from a very long lockdown.
By the 6th of January, most people I knew had been infected, yet they were all considered fully vaccinated. Of these people, not all of them reported, 50% did. The symptoms were often quite mild, and there was some satisfaction that for those who went through it ok, we would reach herd immunity that way by April 2022, so that it would not be such a bad thing after all to contract it with a less virulent variant, while we still had some vaccination effect.
Well, yes and no.
No because it will only give a few months immunity, and it includes the risk of long covid damage.
No, because 30% of cases admitted for Omicron in France, for example, were immuno-compromised people who were still at risk.
No because young children 5-11 were still unvaccinated and were due to come back to school shortly.
Literally a couple of days before the school were meant to open their door for the new term, the Qld Premier announced the school would not open before two weeks, until the kids would have at least their first dose. As we know it today, the first dose protects only at 20-30%. Damage control policy.
Right now, my colleagues with young children are stuck at home again at very short notice and if the principal breadwinner needs covid testing to go outside to work, there is no test.
Supermarket shelves are empty because supermarket workers are calling sick (sick/lack of tests).
My support workers can't work for the same reason.
Basically, the economy is now seriously paralysed.
And if I was not privileged to be able to work at home, where would I be?
If you think that I could leave on a carer government pension, enquire, it is slightly more than unemployment benefit.
It is far less than the outrageous 750Aud/w the government gives to people who lost their job because of covid, in alignment with other main Western democracies.
Carers like me, of course, do not qualify for it since 'they don't have a job they lost'.
A slap in the face for carers with no income, who get approx 400 Aud a week, or unemployed people who get 315 Aud a week, all below the poverty line.
Why do we think that they needed less than people who just lost their job because of covid?
No more subsidies from the government for these people now. Ok, fair enough, and we knew it would not go forever, but what now? Well, they have to go to work at all costs without the ability to be tested. We have gone from one extreme to another.
I just read on ABC News that meat workers, truck drivers, support workers, school teachers are now asked to go to work as long as they have no symptoms, same things for nurses, even if they are contact cases. Will they risk to go to work when they have to weigh the benefit of bringing a much needed income to their family versus bringing them Covid-19? Tough choices.
Who will employ support workers who are covid contact cases?
Roads are empty again, just like in March 2020. Last night, as I drove back home, it was totally eery, a sense of déjà vu. The difference with March 2020 is that we were then 'in confinement', now it is the opposite, we are told to 'go and live with covid' but the result is the same: empty streets.
All we needed was appropriate level of covid-testing capacity for the December policy :(
It was not that difficult. There is no doubt that the test shortage will get worse as Omicron cases are rocketing all around the world, including new outbreaks in Asia, so yes, soon, we'll be able to say it is conjunctural, but so far, no, it was not conjunctural, it was bad planning.
The last covid test kit (x2 tests) that I bought was 29.50 Aud. That was in November.
My chemist friend in Europe tells me she buys them 2.50 euros and sells them 4 euros. What is going on there?
I kind of agree with Morrison that not everything can be free and that we need to let the free market do its job, but this will not gaslight me, this is not a reply to the question: where are the kits?
There could be another explanation. She also tells me that the kits are all coming from China. Is it where the real problem is? Well, I would like to know because I would respect more a Prime Minister who says that as a result of his strong political stance against China, this is what the diplomatic retaliation means for us, rather than it is a case of bad planning. Well, let's hope it is not the case.
Sadly, the 15 mins wonderful Rapid Test, designed on the pregnancy test model we all enjoy around the world, is a local Brisbane invention. We should be proud of it, and manufacture it around the clock,
but no...
The government authorities (TGA) for at-home approval and distribution in Australia only arrived late 2021 so all current orders are being sent overseas. The TGA is currently blamed heavily by the media but when asked, they reply that they can deliver an authorisation within three days. The very very latest blame has been put on the Commonwealth.
Who should we believe?
All this blame shifting does not mask the fact that the PM did not have the means of his policy when he opened the borders mid-December.
.
Yet, we had a compliant population, innovative and technical capacity.
Such a shame, good planning of the testing kits availability could have saved the economy.
There is another problem, and this is less than trivial: No tests, no reliable numbers, no proper administrative technical covid-cases monitoring capacity means that the country is now a candidate to become the next birthplace of a dangerous variant.
Well, on a little note of hope and as an anecdote, it is good to know that when governments fail, civil society takes over and it is not always a bad thing. A young programmer decided to do something for the community and created in the span of six hours a website to identify where the Rapid test kits are located in the country on Monday the 3rd of January 2022. It will not save us, but I salute him! It is called Find a RAT! (https://findarat.com.au/)
There again, in a country with plenty of space like Australia, drive through is also the answer, not only for testing with young children, but also to shop safely. I managed to do it last week, for the first time, and I loved it. I received an sms to let me know when my grocery order was ready to pick up within the 2-hours time slot of my choice. Yet, I could clearly see that the supermarket was not ready. Not many spots were available for collection (called Click & Collect), and I was charged twice the amount of my weekly groceries on my bank statement without asking for my permission because they did not have some items I ordered online, so they changed them for substitutes, and I was billed twice. My money came back, but 'within 2-5 working days', I can only imagine how stressful this could be for many families to be billed twice their weekly grocery bill. Of course, it was blamed on IT processes and capabilities by Coles Customer service officers. For me, it is only rampant lack of planning.
I think private enterprise like Coles and Woolworth, in this case, had plenty of time to be ready in the last two years as well, and to perhaps 'do their bit for the community', get drive-thru ready. For now, there is only a 'symbolic effort' as far as I can tell. The business as usual On time Delivery for supermarket shelves stock is not either an appropriate business model for the pandemic. Like at home, they should have three weeks of stockage ready at all time right now.
The folly continues with opening of international flights in the coming weeks, and still no RATS, which, we are told, will bring Delta in Queensland.
We went from total muzzling with strict confinement in March 2020 (socialist mind) to 'Let's Live with Covid Unhibited' in December 2021 (Liberal/Nationals mind) and the result is the same: empty streets. Maybe there is a middle path, non?
Only moderation will guide us.
Hopefully, the generation who has lived through this will end up becoming a truly resilient generation. Let's hope we will survive it though :)
