After chatting with a friend from my home town in the Uk last night, I realised how differently the Pandemic affects us here in Brisbane, Australia. When I look at Facebook and hear of old colleagues dying from Covid or how stressed out nursing is in the UK, I have no idea how bad the situation is.
My friend told me, “I feel like this is the new normal and that things will not change,” after spending time isolated at home since March last year. Opportunities arose at Christmas to mingle, but she chose not to and just as well as a sharp rise of infection ensured afterwards.
We in Brisbane fared well with the virus. Our Prime Minister decided to announce Covid 19 as a Pandemic a few days before the WHO did. He immediately set to action to prevent people from covid infected areas for entering our country.
The day before Brisbane was to go into lockdown; I knew it was coming. My son had invited me to a football match free of charge as he had won a balcony for friends to occupy for the evening. I went with a sense of mourning that this would be the last time for a long while before we would be free to do this again.
It was nice meeting his friend from Nottingham who was on holiday in Australia: lovely to hear that Nottingham accent again. After sharing a room in a hostel with another person who coughed all night, he had flown from Melbourne. I worried that he might have caught the wretched illness too. Thankfully he hadn’t.
It was lovely sitting in the stall with both sons and their friends, and I made the most of the experience. Practically half the seating areas were unoccupied even before the restrictions commenced.
The next day lockdown began. You could only go to work, walk for exercise or go shopping and if you didn’t comply you would get a fine.
I expected to become busy at work thinking loads of COVID cases would be lining up for treatment. But, COVID patients did not increase, and they cancelled all electoral surgery. As a Casual Nurse, I had no work and was concerned about my income. Thankfully lockdown came to a prompt end.
Even after those few weeks, it was nice to get back to work and drink in cafes again. From then on, restrictions eased more and more. We were able to go about our business as usual. Unlike before the Pandemic, I noticed that I could find a seat on the train in the morning. Before COVID I had to stand, so things were not truly back to normal.
After coming out of lockdown, Melbourne quickly went back in due to a breach in their hotel isolation arrangements. They had to stay that way a long time, and during which a woman flew from there to Brisbane without isolating. The response was for Nursing staff to wear a mask at work and on public transport.
After zero transmissions, we lived a relatively everyday life until a quarantine hotel cleaner caught the virus’s mutant strain. Brisbane and Greater outer Brisbane were ordered to self-isolate again for three days. No community transmissions occurred so the following two weeks we were free to leave our houses but to always wear a mask when gathering indoors with other people.
We are back to living life there as normal as possible, but life has never returned to how it was before March 2020.
I asked my son at the weekend, how his Nottingham friend was. His friend had wanted to be stuck in Australia during the Pandemic but was ordered to make his way home. At Christmas, in the UK, he caught the mutant version of the virus but has since recovered,
