27 June, 2021
It’s 2021 and the COVID pandemic hasn’t ended. In fact, it’s getting
worse globally now with the Delta variant. Life in Sydney had been pretty
normal for us from August 2020 until two days ago. There was a short lockdown last
December in the Northern beaches but that did not really affect us. However, my
husband is getting so used to working from home that he no longer shaves.
Nowadays his moustache is dropping into his mouth when he speaks and he has to
spit it out. His beard is 4cm, longer than anyone of Chinese ethnicity I’ve
ever seen! He looks like a Ming Dynasty man! If this working from home thing continues for
him, I wonder if he will accidentally choke on his moustache one day?
Now Greater Sydney is in lockdown for two weeks starting from 6pm
yesterday, because of the infiltration of the Delta variant, and the Australia-New
Zealand travel bubble has been suspended. The infiltration occurred on 17 June,
when a limousine driver got infected. Then, pretty soon, from a CCTV footage at
the Bondi Westfield, we saw how the virus spread from one person to another in
a two second encounter as two people walked past each other 60cm apart without
masks. New cases increased by 2 everyday until 21 June, and by then I was
already getting pretty nervous, as I am working in a high risk setting as a GP,
pregnant and had not been vaccinated against COVID yet. And by then, I already had
a feeling that lockdown would be inevitable and already started topping up on
the food supply from the supermarket before people made their last minute
rushes, and ordered 25 boxes of My Muscle Chef ready-made meals. But I don’t
understand people’s obsession about the toilet papers – that’s definitely not on
the top of our shopping list. Then the daily case numbers started increasing
rapidly: 5, 10, 18, 11, 29, 30.
The situation in Taiwan, my home country, is not good either. Community
outbreak had already gotten out of hand by May, and my grandpa who has dementia
got kicked out of the motel he was staying in. Luckily, the relatives found
social housing for him, but his dementia deteriorated rapidly. Now Delta is in
the community as well. Unfortunately the death rate in Taiwan is too high in
proportion to the number of people diagnosed, which means there are lots of
undiagnosed people around. I think they should stop mucking around and just
lockdown! The annual Taiwan Association of Family Medicine conference has been
changed into an online conference for the first time ever, which meant I could
actually join this year’s conference online and collect CPD points for my
Family Physician specialist registration in Taiwan.
I think Sydney’s lockdown had happened too late. Can only pray that
things will be good enough for reopening in two weeks’ time.
