Disclaimer, first up – I’m not a social worker and I don’t know much about training to become one other than knowing it requires a degree. A neighbour is undertaking this degree and informed me that she was required to role-play and pretend to be someone in need of assistance from a social worker, like a homeless person, or perhaps someone who needs to navigate the intersection of aged care and hospital. The aim of the exercise is to present some real-life scenarios and practice techniques for helping people who might be distressed or unable to adequately communicate what they need.
I thought this sounded like a good idea. The students disagreed. They refused on the grounds that it was unethical and potentially harmful to, ‘pretend to be’ something they are not. The teacher accepted their position wholeheartedly and the exercise was abandoned.
The trouble is, social work is about helping people who are almost always different to you. To me, the fact that students refuse to imagine the lives of those less fortunate than themselves represents a triumph of neoliberalism – the celebration of the personalisation of problems. A person who is homeless becomes a “homeless person” – it is an identity, rather than a situation. We know it is now part of their identity because 23 year old social work students refuse to role play, ‘being a homeless person’. They’re not role playing being homeless. They’re role playing being a homeless person.
This conveniently switches the focus from the structural reasons for homelessness, to the homeless person themselves. Everything is oriented around the “homeless person’s” experience of life, obviating the need to examine, discuss or mobilise around the reasons for becoming homeless in the first place.
There are various terms to refer to the cultural shift towards the individual and their identity, and away from the broader structures and institutions of society. Many of these terms have been adopted and bastardised by the far right. We are warned about ‘identitarianism’, where newer identities are dismissed as nothing more than rarefied, gilded narcissism.
In the last week Viktor Orban genially explained this phenomena to a credulous Tucker Carlson, whilst the latter squirmed with delight. In America and the rest of Europe, the focus is on the self. In Hungary, he opined, the central unit of society is self sacrifice to the [Christian] family. We, in the West, are all a bunch of self obsessed cry babies, with no understanding of our broader place in the world, the explicit suggestion being that we should stop supporting Ukraine and all be nicer to Russia because Orban lives next door. Orban’s performance was a master class in populism, playing up accessible, domestic issues (culture war) while ignoring the broader context, (that the US is helping Ukraine to escape from Russia’s control, just like it did with Hungary 50 years ago). Perhaps Orban is hoping for a window-office when Hungary becomes part of Russia again – who knows?
Anyway, my point is that all of these culture wars are nothing more than naked power. Every time someone asserts the terminating clause, ‘I don’t identify as….’ any and all other considerations are rendered null. The idea that one’s personal identity is so sacrosanct it cannot possibly be imagined by another human being has been floating around for a long time, but it’s taken a while for it to realise its full power – the complete sterilisation of political change.
Representing an identity that is not your own opens the door to taking liberties, for sure, and it should not be done lightly. We are right to have championed the views of marginalised perspectives to obtain better insights into how things actually are in the world, and how they differ for different people. However, there’s a point where things get silly – women arguing, for instance, that men cannot be obstetricians (this is a remarkably common position). Men’s and women’s bodies are different in many ways, not just the grosse reproductive stuff. Our organs, endocrine systems, vascular systems……so many things. To suggest that a man cannot be an obstetrician leads us to a place where women cannot ever perform a surgery on men and vice versa. Can we only provide services to people who are exactly like us? Do I need to find a surgeon who is a red head, has working dogs and a motorbike?
Because that’s where this stuff leads. We should always encourage ourselves and others to try to imagine what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes, to have someone else’s identity. We should listen to others and let it inform our own views. Yes, we might fuck it up, but it’s important to try. The fidelity of identity is the most dangerous game of purity politics.
Are all those YA books about foppish vampires are written by actual teenagers? Or actual vampires?
Sometimes people wonder about the point of something like sociology or cultural studies, but seldom seem to criticise the purpose of anthropology. Anthropology, as most ‘westoids’ think of it, is the practice of studying funny, non western cultures. At its core is an exoticism that renders ‘the other’ as simplistic and inferior. One might suggest that this is an artefact of the process itself – when an outsider makes abstract pronouncements about how ‘a society works’, it’s bound to come up with some over-simplifications.
Others, however, genuinely think that western society and culture is uniquely sophisticated and nuanced, and broadly structured around the Enlightenment principles of rationalism and scientific thought. To an anthropologist, this is the funniest idea yet.
If social media has brought us anything, it has elucidated and amplified the rich silliness that characterises a complex society, and has always done so. Indeed, as our collective ideas about how the world operates become increasingly self-referential, we reach new and ever more vertiginous pinnacles of silliness. The madness of crowds grows ever madder the more we listen to the crowd.
In the past I’ve considered two topics – the Covid19 pandemic and what we might call ‘gender business’. My views on both topics are fairly ordinary – I’m broadly convinced by the emergent realities of both. What interests me much, much more, is the development of orthodoxies around both topics. How are mainstream views constructed? How are deviant views presented? What’s normal? What’s not? What’s legitimate? What’s not?
Unsurprisingly, the final arbiter of all of these questions is some old fashioned ideas about power. Access to an ‘old fashioned’ education enabled me to broadly predict the shape of the discourse of both social issues. For example, in order to get a grip on the emerging Covid19 pandemic, I read a lot of scientific papers. Some of them were errant bullshit. Or, perhaps I should say, some of them were more ‘speculative’ than others. I used my general sense of scepticism to assess the veracity of these papers, but importantly, I could express my cynicism using some pretty ordinary language/notation that I learned as part of a fairly ordinary education in statistics. This is a privileged position.
Likewise, the gender debate. For the past few years, most western countries have broadly (and not uncontroversially) adopted a model of gender that relegated biological differences between humans as no more than a locus of potential discrimination – like having a particular skin colour (as one famous feminist, MacKinnon, recently stated). It followed, therefore, that our bodies could be seen as a kind of stage for our gender, and we could alter them in line with gender norms.
There are some obvious logical inconsistencies here. For instance, the ‘gender norms’ that one might attempt to bring one’s body in line with are based in a biological understanding of sex. Why would a person want to remove their penis in order to live ‘as a woman’?. In other words, if our physical bodies are incidental to our gender, why alter them?
Body modification is consequential. Removing one’s penis or breasts, or undergoing hormone therapy are interventions with long term ramifications. My ordinary education enabled me to look for other examples of body modification. This is, of course, not the first time in human history that we have sought to modify our bodies to bring them in line with socially defined gender expectations. Female circumcision/FGM is a long standing example of gender-affirming surgery, which of course, brings us full circle to anthropology.
Many western countries sanction FGM. Indeed, in Nordic countries, girls from African backgrounds are subject to spot-inspections upon return from overseas travel, as a deterrent against parents obtaining FGM for their daughters whilst overseas. That a western government would provide genital surgery to one group of young women to bring them in line with gender expectations, but outlaw it for another, is a perfect example of cultural relativism. What characterises many of the current debates are inconsistencies. In a system that is supposedly based on rationalism and equality, inconsistencies render the system fragile.
There are other historic examples – this is from the DES Action Group, a group representing women who were treated with synthetic hormones in order to prevent them from growing ‘too tall’. What was deemed ‘too tall’? Anything over 175cm, or about 5 foot 9 inches*. The shocking part of this particular story is the cavalier attitude with which the hormones were used – it has since emerged that this treatment resulted in a multi generational risk for particular cancers. To be clear – for a treatment to confer a cancer risk in not one, but two generations of daughters, is extremely rare.
So, it’s clear that the social discourse surrounding care for people who want to bring their bodies more in line with what they see as normal gender expression has a pretty patchy history – usually, but not always, because it has involved women’s bodies. Again – very old forms of power are extant.
And now, as 2023 rolls on, the social narrative around appropriate care for young people who express some discomfort between their own bodies and what they think the norms of gender are, is changing. I’m not across all the details, but the medical and legal protocols are changing and accessing this treatment is becoming more difficult.
Three years ago when I first found out about young people, mostly girls, having body modification treatment of some form or another, I thought of both of these examples – FGM and the tall girls. Both treatments eventually came to be socially sanctioned, both on the grounds that those involved were minors. It was very difficult for me to see how the current ‘affirmation model’ – where social and medical transition sat alongside one another as an inevitable ‘correction’ would not follow the same eventual fate.
I’m not personally invested – nor was a personally invested in the debate over the correct action to take during the pandemic, but I am absolutely fascinated by the way the discourse of what is considered legitimate, reasonable, knowable and ethical is developed and shifted over time.
I really feel that if anthropology has any value at all, it lies in its ability to look at our own social milieu as just as silly as everyone else’s.
*What’s really fascinating about this is that the estimates for the girls’ eventual height were inaccurate and that the ‘treatment’ actually did not alter the girls’ final height much at all (although for younger participants, there was a stronger effect). Researchers, in a retrospective study, compared two groups of girls – those who had received treatment and those who had not. The estimated the final height for both groups of girls. The average difference between the estimated height and the real height at adulthood was 1.1cm for the untreated girls and 1.4 for the treated girls.
I really underestimated how much work two jobs would be. Of course, as with all things, there are busy and quiet times, but when both jobs hit the busy period it gets quite busy indeed. Fortunately, both jobs were contract work, and have now ended, and so I now find myself employed more in line with my proclivities – that is to say – surfing.
I wrote a little while ago about ticks, specifically the the holocyclus species that we have locally. Ticks are the perfect example of a zoonotic clusterfuck – they perfectly illustrate the hubris of modern medical science. Ticks give people diseases in curious, non linear ways, with often ill defined pathologies and vastly different levels of severity. Oh, and some people, like myself, are naturally, genetically immune. The dullards amongst us might suggest that this is something that can be mapped onto my particular ethnicity or bloodgroup, but in the age of ‘identifying’ as various things that one is quite evidently not, I have concluded that the most logical explanation for immunity to alpha-gal allergy and disease is that I am three parts bandicoot.
Bandicoots live here, they are a stalwart of coastal NSW. Bandicoots are common and also, helpfully, really really cute. They have long prehensile noses that they use for spreading diseases around corners. The funny thing is – you never see them. They’re nocturnal, so that doesn’t help, but there are plenty of nocturnal Australian animals that you see all the time, everything from possums to those gamers with those pale, vestigial legs. Unlike the gamers, bandicoots spend a lot of their lives snuffling around in the leaf litter getting things done.
I’ve only seen them a couple of times, but I know there’s heaps of them. Bandicoots are absolutely essential to the life cycle of the paralysis tick. Without bandicoots there would be almost no ticks at all. Yes, ticks live on all sorts of animals, but bandicoots provide the nursery for the ticks. Without them, the numbers drop precipitously. Bandicoots are the only animal that is completely immune to the tick venom -they can literally carry thousands of ticks with no ill effect. And, as I said, they like to hang around in the leaf litter, which is an excellent place to acquire four million of your closest friends.
Paralysis tick – holocyclus
Ticks also like it wet – their eggs and larvae are prone to drying out. Indeed, the only truly effective treatment for tick control is diatomaceous earth – it essentially glues up with the eggs and, to a lesser extent, the larvae, and they dry out. When it’s wet there are more ticks. Usually, winter is a quiet time for ticks locally because our winters are pretty dry but the last two winters have been very wet, and the ticks have been on a rampage.
Currently, we haven’t had any decent rain for about a month – we appear to have returned to a more typical weather pattern, where the winter days are sunny and dry and reasonably warm. I would have expected the tick numbers to drop away to almost nothing however, that’s not the case. The ticks are going crazy this winter.
For the last six months or a couple of local government bodies have been shooting foxes. Foxes eat bandicoots. You can see where this is going. Indeed, there is such a boom in the bandicoot population that areas of suburbia look like they’ve been shelled by the world’s cutest and most poorly organised military (bandicoots leave little holes surrounded by a mound of dirt). Naturally, Australian suburbia has little time for Lawn Assaults, and so the level of consternation is high.
What’s really fascinating though is that there is so little research and information about ticks in south eastern Australia. We know how the mechanisms by which they fuck humans up, but we know surprisingly little about their life cycle and numbers – their ecology. Aside from the statement that bandicoots are important to the life cycle of the ticks, there’s almost nothing that gives any idea of how important. Now, as the bandicoot numbers explode, we’re getting a sense of the impact on tick numbers.
An example – I was talking to a landholder last week who did a cool burn years ago through a patch of Red Gum forest on his property. What returned, after the burn, was a monocrop of needle grass – basically, sharp pointy grass that foxes don’t like. So, the bandicoots were most impressed with the new digs and moved in in their thousands, and the tick numbers increased dramatically.
Coastal Red Gum
The importance bandicoots also helps answer some of the weirdest aspects of ticks – why are there so many in some places, but none nearby? I think it’s got something to do with how suitable the habitat is for bandicoots. Are there dogs around? Is the leaf littler thick enough? Bandicoots are also territorial, so there is an upward limit on how many one might find in an area, but that number is high.
I suppose what I’m most fascinated by is the lack of knowledge about the ecology of ticks. We live in an area where ticks regularly sicken humans and kill dogs (and other mammals) and we really don’t know that much about them.
Imagine, if you will, that I am writing the New York Times version of this story, it begins something like this,
After her third spin class was called off, in the middle of winter 2021, Sarah, a middle aged Mom from Smithsville, contacted her doctor. What, she wondered, could her non-binary, vaccinated, and hashtag masked vegan child do about the proliferation of severe allergies in her small private college?
I loathe this kind of writing. It reinforces the most common stereotypes while obliquely suggesting they don’t exist. So, this might not be that interesting to read but I’m not writer.
I’m interested in censorship. And it’s not because I’m an anti vaxxer or a vegan or GOD FORBID, a member of a ‘spin class’. What I’m interested in is the broad shape of debates – how they frame topics for our consumption, and how they change over time. The US is an obvious place to begin this discussion, because, as always, the rules of the game are clearest in the extreme cases.
For instance, this month we’ve been treated to a supposed ‘reckoning’ about vaccines – the ‘revelation’ that they don’t prevent transmission, which supposedly undermines the mandates that were in place in varying forms, across the US.
Sydney 2021 – “We’re not fucked yet”
I’m only realising now how canny NSW (Australia) Health was. In late 2021, when our vaccination drive was in full swing, and most of the state was in lockdown, targets were discussed in daily press conferences. Even that fact that there were press conferences at all was interesting.
The Premier said that the state needed to reach an 80% level of vaccination. Those with a punitive, authoritarian glint in their eye, asked – why not 100%? And the answer was always the same – because the purpose of the vaccine is to prevent our health system becoming overwhelmed, and 80% is what’s needed for that. At the time, the Delta variant was on the loose, and it was, correctly in my view, predicted that in the absence of vaccination, many of our hospitals would become overwhelmed, and the cumulative cost of that would be deaths from Covid AND other ailments. It does not mean that everyone had the same level of risk from Covid. I am vaccinated and I don’t have a problem with it but I felt like I could make an informed choice and others did not. I’ve also had Covid.
When the case numbers dropped precipitously following widespread vaccination, many asked if NSW should pursue an elimination strategy like Victoria. The answer was no – that we should assume Covid would spread, and assume that the protection from infection was short lived. The mRNA vaccines were never meant to be sterilising. This has played out.
In fact, as NSW opened up, case numbers increased drastically and hospitals were under severe strain. The vaccine did prevent the collapse of the health system, I am confident of that. Whether the health system is fit for purpose is another matter…..
And yet, in the US, this narrative operated differently. There was a stronger moralising tone, and more polarisation. And, quite naturally, it leads to an inevitable pendulum swing. In the last couple of weeks people have claimed that the mandates were bullshit because they were predicated on stopping the spread of the disease, and the GOTCHA moment is the acknowledgment from government that they prevent transmission. This kind of thing massively undermines public trust.
In the US, most universities are still requiring healthy young people to get 4th boosters in order to attend campus. It is very difficult to see how this aligns with the information about the risk/benefit profile of the booster shots, especially for males. (Universities in Australia – for overseas readers – have never mandated the vaccine for attendance, although almost all students received it. A fourth booster is not recommended for young people at all)
It’s politics that shifts the narratives about what is the right thing to do. NSW Health made no bones about why there needed to be a certain level of vaccination, and resisted the urge to keep restrictions further than December (when NSW reached the vaccination target). People could moralise all day long, but the truth of it was that NSW Health’s aim was to avoid football fields full of people gasping like stranded Murray River cod. And, importantly, there was no suggestion that more was known about the vaccines that was actually known.
There are some people who did not get vaccinated, and believed they would be fine without it, and they probably will. This was known then, as it is now. It’s the moralising bullshit that goes alongside it that is the dangerous thing. I’ve chosen this example because we see censorship – as in the US model, where complete fealty to a particular narrative was dictated and condoned – as ultimately problematic and divisive. Some elements of the discussion were censored. NSW did a reasonable job of not fucking things up in that regard.
So, let’s let’s look at an example where we don’t do so well; treatment for gender dysphoria. I don’t have skin in this game, but I am interested in how the narrative is shaped, and what the possibly consequences are.
There is a fundamental inconsistency in the way gender care is administered in NSW. Having gender dysphoria is no longer considered to be a medical condition. This is the consequence of lobbying from the trans community. I am not suggesting that is bad – communities should advocate for their needs and they should be listened to. Being transgender is commonly positioned as the ‘same as being gay’ – an incontrovertible fact of life that is not a medical or mental health issue.
Yet, totalising narratives often conflate things that are not the same – for instance, people who are gay are not routinely asking for medical care to change their bodies. Quite the opposite – the history of gay rights has been fighting to get the government and medical establishment to quietly piss off out of their lives, and to get involved when asked (i.e., around health issues that disproportionately affect gay people).
It’s difficult to argue for a medical treatment/body modification for something that is not an illness without getting into some very woolly culturally bound territory about what bodies are supposed to look like. Female circumcision – the complete removal of the clitoris and/or sewing the vagina almost shut – is gender affirming surgery, but the state won’t pay for it. Indeed, in Australia it is criminalised, for both minors and adults.
Another example – until the 1990s in Australia, teenaged girls who were predicted to grow to be taller than 175cm were prescribed DES, a hormone to arrest their growth. DES comes with intergenerational cancer risk – this means, the daughters of some of these women developed reproductive cancers. The cancer risks were known many years before the treatment was stopped. This was also gender affirming care – women should not grow taller than 175cm, because this will make them, ‘unattractive’ to men.
It’s clear that humans are very diverse. There are some people who believe themselves to be, ‘in the wrong body’, and throughout history, this has always been the case. There are 8 million of us, so you can guarantee that whatever experience there is out there, someone’s having it. Obviously though, there’s a diversity. It is most probable that one person’s experience of being transgender may be different to another person’s. This should not come as a surprise, and yet, the totalising narrative of ‘treatment’ conflates all experiences into one.
There is an assumption, for instance, that transitioning is exactly that one is attempting to change one’s body from one gender to another. Medical support is premised on this trajectory. First, you must live as the opposite gender, and convince a psychologist that you are sufficiently aligned with their bimodal model of gender. The, you may begin hormones and progress to surgery. This is still the medical model and it is criticised by many who are subject to this treatment pathway as, ‘gatekeeping’.
Many trans advocates criticise this highly directional model. Some would like to keep their penis (apologies for the blunt language), or perhaps have their breasts removed but not take hormones. Others would like to change their legal status but keep their body as it is. For a few people, transgenderism is a philia – part of a sexual desire/kink, and body modification is an amplification of that. Also, there are some people who cannot be made adequately aware of the consequences of various treatments, in order to give consent.
There is a huge diversity of experiences but the ‘treatment’ pathway is very uniform. Affirm and set the wheels in motion.
Now clearly, there is a difference, I would argue, between a young autistic girl, who is completely socially isolated and spends almost her entire life online in trans-support networks, who cannot see a version of herself as an adult woman who wants to ‘change’ into a boy, and a 30 year old man who has finally realised his desire to change gender. There’s a difference between a 25 year old person who would like to have a mastectomy to alleviate dysphoria but not take hormones.
Our medical system should recognise that everyone is different, and importantly, should be able to ensure that people are adequately aware of the long term consequences of their decisions.
Were the girls who were given growth stunting hormones adequately aware of their long term cancer risk? Were their parents? And, if a teenage girl says she consents to genital circumcision, and her parents consent, why isn’t this legitimate?
What’s interesting to me is the shape of these debates. Two years ago those who raised concerns about the way that gender affirming care was carried out were subject to censure of various kinds. This is now less so, as the consequences are more widely known and felt, and simply, more people undertake this form of medical treatment and the full range of outcomes are realised.
And, as with the ‘tall girls’, social norms around gendered bodies changed. I myself am scraping 6ft, and find the idea that I’d be medicated against tallness deeply offensive. And yet, it was happening to my teenaged peers (unbeknownst to me).
There are other examples where physical or surgical interventions that were once accepted are no longer used to treat dysphoria.
Apotemnophilia is body dysmorphia where a person feels that they must have a limb removed. The treatment for this extremely strong dysphoria, until the 2000s, was surgical removal of limbs. Treatment is now psychological and surgery is effectively banned.
Our current model of care and treatment for dysmorphia is arguably out of step with legal requirements surrounding consent – so called, Gillick competency. It is very difficult for a young woman with painful endometriosis to obtain a hysterectomy, but easier for a young woman to have potentially sterilising gender affirming treatment. Both of these rely on cultural ideas of gender. In the first case, the woman who claims she never wants children is almost always denied bodily autonomy, on the grounds that the medical establishment believes she may want children one day. On the other hand, a teenaged trans person is considered more able to judge the consequences of sterilisation than the young woman. The context is different, absolutely, but the outcome (sterilisation) is the same.
We’re also confronted with the idea that some forms of dysmorphia are more easily considered to be ‘psychiatric’ (such as apotemnophilia or anorexia) whereas others are not; trans identities or female circumcision. If one is modifying one’s body to bring it in line with that they believe a woman should look like, then they are relying on cultural or social ideas of what this is, not ‘psychiatric’ ones. What then, is the difference between female circumcision and other forms of ‘bottom surgery’? At best, this is ethnocentrism.
Again, I’m not arguing one is right and the other is wrong. I tend towards libertarian views on bodily autonomy – you want to get it done, go for it. I support people’s right to enjoy/fuck themselves up in ways that aren’t too exxy on the public purse in the longer term.
But what does signal ‘Royal Commission’ to me, is when the laws are applied differently to one group, especially when those laws are intended to balance autonomy with duty of care. And in this case it is clear to me that the rules around consent for everything from vaccines, to sterilisation, to circumcision, to other forms of gender affirming surgery are applied very much in line with who is seeking treatment, and when.
Ah ha! Another blog post that breaks the hiatus, while I have spent several months encouraging a group of bemused adults to be a little more cynical about their world.
Let’s talk about debilitating pathogens!
Ticks are arachnids, which comes as a surprise to many people, although not to the svelte little ticks themselves, who are quite well aware of other spiders giving them the glad-eye. Ticks are absolutely bloody fascinating. They’re also endemic to my local area, and you’d be hard pressed not to know someone with the MMA – Mammalian Meat Allergy, as a result of a tick bite.
Our local species – holocyclus – which is Latin for ‘bastard that returns regularly on a bicycle’ has four main life stages; Eggs, larval, nymph and then fully grown, known locally as the shellback tick. Ticks can’t actually move in the first three stages – they are fully reliant on an animal, warm or cold blooded, to sit or lie down on them in order to get a feed. They are truly the Channel 10 gameshow of pests. Only with a feed of blood can they progress through to the next round. This is important, because many people think that ticks can move around on their own, but most of the time they can’t.
Ticks are heavily reliant on animals, in most cases, mammals like kangaroos and bandicoots, to get around. This is why people with dogs seem to have far less ticks – the dogs inhibit the movement of the native animals – basically, they keep them away from humans. Of course, sometimes the ticks bite the dog, but this isn’t one of those gently whimsical New Yorker cartoons. If you have a dog, it should be on Bravecto.
Reactions are broadly divided into two – a local, allergic reaction to the tick, potentially fatal, and a resulting mammalian meat allergy, also potentially fatal. Adult, or shellback ticks, are the only ticks that can provoke these reactions. The smaller nymph or ‘seed ticks’ can cause a local reaction, but not a dangerous one.
The mammalian meat allergy was only discovered around 20 years ago, in Sydney. It is a reaction to an epitope, Galα1-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc-R, and it is an allergy to red meat and pork, and WIFI passwords. Alpha gal (for short) is excreted by the adult shellback tick.
Humans and Old World monkeys are the only animals who do not produce alpha gal. We lost the ability to produce it, somewhere in our evolution (more of this shortly). As a consequence, humans developed the ability to produce high levels of antibodies against alpha gal. This is what causes the reaction. So, why would it be that humans and Old World monkeys are the only animals to have ‘dropped’ alpha gal?
Alpha gal resembles the coating or surface of the malaria and tuberculosis viruses. This suggests that at some point, there was a genetic bottleneck, whereby the burden of these diseases was so great that it acted as a selection event. Those who generated high antibodies against malaria or TB survived. They were the fittest. It is thought that this is why humans lost the ability to make alpha gal – because those who didn’t make it themselves saw it as foreign when it was encountered, and produced antibodies against it.
MMA is also present in other countries with ticks, although different species to those found in Australia. In Sweden, researchers examined data relating to anaphylactic responses to tick bites and found that almost everyone was susceptible, except those with blood type B (around 16% of the population in Australia, but varies depending on your population). So what is it that makes people with B blood fairly ‘immune’ to fatal tick reactions and/or resulting meat allergies?
Alpha gal looks like malaria and TB, yes, but it also looks like an antigen that people with B type blood make themselves. So, when the B team encounter alpha gal, they don’t have a reaction.
It probably does, however, make them more susceptible to malaria and TB. But at least they can eat bacon while they die.
Indeed, the relationship between alpha gal and malaria is prompting vaccine research. This paper, and there are many like it, looked at ‘natural immunity’ against malaria, amongst exposed people in Mali and Senegal. It found the people with high levels of alpha gal antibodies had high immunity to malaria. This is a Big Deal.
The same effect is observed in TB;
“Likewise, tuberculosis patients in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) had low anti-α-Gal antibody levels when compared to healthy individuals. These groundbreaking findings suggested that anti-α-Gal antibodies might protect not only against Plasmodium parasites but also against other pathogens expressing α-Gal on their surface….The current paradigm is that immunity against M. tuberculosis relies exclusively on cellular defense mechanisms. However, mounting evidence supports that humoral immunity contributes to protection against tuberculosis.” 2017
Interestingly, it’s long been known that people with O type blood were more susceptible to getting sick with malaria, and initially, some thought that these two things were related. But, they are not. O type blood promotes rosetting, which is basically a way that the virus drives blood cells to increase infection. It is a completely different mechanism to the alpha gal antibodies, which prevent infection in the first place.
Those of us with B type blood are more susceptible to malaria and TB, and indeed other viruses that ‘look’ like alpha gal. But, we’re less likely to drop dead from a fatal tick reaction.
As I said before, it’s only the adult tick that can give you a reaction. There are two ways this can happen. The first is scientifically known as ‘scratching at it like a m-fucker and pulling it out with tweezers in the dark without your glasses on’. This squeezes the tick’s body, giving you an injection of The Stuff. Anecdata suggests that a potentially fatal reaction is much more likely when it’s in your head, which is a feeling familiar to any woman who has visited a doctor at any point in her life.
The second option is that the tick itself will inject The Stuff, after 4 days of feeding. This is unlikely to happen to anyone older than a baby, as most people know when they’ve got a tick attached to them and rip it out.
The best option is to freeze them. There are now products on the market that provide a short squirt of ether that freeze-dries Ms Tick (only adult ticks AFAE (Assigned Female at Egg), feed on humans.
And, because this is Australia, you can also use this stuff;
They’ll both kill ticks but only one of them will eventually leave you in need of a re-bore.
And that’s today’s post about genetics, evolution, deadly pathogens and bicycles.
I’ve only got five minutes to write today but last night my kid was harassing me about climate change, and some of the pretty scary science that describes it. And it is scary, to be sure, but there’s also the issue of doomerism, uncertainty and the very real fact that we’re aware of the impact of burning fossil fuels and gradually, in a half-arsed, we’re cocking it up, shambling, bitching pissing and moaning kind of way, doing something about it.
It will always be too little, and will it always be too late to return us to what went before, but that’s extremism talking. And extremism, where we must have the absolute answer, the absolute solution, the absolute position to the exclusion of all others, is very much the vibe of the moment. And it’s a product of manipulation. It is how we are being taught to think about problems.
I’m increasingly seeing the media’s portrayal of all issues as either reality-driven or anti reality. We’ve been coddled into this. Ten years of inspirational Instagram tiles telling us to, ‘make our own truth’ and ‘be who we want to be’, to ‘manifest our destiny’. People who think this New Age fuckspeak is without consequences are foolish in the extreme. And it’s not a modern phenomenon either. In the 80s I remember all those books and movies about how the winsome protagonist made his dreams happen because he believed in himself. It’s the lynchpin of shifting the focus from the macro (large organisations, corporates, governments) to the micro (individuals). And now we’ve cultivated the individual so much so that we think we can bend reality. I distinctly remember going to a friend’s place to watch Live Aid, on the tele, interspersed with footage all those poor wee kids with their swollen tummies who had failed to believe in themselves.
A friend’s social media post yesterday alerted me to the newest Covid fad – the Event 401. ‘Look it up! It’s all right there, people just can’t be bothered to even look, they’re such sheep!’
Event 401 was a tabletop exercise run by Johns Hopkins in 2019, aimed at hypothetically testing global preparedness for a SARS-like pandemic.
If you recall, SARS (and MERS) were a bit of a bugger. The global response was broadly effective, albeit in the usual shambling kind of way. And then, when it all died down, everyone got together and went,
‘Phew, that was ugly, thank goodness it will never, ever happen again!’
Oh, hang on. No, that’s not quite right.
In actual fact, they got together and said, ‘Given what we know about the conditions under which SARS and MERS emerged, we should expect another zoonotic to human pandemic within the next 20 years. Let’s prepare for it (including the development of potential vaccines)’.
If Event 401 is supposed to prove that Covid19 is a hoax then I can’t wait to see these idiots discover earthquakes.
But this is where we’re at. We are at the point where completely predictable, observable reality is positioned as proof of a hoax.
“See that? It’s rain! it’s raining!”
“Yes, it is”
“Toldya. Sheep”
I’m now watching my friends argue on instagram about the participation of permaculture activists in the Melbourne protests.
‘You’re protesting with Nazis! And you’re being manipulated by Clive Palmer!’
It perfectly encapsulates the two characteristics of modern thinking about these problems; You have a tribe, and the price of allegiance is to forsake all others. If you’re anti vaccine mandate, therefore you march with Nazis. Therefore, you are a Nazi. Or, if you believe in permaculture, you don’t believe in science. All these positions, from Nazism to permaculture to anti vax assume one thing – a puritanistic supremacy of the individual to force their truth on to reality.
It’s much more nuanced than that. I can understand the position of the permaculture people on vaccines – to see humans as sitting within a web of life, rather than outside of it, and to focus on the web rather than the individual. We are ‘cheating’ nature with vaccines. Nature would have us die. Indeed, nature would have killed somewhere between 15 to 40% of the people at the protests, before they had reached 60. That’s reality.
I’ve personally been saved by modern medicine no less than 8 times in my life, maybe more. And that’s just the direct impact of medicine. And that’s before plumbing.
It’s no good being a puritan about this shit unless you’re willing to accept the endpoint – natural death. But puritan individuality is what we are constantly trained to think about. Because projecting our sense of individual power over our circumstances plays into the biggest fleecing of all – that climate change requires individual rather than systemic change. This cult of the individual is nothing more than fashionable politics. It is adorning oneself with something that makes you feel good, endlessly reinventing yourself in an empowering but ultimately innocuous and futile way. The irony is that it’s often the permaculture/wholeness/wellness people who’re most involved in their own personal identity brands.
We are personalising the political. And it will be the buggering of us.
I haven’t written anything on this blog, or anywhere else, for months. I’m busy I suppose, but also side-lined, bright-lined and maligned by the endless task of interpreting statistics about disease and the lack thereof. Shifting paradigms.
Increasingly I’m drawn to two orthogonal poles. The first we might broadly refer to as ‘science’ – the shambling, iterative, dirty net curtain of rationality and causality. The second is more sociological or cultural – the idea that there are patterns, fashions, if you like, that characterise different intellectual epochs. These are slippery and developed in concert with their constituent technology. The best example of course, is the current one, our kind of technocratic rationalism, running on the fumes of utilitarianism with the inferred certainty of a kind of social Carnot cycle. In this model, we take scientific rationalism and apply it, writ large, to social problems.
As a fashion, we’ve been subject to this model for quite some time. Bureaucrats carefully but assuredly ‘pulling levers’, feebly adjusting the fuel mix of the economy in the vain hope that it will overcome its chaotic wobbliness. I suppose this is neoliberalism – the promise of certainty, stability in the face of an economic rationalism that perpetually threatens to end it all.
The model is anywhere and everywhere, the language of rational management, the bloodless accounting of society’s ups and downs. Consider the enormous and still flourishing network of ‘mental health’. An institution is sanctified and legitimised once it reaches a certain size and begins to upholster its processes with the baubles of ‘wellbeing’. One is ‘at risk’, then ‘assessed’ then, ‘assessed for risk of immediate harm’ then assessed for one’s ability to ‘engage with processes that might engender a meaningful shifts in outlook’ and then, and then and then. Of course, to those experiencing the pointy end of whatever institutional shafting the Random Shafting Generator has selected for them on any given day, this window-dressing is offensive. And that’s the point. It is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. It shifts blame to the victim, while assiduously ossifying the power of those who seek to create a seamless integration of professional and personal. The shiny-bummed carpet baggers.
Your personal is your political, and your political better get the fuck on board.
Examples abound. Just two days ago, the NSW state government declared a massive increase in funding for Headspace. This is a service that ‘deals with’ mental health issues amongst young people. Only, of course, it doesn’t. Being well acquainted with a former manager of Headspace, I can unsurprisingly inform you, Dear Reader, that Headspace does absolutely nothing for the mental health of those who seek its services. Because it provides nothing. That’s the point. It sits there telling young people who are distressed because they feel alienated from their lives, their families, their nature and their culture, that they have mental health problems. Young people who’re expected to find their way in the world, stumbling along on a diet of chicken salt and Fortnite.
Of course, for those who do, in fact, have mental health problems, like schizophrenia, no help exists at all. It was ever thus. The ex Headspace manager mused about the amount of money that could have been spent on young people with schizophrenia, were it not all being soaked up by the dangly-earring set, feeding teenagers a quaintly June Daly Watkins/Margaret Thatcher habitus.
I’ve digressed. Because this, ‘mental health’, was only meant to be an example of the broader style, or fashion, of thinking and talking, in which we are training ourselves. The technocratic rationality. At times is becomes visible for all – the anti vax debate is a particularly current example. On the one hand, the simple, modernist and muscular public health logic dictates the best outcome for the most people. On the other, a supreme adherence to individualism, fostered by what is now 30 years of neoliberalism, and cosseted by the rude good health guaranteed by previous public health measures based on the aggregated self, now illustrates the extent to which people grapple with the invisibility of government and their own (in)significance.
It feels clumsy to lump this way of thinking into BN (Before Neoliberalism) and after, but it is easy to delineate some key differences, through the prism of public health. We imagine the state is invisible, imagine our lives as governed by our own hard work and good fortune. Of course, this is sheer folly. The average Filipino works just as hard, if not harder, than the average Australian. Our Australian cards sit on the top of the economic deck because of our position in the ‘first world’, or ‘global north’. These benefits are almost entirely due to our government’s ability to consolidate influence within the global financial markets, either to create wealth from wealth, or to capitalise on wealth we ‘produce’ (commodities). At no point is there a direct linear relationship in which we can compare the output of an Indian, Filipino or Nepalese worker and an Australian in the same position.
I’m not going to get into a long-winded account of global currency markets, but it’s enough to say that our government’s role in our welfare and wellbeing is mostly ‘international’ rather than domestic. And yet it is the domestic politics with which we are the most familiar. This is how our governance is presented to us. Hot Mess Gladys and the endless handwringing over the intergenerational inequities in the housing market.
Public health is also invisible, unless there’s a crisis. Our wellbeing, the security of our nation in terms of ‘burden of disease’ is only relevant in broad terms.
I remember, many years ago, reading about risk and public health, from Nikolas Rose, who, ironically, is a biologist. What occurs (and this is because I can’t recall if it’s his idea, or perhaps my own that was generated through interaction with his work – suspect the former) is that risk helps us to imagine ourselves in the aggregate – it is a tool through which we might be controlled. Talking about our bodies through a prism of risk is something Foucault got hot and bothered about too. We can think of ourselves as entities disseminated through multiple strategies of risk. We’re all familiar with this way of talking and thinking about ourselves.
‘Smokers have a 50% chance of dying from a smoking related illness’
In this way, we might imagine ourselves as a collective, constantly shifting the levels on the risk amplifier we share with everyone else. Certainly, this was an element of neoliberalism – the utilitarian model applied to bodies as a means to control and moderate them, and to perfectly integrate them within a model of ‘productivity’.
And this is where fashion comes in. Because I am now old enough to recognise when this went out of favour, with the rise of identity politics. It happened with fatness. Partly, this was to do with over-reach. The model was overfitted. Risk was attributed everywhere, to everyone. The model got lazy. I remember the first debunking of the ‘Obesity Epidemic‘. Supposedly, obesity was causing high rates of diabetes and other poorly defined problems. The pendulum swung back, people began to question lazy data science. And, most importantly, there was a growing focus on the social consequences of ‘epidemics’. Who is affected and why? Who gets categorised, and what does that mean for them? What are the implications of being labelled fat?
We witnessed a shift in thinking, away from the rational, bio-deterministic models of social control, partly due to sloppy science, and partly due to the rise of the individual. Identity emerged; we began to hear terms like ‘fat shaming’ and the reclamation of physical attributes as identity (reclaiming the term ‘fat’ for instance). This is an interesting shift, a revocation and refusal of the bio medical model that sees humans as barely functioning meat-sacks on the fritz.
And then, we can trace the rise of the ‘victim’ narrative, salvation through identity. The rise of the virtuous disability, as yet another way to claim power.
Underneath it all, to me, these modes of thinking all retain one thing in common; they serve the same power that they always did.
That’s enough crapping on for one morning.
Addendum, By the way, I note that Nikolas Rose has shifted his interests to the ‘psy-disciplines’ and is, unsurprisingly, friendly with Foucault.
As many others have noted, the coronavirus pandemic is illustrating the peculiarities of our relationships to one another as individuals within a society. Indeed, most historians would argue that communicable diseases initiated the modern state as we know it. In short, there’s death and taxes but the buck stops at plumbing.
I used to live in California, and my friends give an interesting and troubling insight into daily life in the age of the pandemic. Most of my contemporaries have children, all are educated and financially secure, and all have been self isolating to various degrees since about February. I should say, I haven’t lived there for years so I can only make statements on what I see from my friends and in the news.
School goes back in California this month and Governor Newsom has declared that children will return to online learning only. For my contemporaries this means they continue to live in isolation whilst working from home. In some ways our lives are similar – I’m working from home, although I could go into the office and be relatively safe. I would be temperature checked, logged in and there would be a limit on the number of people I could be in a room with. However, in other ways I’m realising that we’re on quite different trajectories.
For us in NSW, schools closed for 6 weeks early on in the pandemic (about March). Despite some local cases, schools have remained open with some restrictions around adults on campus, hand hygiene and group gatherings. Mostly though, school is back to normal.
I can go walk down the street in my local town and see maybe only one or two people wearing a mask. I can go shopping more or less as normal. I can visit friends for a cup of tea. e’d probably sit outside. Many councils are now relaxing rules on outdoor seating so cafes can close their indoor spaces.
In areas where social distancing is not possible, people are asked to wear masks, and almost entirely comply. In short, the government has explained the risk and the conditions under which masks are appropriate, and by and large, most people follow the guidelines. Our local supermarket is sometimes quite busy and has asked all patrons to wear masks. Everyone does. It’s not ‘required’ and no-one will be thrown out of the shop, but so far I’ve not seen anyone without a mask. Other smaller shops, the butcher for instance, have limits on customer numbers. People wait outside until they can go in. It makes sense – you’re just waiting anyway.
Mostly though, people aren’t wearing masks unless they’re asked to (the chemist for instance, asks people to do so, and people do). Aside from a bit less social interaction, our lives are more or less unchanged.
For my friends in California, life seems to me to be more restricted. People appear to be consciously living in ‘bubbles’, children largely remain within their family ‘bubble’ and food/supplies is managed either through online ordering or strategised procurement.
A friend’s online posts on show her hiking in the wilderness with a friend, for miles in solitary wilderness, both of them wearing cloth masks. I wonder if the cloth masks (rather than N95 masks) are to protect others – it seems to be the case, signalling inclusion in a community of likeminded people who care about one another and have a sense of social solidarity. When venturing out of this community, however, they will encounter much larger groups of people who’re not wearing masks – generally poorer people who’re performing essential work (like delivering groceries) and will likely get the virus soon if they haven’t already.
And this is the point: In essence, my friends are waiting in virtual gated communities for the virus to reach some level of herd immunity in the surrounding population. In other words, at a certain point, rumoured to be around Christmas, the virus will reach a tipping point between susceptible and infected in the population at large.
Let me tell you about birds.
Last month a flock of black cockatoos stripped every nut off our huge macadamia tree, screeching and dropping the shells onto the driveway. We’ve always had black cockies in the trees out the back but this is the first time they’ve been hungry enough to have a crack at the tree.
They’re here because we live in a small patch of unburned bush, not more than about 20 square kilometres in size. The fires that ripped through our area on New Year’s Eve and then twice more in the coming weeks were stopped by the river, a natural firebreak, on our northern boundary.
This small oasis of bush, which is now a refuge, groaning with hungry birds and animals, is now considered ‘safe’ – because it’s been effectively back-burned.
I can’t help thinking of my friends in California, living in small, largely COVID-free havens where people work hard to reduce both their personal risk and the risk to others in their small, likeminded community, waiting for the surrounding population to backburn an ‘asset protection zone’ around them and effectively reduce the risk to zero.
Of course, you can’t account for a random lightning strike.
In Australia, we’re all more or less susceptible to COVID19. The numbers of cases in Victoria are shocking for us, but they’re actually comparatively small. In NSW for instance (my state) we’ve recorded 3 new cases today, all linked to existing clusters. The numbers are declining daily. We may get to ‘effective elimination’ where we assume the disease is still around, but in very low numbers. There’s an enormous, continuous testing effort, and an elaborate contact tracing and testing program. We are unburned forest. Our ‘asset protection zone’ is the ocean. It’s no surprise that so much focus is on Australia’s borders. New Zealand is in a similar situation.
In a way, California seems more like a tale of two cities – a small, relatively wealthy community of people living amongst a much, much larger service class. This itself isn’t new – California’s economy is often described as suffering from a form of Dutch disease – there’s a huge discrepancy between the small, high income elite and the much poorer, much larger majority who’re participating solely in a domestic economy (both working and consuming in the service and retail sectors).
Will these ‘two countries’, one ‘letting it rip’, the other ‘waiting it out’ make it to the Christmas herd immunity, with a small non immune population surrounded and protected by a much larger immune population?
In Australia we’re all sitting it out, waiting while the rest of the world ‘burns’, only our borders between the two groups is physical, whereas in California, it’s simply money and fragile networks of separation.
Increasingly, the management of COVID19 has become politicised. With that comes the usual ‘both sides’ arguments. In some countries and contexts, it’s impossible to have a ‘both sides’ discussion. For instance, if you’re in the US, one side might claim that the disease is caused by God or pixies or lizard people or something. With a population of over 300 million you’re going to suffer the effects of critical mass pretty smartly. It’s not a situation given to nuance.
In Australia and other nominally secular, science leaning nations, COVID19 has been managed by the technocrats. Broadly, the politicians listen to the scientists and follow their recommendations – even when they might seem extreme or draconian. In these contexts, ‘both sides’ are generally engaging with one another on similar terms, to the exclusion of lizard people.
Unsurprisingly the argument ends up over over the details. To what extent should states ‘lockdown’, and to what end?
I like to think I’m not hide-bound by dogmatic thinking. This means, necessarily, that I read widely on topics. The one thing that occurs me about my reading on COVID19 is that generally, there’s little debate about the numbers themselves. What differs is their interpretation.
For instance, this Swedish ER doctor has written about his experience in a large hospital in Stockholm. His post is widely circulated on what might be called ‘contrarian’ sites, that is, people who think various governments’ reactions to COVID19 have overreached. Lockdowns, they generally argue, cause more deaths, through medical neglect (failure to treat patients with other problems) and economic decline.
Dr Rushworth argues that his hospital saw an initial spike in cases and deaths, followed by a steady decline. Dr Rushworth suspects that although antibody tests show that only relatively small number of people have had the virus, more than 50% of people have T cell immunity, which is much harder to test for. Broadly, he surmises, Sweden has reached a type of herd immunity (although this is not strictly the definition of herd immunity).
Dr Rushworth cites around 6k deaths from COVID19 in Sweden, a number he expects to top out at around 7k, as the (short) tail comes to an end.
His numbers and logic work out, and are not in dispute. Here’s the bit that struck me:
Let’s repeat that. Sweden has around 700 deaths from the flu, every year. Sure, if you average out COVID19 over a year, now that it’s run its course through an immunologically naive population, it ends up with a similar CFR. But what happens before you get there?
And here’s the rub. Australia has just over twice the population of Sweden. This death rate would translate, pro rata, to around 12k in just a few months. That’s twelve thousand dead people by now. And that’s assuming that our hospital and health system would cope and we’d still be able to treat all the other people who staggered in through our hospital doors.
It also assumes one other thing: a relatively healthy population. In New York city, where the virus ‘let rip’ initially, the death rate is almost three times that of Sweden’s. Three times.
88% of Americans have metabolic disease, a significant risk factor for COVID19 morbidity. Swedes are much healthier. It’s worth noting that the majority of younger deaths in Stockholm were concentrated amongst its (large) immigrant population, many of whom have worse health in general that Swedish born Swedes.
What does all this tell me? Where you sit determines where you stand. Your country’s basic level of health and healthcare should determine how you deal with COVID19.
Currently Victoria is undergoing a serious and wide ranging lockdown to reduce the case numbers. This is predominantly because Australians are shocked by the large numbers of deaths as the virus moves through aged care facilities. Dr Rushworth is more cavalier – many of these people would have died within the year anyway. This ‘harvesting effect’ certainly does account for some of the deaths, but not all. In Britain, for instance, where the general level of health is far below that of the average Swede, fatalities are losing many years from their lives.
I think, from what’s emerging now, Dr Rushworth is possibly right about T cell immunity. COVID19 is hugely infectious, and even with Sweden’s low level of restrictions it should be assumed that infections have reached 50% in Stockholm.
In my state of NSW that’s not the goal we’re aiming for.
It seems the aim is to allow for a small amount of community transmission and to limit the virus’s access to aged care homes especially until effective treatments are found. This does require borders to be closed for another year or two, at least, but there’s simply no way to ‘let it rip’ in Australia that doesn’t result in unpalatable political casualties. Australia will remain largely immunologically naive probably until a vaccine is developed, which could be a while. There will be ‘spot fires’ and some deaths. Australians will accept that.
The US, on the other hand, has a completely different scenario on its hands. Having lived in the US what’s striking is the general level of ill health. If there’s one country where a total lockdown could be justified, it’s probably the US. And yet, it’s the least likely to get one.
I’ve got no insights into the ‘rights or wrongs’ of lockdowns. I personally agree with NSW’s epidemiology informed approach at the moment, and its commitment to changing things according to the level of risk.
My point is that there’s little doubt now in my mind about the actual dynamics and pathology of the disease, because both the public health hawks and bulls seem to be using the same numbers.
I have a family member currently visiting in Rotorua. His updates are interesting, including that their hotel room had not been cleaned when they arrived in the evening and that it’s a bit hard to get a meal. He’s staying in a pretty fancy hotel, so this must seem a bit weird.
Where are the staff?
Rotorua does tourism in bulk. Yes, the numbers of tourist have declined, but so too have the numbers of short term migrants to clean their rooms. To be clear, New Zealand’s economy loves visitors who spend money, especially if they bring other visitors who pay tax and work for very low wages, without the kind of protections we might think of as acceptable for domestic employees.
This happens everywhere, obviously. I’m sure there are people in NZ right now moaning about people ‘sitting on welfare’ or whatever the coronavirus support is called, rather than cleaning hotel rooms, as if they were cleaning hotel rooms right up till about April.
Well, someone was cleaning them, until they went back to the Phillipines.
There isn’t an army of hotel cleaners sitting at home in Rotorua.
I think if Covid19 has done anything, it’s made some of the most odious elements of economic rationalism visible in a ways we can’t ignore.
The same thing is taking place in Melbourne right now, with a developing scandal over hotel quarantine. It’s a perfect example of asymmetries in the state’s economy. Victoria has an incredible capacity for medical research, so the outbreak has been ‘mapped’ – the genomic sequencing of every positive case of the virus. And, shock horror, this extraordinarily expensive exercise has revealed that Victoria’s current outbreak disaster is directly attributable to quarantine failures. It turns out that the other end of Victoria’s economy, the poor, casualised labour end, is run by a loosely incorporated cabal of security sub-contractors otherwise known as ‘My Cousin’.
This end of the labour market is doing what all small businesses try to do – maximise profits, by employee the cheapest, most casual labour they can get their hands on. On its own, this may not have spelled disaster. Combined, however, with protocols that isolated Covid19 positive individuals instead of their entire households, it was an omni-shambles in the making. It’s worth remembering, for all the veiled, nasty suggestions that people who tested positive attended family events (and it seems they did), that the authorities did not suggest to these people that their children stop attending school, for instance. It’s pretty easy to see why you wouldn’t think it’s that serious if you’ve been told not to go out, but it’s OK to keep sending your three or four kids to high school.
Today’s Covid19 numbers suggest to me that the entire state will be in some kind of lockdown again, within a week. Simply, the numbers have reached the point at which test and isolate is no longer viable. I can imagine that NSW’s Dr Chant reached the same conclusion yesterday. As has been said multiple times, it’s primary school maths.
The Mutton Flap 