Dodging Omicron for a beach holiday
08 January 2022
With the vaccination rate reaching 90% of over-16s, the reopening process started. Cases rose a little but the hospital continued to empty of serious COVID cases and elective surgery began to return to a more normal schedule. It was a relief to be able to do “normal” work rather than thinking about the pandemic every day.
Jay continued to work from home and EA tried to cheer him a little with Halloween cakes. Meanwhile I replaced the 2014 MacBook Pro with the new 2021 model.
We had scheduled a “sanity week” off for the first week of November and spent it at Sorrento. The weather was starting to warm up enough for lying on the beach, but the water was a bit too cold for me to swim. The town was quite busy during the long weekend at the beginning of the week, but for the rest of the week it was quiet.
There had been a fierce wind storm shortly before we arrived and quite a few established trees had been blown down. I had to do a little work with the chainsaw cutting down fallen branches around the house.
I had received my initial COVID vaccinations quite early, so my third dose was due in November. By this time, second doses had been given to almost everyone who was prepared to have one, with the coverage of the eligible population at about 95%. The vaccination centre at the Exhibition Buildings was very quiet and I sat alone in the fainting area after my shot. Jay had the same experience, going a few weeks early for his dose so as to have it before the scheduled closure of the centre in early December.
We were invited to a dinner with friends at a house they had rented for a long weekend at Blairgowrie. It was a long drive just for dinner, but because we could stay the night at Sorrento and drive back the following morning, we could enjoy the dinner without having to face a 90 minute drive home.
The stable COVID case numbers and falling number of hospital patients made it feel as though things were as safe as they were going to get for the time being. Despite being tested twice a week, I was still reluctant to spend time inside the nursing home where my mother is for fear of having unknowingly picked up the illness from one of my unvaccinated paediatric patients. It did feel safe enough to take mum out to the park however, so I was able to have some time with her in person for the first time in months. FaceTime had been a poor substitute for visiting as she does not really interact with the iPad.
At the end of November we went out to a club for an event run by our friend Kam: “Thick n Juicy”. It had been more than six months since we had been in a room with so many people. We were lucky that a lot of our friends decided to go as well and so we stayed dancing for much longer than we normally would.
Our friend James Allan didn’t come to the club event as he had been offered a new position at the University of Calgary and a requirement to isolate after visiting a potential COVID exposure site would have disrupted his plans for moving to Canada in mid December. The move was an exciting opportunity for him but we will miss his company.
For the last week or so before he left, he stayed in our spare room so that he could completely empty his apartment and ship his belongings to Canada. He had his third COVID vaccine dose as a precaution a few days before travelling and was unlucky to suffer a significant febrile reaction to the dose. Fortunately it subsided the night before he was due to fly out.
The Sunday before Christmas I was on call for the public hospital and had the unusual experience of not only being called in to help the registrar for much of the shift, but to anaesthetise for an emergency awake carotid endarterectomy, an open abdominal aortic aneurysm for rupture and a revascularisation of ischaemic bowel. It wasn’t much fun at the time, but it was reassuring to know in retrospect that I can still do these cases.
The appearance of the Omicron variant in December completely changed the trajectory of the pandemic for us. Instead of low and fairly stable case and hospital numbers with very limited restrictions, we moved to rapidly rising case numbers and still low but increasing hospital numbers. The high transmissibility of the new variant means that there appears to be no alternative to accepting the case numbers and trying to find a level of restrictions which still allows enough people to work to keep essential services functioning.
Christmas was almost normal: I cooked Christmas lunch at my sister’s house for her, my mother and Jay. We were grateful for this as it seemed as though things would get a lot more disrupted in the weeks that followed, and this was indeed the case.
We had scheduled two weeks of vacation after Christmas. Jay was given an additional week before Christmas as his team had been very productive for the year. For the first week of January we had booked to fly to Lord Howe Island for the vacation we had cancelled in June. In order to maximise our chance of being able to take the flight to Lord Howe Island, we spent the preceding week at Sorrento with no visits to the gym, restaurants, or other unnecessary potential exposure sites. We spent New Year’s Eve watching the little of the fireworks we could see from the deck at home.
The Omicron case numbers rose rapidly and there was a rash of friends and colleagues having to isolate or testing positive. We were lucky enough to have only one exposure site notification from the preceding week, with a subsequent negative test, and to get on our flight on January 2 as scheduled.
Having dodged Omicron successfully to take our trip, we flew straight into tropical cyclone Seth which was moving slowly South across Lord Howe Island. The cyclone actually didn’t have a big impact on our trip: the plane was still able to land as fortunately the wind was along rather than across the runway at the island. We had high winds and a lot of rain for the first two days on the island but the temperature was warm and the clouds cleared by the third day.
We spent our time walking along the beaches and the tracks on the island. We had booked to take the guided hike to the top of Mt Gower, but this was not able to go ahead because of the weather. We experienced how fierce the wind was just climbing the 200m elevation of some of the lower hills and so were not too disappointed not to climb to almost 800m and negotiate the cliff-face parts of the hike.
We swam in the lagoon and went snorkelling over the coral reefs. We saw several turtles from the boat on the snorkelling tour. The birds on the island were almost completely unafraid of people, making it easy to understand how the dodo was so quickly eliminated on Mauritius. The island had a very relaxed pace and a small population of both residents and tourists so there was no crowding of the beach and we saw very few other people when walking the tracks. The lack of any mobile phone coverage and the limited Internet access also helped to make it a relaxing break.
I returned home hoping that we were entering the last rush of COVID work at the public hospital and disruption of elective operating, only a little discouraged that this was just what I thought was happening exactly a year ago.
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Jay continued to work from home and EA tried to cheer him a little with Halloween cakes. Meanwhile I replaced the 2014 MacBook Pro with the new 2021 model.
We had scheduled a “sanity week” off for the first week of November and spent it at Sorrento. The weather was starting to warm up enough for lying on the beach, but the water was a bit too cold for me to swim. The town was quite busy during the long weekend at the beginning of the week, but for the rest of the week it was quiet.
There had been a fierce wind storm shortly before we arrived and quite a few established trees had been blown down. I had to do a little work with the chainsaw cutting down fallen branches around the house.
I had received my initial COVID vaccinations quite early, so my third dose was due in November. By this time, second doses had been given to almost everyone who was prepared to have one, with the coverage of the eligible population at about 95%. The vaccination centre at the Exhibition Buildings was very quiet and I sat alone in the fainting area after my shot. Jay had the same experience, going a few weeks early for his dose so as to have it before the scheduled closure of the centre in early December.
We were invited to a dinner with friends at a house they had rented for a long weekend at Blairgowrie. It was a long drive just for dinner, but because we could stay the night at Sorrento and drive back the following morning, we could enjoy the dinner without having to face a 90 minute drive home.
The stable COVID case numbers and falling number of hospital patients made it feel as though things were as safe as they were going to get for the time being. Despite being tested twice a week, I was still reluctant to spend time inside the nursing home where my mother is for fear of having unknowingly picked up the illness from one of my unvaccinated paediatric patients. It did feel safe enough to take mum out to the park however, so I was able to have some time with her in person for the first time in months. FaceTime had been a poor substitute for visiting as she does not really interact with the iPad.
At the end of November we went out to a club for an event run by our friend Kam: “Thick n Juicy”. It had been more than six months since we had been in a room with so many people. We were lucky that a lot of our friends decided to go as well and so we stayed dancing for much longer than we normally would.
Our friend James Allan didn’t come to the club event as he had been offered a new position at the University of Calgary and a requirement to isolate after visiting a potential COVID exposure site would have disrupted his plans for moving to Canada in mid December. The move was an exciting opportunity for him but we will miss his company.
For the last week or so before he left, he stayed in our spare room so that he could completely empty his apartment and ship his belongings to Canada. He had his third COVID vaccine dose as a precaution a few days before travelling and was unlucky to suffer a significant febrile reaction to the dose. Fortunately it subsided the night before he was due to fly out.
The Sunday before Christmas I was on call for the public hospital and had the unusual experience of not only being called in to help the registrar for much of the shift, but to anaesthetise for an emergency awake carotid endarterectomy, an open abdominal aortic aneurysm for rupture and a revascularisation of ischaemic bowel. It wasn’t much fun at the time, but it was reassuring to know in retrospect that I can still do these cases.
The appearance of the Omicron variant in December completely changed the trajectory of the pandemic for us. Instead of low and fairly stable case and hospital numbers with very limited restrictions, we moved to rapidly rising case numbers and still low but increasing hospital numbers. The high transmissibility of the new variant means that there appears to be no alternative to accepting the case numbers and trying to find a level of restrictions which still allows enough people to work to keep essential services functioning.
Christmas was almost normal: I cooked Christmas lunch at my sister’s house for her, my mother and Jay. We were grateful for this as it seemed as though things would get a lot more disrupted in the weeks that followed, and this was indeed the case.
We had scheduled two weeks of vacation after Christmas. Jay was given an additional week before Christmas as his team had been very productive for the year. For the first week of January we had booked to fly to Lord Howe Island for the vacation we had cancelled in June. In order to maximise our chance of being able to take the flight to Lord Howe Island, we spent the preceding week at Sorrento with no visits to the gym, restaurants, or other unnecessary potential exposure sites. We spent New Year’s Eve watching the little of the fireworks we could see from the deck at home.
The Omicron case numbers rose rapidly and there was a rash of friends and colleagues having to isolate or testing positive. We were lucky enough to have only one exposure site notification from the preceding week, with a subsequent negative test, and to get on our flight on January 2 as scheduled.
Having dodged Omicron successfully to take our trip, we flew straight into tropical cyclone Seth which was moving slowly South across Lord Howe Island. The cyclone actually didn’t have a big impact on our trip: the plane was still able to land as fortunately the wind was along rather than across the runway at the island. We had high winds and a lot of rain for the first two days on the island but the temperature was warm and the clouds cleared by the third day.
We spent our time walking along the beaches and the tracks on the island. We had booked to take the guided hike to the top of Mt Gower, but this was not able to go ahead because of the weather. We experienced how fierce the wind was just climbing the 200m elevation of some of the lower hills and so were not too disappointed not to climb to almost 800m and negotiate the cliff-face parts of the hike.
We swam in the lagoon and went snorkelling over the coral reefs. We saw several turtles from the boat on the snorkelling tour. The birds on the island were almost completely unafraid of people, making it easy to understand how the dodo was so quickly eliminated on Mauritius. The island had a very relaxed pace and a small population of both residents and tourists so there was no crowding of the beach and we saw very few other people when walking the tracks. The lack of any mobile phone coverage and the limited Internet access also helped to make it a relaxing break.
I returned home hoping that we were entering the last rush of COVID work at the public hospital and disruption of elective operating, only a little discouraged that this was just what I thought was happening exactly a year ago.
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