Covid Reflections – what have I learned?

Four years after starting my COVID reflections series, I’ve learned that:

• Looking for a bit of beauty every day is a great way of finding positives in the world
• Writing about what is happening the world is much better for my state of mind than doomscrolling
• A community of people reading and reflecting is even better!
• Basic, widely available data and information is a vital part of government’s role, and one which they are still not doing enough to fulfil.

That was then…

Four years ago today, Saturday March 21 2020, I wrote a post called Reflections on Covid19.  I wrote about how I had started reading obsessively about Covid19, and that for my own mental health, I needed to do something productive, instead of all that doomscrolling. My plan was to post regularly (I said most days!) with insights, links, glimpses into life today, and finally, my favourite part, a bit of beauty (generally a picture from our local neighbourhood). I’ve written 87 posts in that series now.

It is hard to believe that was four years ago, but I’ve been looking back at those early posts to remind myself about those days. When I started posting, New Zealand and Australia had just closed borders to everyone except citizens and residents (with compulsory self isolation for 14 days on entry). And it was clear that there were more restrictions to come.

On March 21 2020, cases in Australia were doubling every 3-4 days. There were 225 notified cases that day, with a total of 1,072 cases in Australia. There had been 7 confirmed deaths from Covid19 in Australia, and nobody was reporting the number of people in hospital with Covid19 (by 5 April 2020, there were 330, 93 of whom were in intensive care).  Similarly the positivity rate of Covid tests wasn’t being tracked quite yet, but on 30 April it was just under 3%.

And now?

Nobody is keeping daily track of any of these statistics any more (not even Covid Live)  as the government doesn’t release daily data any more.

Nevertheless, there were 1,030 cases reported today (21% of the PCR tests done were positive), with a total of nearly 12 million cases reported to date in Australia.  On 15 March 2024 there were 771 people in hospital with Covid 8 of whom were in ICU.

Of the whole Australian population, 84% have had two doses of vaccine against Covid-19, which is why despite all those infections, there haven’t been more deaths.

In the 11 months to November 2023 there were 7,400 excess deaths (excess deaths are those deaths above the level that would have been expected in the absence of a pandemic) with 4,200 directly from Covid, and another 1,800 Covid related deaths. (From the Actuaries Institute’s latest report for the 11 months to November 2023). From the causes of those non COVID-19 identified deaths (disproportionately heart disease and diabetes), it seems likely that many of those excess deaths were made more likely by prior Covid9 infections. Covid 19 was the third highest cause of death in 2022, and likely to be in the top 10 causes of death in 2023, with more than ten times the number of deaths than influenza.

Excess mortality in Australia over the three years 2020-2022 was 4% (or nearly 19,000 excess deaths, including  nearly 17,000 from Covid) compared with expected mortality without a pandemic, which compares favourably with the 14% population average of the other countries where data was available, which gives a total of around 26,000 excess deaths in Australia for the pandemic period up to November 2023.

It is hard to imagine what I would have thought about those numbers on 21 March 2020. I think I would have been simultaneously appalled by the number of deaths (even over four years) but heartened by the massive success of the vaccination program. It is interesting to see how quickly we have become habituated to an extra cause of disease and death, in ways which we might have horrified us four years ago.

Lessons and Reflections

• This blog was a great outlet for me, and particularly the bit of beauty I put in every post helped me to look for the beauty and the positive when the world got a bit scary
• The community of people commenting here and on linkedin really helped me up my game in explaining statistics and data
• I’ve become even more passionate (if that is possible!) about the need for governments to both collect and distribute data about our society. NSW is the leader of Australia’s governments in this area, but from a very low base compared with many other countries whose data I dipped into during the last four years. Sadly in Australia, the best usable data came from volunteers such as Anthony Macali and Juliette O’Brien, who were both awarded OAM for this work, rather than from official sources.

And finally, because of this blog, and the work that flowed from it at the Actuaries Institute, I was fortunate enough to meet some very impressive people and talk to them about many aspects of the pandemic. Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty,was my favourite.  I interviewed him from his home in Melbourne (watched remotely by hundreds of attendees of an actuarial conference) while he was locked down in August 2020. Casey Briggs was pretty fun too.

Bit of beauty

The bit of beauty was my favourite part of this reflections series. Today’s bit of beauty (like the majority of them) was a picture taken by geekinsydney, on our walk around the neighbourhood.  He calls it mushroom town.