COVID Chronicles: October Update

Oct 31 – Happy Halloween!

Welcome to the Covid Chronicles: October edition. 

Friday’s Stats:

Cases yesterday: 762 (total: 61 059)

Deaths: 6 (1908)

Current hospitalised cases: 327

Current ICU beds in use: 42

We are one and a half weeks into a six week lockdown. The second wave peaked here on October 16 with 1284 cases. On October 15, a ban on home visits was introduced, and this is being lauded as the successful strategy responsible for nearly halving the case count in two weeks. Despite seeming incredible, 762 new cases a day is a vast improvement. (Sat was 397, Sun was 552 new cases.)

The new lockdown is keeping schools open, which is great for me as a substitute teacher, but also fraught, as it leaves me very much on the frontline of the pandemic. Some of my work has been covering for teachers that are out ill with COVID-19, and being in a room with students who went home ill, and then tested positive with COVID-19. I am very much in the thick of it. 

Each school has slightly different protocols in place to protect their staff and students. One of the schools has over 2 pages of guidelines to follow, including things like 

• Ensure classroom windows are open at all times (despite it being about 9 degrees out)
• Teachers are to wear a face covering at all times
• Students are to play outside in 10m x 10m square with only their classroom ‘bubble’
• Students must not move from their desks unless absolutely necessary whilst inside the classroom
• All surfaces must be sterilised prior and after use
• Teachers must take their temperature at the beginning of the day and sign a waiver that they’ve had no COVID symptoms in the last 14 days.

All this as well as staggered start and finish times, and staggered breaks to ensure that there’s not too many people coming or going any given point in time. 

I have been impressed with the thoroughness and professionalism that all of this has been adopted with, and the fastidious nature of all the teachers and SNA (special needs assistants) that I have encountered. The students have also been similarly vigilant, and really quite good at sticking to this new litany of rules thrust upon them. 

The whisperings of many staff rooms include the possibility that virus spread in schools is being minimised for the purposes of keeping schools open. There is a lot of scientific evidence to show that children under 12 do not spread the virus as much, as they’re not as susceptible to catching it in the first place, they do not carry as much viral load as adults even if they do catch it, and they do not have the lung capacity to project droplets as far as adults, even if they are sick with it. (See this, this, and this counterpoint.)

There’s a few reasons that teachers are worried about schools staying open – one being that here, a close contact for the general public is anyone you’ve been in contact with for 15 minutes, whereas in schools, it is two hours. Another being if there is a positive case in schools, then there is little to nothing done in the way of contact tracing. Classes are not necessarily notified if their teacher is ill with COVID-19. Families are left to inform the school themselves if they have tested positive, because of privacy laws. If a class has a student or a teacher test positive, the rest of the class is often not notified, let alone sent for testing or asked to isolate. The explanation for most cases is spread in the home, and the household is expected to isolate, rather than the student’s class. 

The main reason given for schools remaining open is the risk to children if they stay home is greater than if they are attending school, on the grounds of social, emotional and mental health. Also, a lot of schools in Ireland are ‘DESH’ schools, meaning they are provided with breakfast, snacks and lunch whilst at school as they may not otherwise have food at home. There was a big speech from the Taoiseach Michal Martin saying that COVID-19 had taken so much from us already so far this year and they would not allow it to steal our children’s education as well. 

None of the teachers I’ve spoken to are wanting to go back to online learning – no one learns well in a zoom classroom, and many sources have said that the burden of helping children with school at home largely falls to women to keep students on task if both parents are home and trying to work. (See this, and this article about impacts on woman.)

“At an individual level, the choices of many couples over the next few months will make perfect economic sense. What do pandemic patients need? Looking after. What do self-isolating older people need? Looking after. What do children kept home from school need? Looking after. All this looking after—this unpaid caring labor—will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce. “It’s not just about social norms of women performing care roles; it’s also about practicalities,” Wenham added. “Who is paid less? Who has the flexibility?” (The Atlantic, The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism.)

I’m not fully convinced any of Taosieach Michael’s cited reasons are as important as these two:

1. If children are home, it is much harder for parents to work, particularly women
2. If teenagers are not at school, then they are not likely to willingly stay home either, and at least in school there is a measure of control over the environment they are interacting in. 

The problem with that is that teenagers carry an adult level of viral load, and to my knowledge, I don’t think students are being asked to wear masks or anything like that, so there could be a persuasive case made that high schools are a hotbed for virus spread. In fact, it is a case that is currently being made by the Secondary school union here, about unsafe working conditions, and teachers fearing for their safety. A valid concern, in my opinion. 

Just before the mid-term break, a junior infants (Y0) teacher tested positive for the virus in one of the schools I was working in. The principal asked me if I would teach in that class the next day, as all the kids were expected to come to school as normal. 

Substitute teaching is a vulnerable game, and my livelihood relies on me largely doing as I’m asked without too much fuss made, however, I’ll not lie, I was petrified about being put into a classroom where a person who had tested positive had been working, breathing, existing, and touching everything. 

The likelihood is that she probably got it from a student, but contact tracing here is miles behind the 8 ball, and there was not any clue of where she picked it up from in such a short time. 

Having just read an article about how COVID-19 germs were found to still be viable on surfaces after 28 days, I messaged the principal about my concerns later than evening and he went a good way to allaying them. He outlined the stringent deep cleaning process for the class, and he finished that message concluding that the HSE (Health Service Executive) had actually asked for that whole class to go for testing, and so the whole point of whether or not that classroom was safe became moot. 

Obviously, I’m trying to be super careful, and not become a superspreader, given that in a normal school week so far I’ve averaged 2-3 different schools a week, and often 4-5 different classes, so I’m in contact with between 80-150 different students, teachers and other staff in any given week. It requires unparalleled constant vigilance, which is, in and of itself, quite exhausting. 

However, so far so good, and hopefully like other places around the world, all of the COVID hygiene measures will mean that there’s a much lower incidence of seasonal flu as well. (I was so very sick for nearly all of December and January last year – not fun.)

The best case scenario in the 6 weeks of current lockdown, is to get numbers down to a few hundred cases a day rather than over a thousand, and this will be ‘safe enough’ to open up for Christmas, for the purposes of festivities, family gatherings and, of course, to enable businesses to avail of the silly season. 

Two days into the current lockdown, there was already news of another lockdown that they’re expecting to implement early 2021. They are also expecting that due to all of the gatherings and travel, there will be a lot of virus spread. See also here and here.

That same day, I got the first letter from my paternal grandmother that I’ve received since moving to Ireland. Just a brief newsy one page note, where she mentioned that she was having a birthday party on March 6 for her 90th. I think it was probably intended more as informative rather than invitational, but the FOMO around freedom, summer, friends, family, and parties, and just existing in the awesomeness that is NZ became too much to bear. 

A few days prior, Jared says casually ‘I’m seriously considering sending Lauren home for a few months’ to someone we were having dinner with – al fresco dining in 8 degree weather two nights before lockdown. 

‘Babe, that’s one of those things you can’t unsay’ I whispered my surprise. I had not dared to hope for such a possibility since COVID hit, given the scarcity of flights, and the price of managed isolation. 

In amongst all of this, Jared had secured a new job, one that he was quite happy with. He started the day before lockdown – we were worried he wouldn’t be able to start at all. It is for a smaller company, doing mostly residential work and he is under an owner who has been managing the whole thing himself, so is intimately acquainted with the work, and also has a consultant who comes in once a week or so to check Jared’s work, and mentor him. He’s been there for two weeks and seems to be really enjoying it so far. 

While Jared was happily working away, I was much like Mal in Inception: once planted, the idea of going home took hold, and I couldn’t shake it. I found myself imagining road trips in the sun, parties with friends, hokey pokey ice cream, beaches, seeing my mum, and taking in the beauty that is Wellington just as you come over the Ngauranga gorge flyover and see the harbour and the city in all of its stunning Wellingtonian glory. 

After much humming and hawing and should-I-shouldn’t-Is, I have decided fuck it, let’s have a crack at going home for a bit. I discovered that if you stay in NZ for longer than 90 days, then managed isolation is free, and the only barrier then was getting a flight. 

So Thu just gone, I booked my tickets! 

I (hopefully) land in NZ on Jan 10, all things being equal, and I’ll be there until April 24. I’m hoping to either relief teach in a safer environment, or work on Mum and Paul’s farm for the summer, be there to see my Nana turn 90, celebrate my own birthday in the sun (as God intended) and then head to Sydney for my cousin Clarissa’s wedding, then back to my adoring husband in Ireland, who after 4 months, might’ve noticed that I’m missing by then. (Seriously, his levels of fine-ness and nonchalance are just baffling.)

Hopefully the airports will all be open, and the flights will go ahead as scheduled, and I’ll manage to survive the next 10 weeks COVID-19 free. I’m really hoping that telling you all is not going to invoke Murphy’s Law or something crazy, and mean I can’t go after all.

In other happy news, we have found a really nice flatmate. He’s Italian, and constantly disparaging the crappy food quality here. He has converted us to the Italian method of coffee making, and today he is making us authentic Italian lasagne. (It was brilliant! Last week it was Tiramisu.) 

So New Life in Ireland 2.0 seems to be going well, for now. Watch this space.