A three-year-old, two minutes, a mic and no warning: Welcome to Finia Fridays. In this first interview, we talk COVID-19, social distancing and the locked-down state of international air travel. Kind of.
Me: Finia, what’s in the air and what are we scared of when we touch each other?
Three-year-old: Um, coronavirus.
And what is coronavirus?
You can’t touch things.
Why, what does it do?
It’s do get corona on your hand.
And then what?
Then what. You have to wash your hand. Huh?
Mmm-hmm.
And then you have to … mm, don’t touch things.
Why, is it because, does it make you sick?
Yeah, stay.
Makes you sickie. And then what.
Then what. Then what?
Do you have to go to hospital?
Yeah. Have to go to hosiple. Hmm?
And then, what about all the planes in the sky?
All the plane is gone in the sky co’ we can’t go on plane co’ we can’t reach the plane cos all the plane in the sky so we can’t fly in the plane. Everyone fly in the plane, now we got no more planes to fly in. That why it’s really sad.
And are you, do you miss seeing anybody?
She buries her head in the sofa. Ok, now she’s looking sad and she’s told me she’s not doing any more talking. Ok, Finia, thank you for the interview.
There’s a part of my running route, a short and gentle uphill climb that turns a right corner at the top, where the path curves round a busy set of traffic lights.
I’ve come to remember sections of my runs by what I was listening to when I trod each section. Or maybe it’s the other way round – I remember pieces of podcasts and news stories, reports of global events and snippets of heart-warming anecdotes when I think of the places I’ve run. The beach in Queensland that is all about Turing and sentience, the corner of summertime Munich that now reminds me of alien invasion, the Kenyan elections unfolding alongside a corn field in west England.
Maybe it’s the rhythm of my jogging, or the fresh air, or the lack of distraction, but I have a curiously vivid memory of those places and their soundtracks.
The path has got a lot busier than usual, we’re allowed out of lockdown for exercise and the gyms and beaches are closed in this part of Sydney, Australia, so everyone seems to have taken up running, or walking with their families, to escape the four walls of home. I tread from the pavement to the road and up again, skirting around prams and masked couples where I usually pass next to no-one.
And as I tread the warm tarmac, sweep around roadworks and pass boats parked on trailers alongside the golf course, I listen to news from America during the Covid-19 crisis. My runs have become
That’s what I was doing as I approached the small hill a few days ago, and that’s how I learnt how hard it is to run and cry at the same time.
I’m listening to a story about a woman who is barred from visiting her mother who has ALS and lives in a hospital and, with coronavirus spreading, the woman worries about never seeing her mother again. She stumbles with grammar, her syntax muddled by the overwhelming reality that, if coronavirus reaches her mum’s ward, it’s very likely she’ll die. She lives across from the hospital and can see her mum’s window. She’s forced to ask questions she never imagined she’d ask – will she have to stand in the park as her mother dies, and imagine what’s going on behind that glass as she looks up from her safe distance?
And I think of my own mother, in a high-needs unit in a care home in England. She has early-onset dementia and is hoisted from her bed into an armchair and back again each day. Because of the virus, she’s not allowed to leave her room or to have visitors, so, even if I was to somehow abracadabra my way through aeroplane-less empty skies to Covid-ravaged Europe, I’d get no further than looking up at the double-glazing in her window, too.
My chest seizes up as the woman describes her dream of getting her mum the fuck off planet earth and how irrationality sometimes takes over – could her mother’s ventilator be given to a younger, more potentially fruitful patient? She has no breath of her own, and no chance of taking another breath, after all.
It’s happened a few times, now, as I run and listen to what sound like dispatches from a third world country. The hospital worker in New York City who couldn’t be with his wife as she died at home. The immigrant who, sick with Covid-19, is sleeping in his car because he was thrown out of his accommodation by his scared, pregnant landlady.
I struggle for air, my throat clamping down and my chest feeling like it’s buckling under a heap of sand bags. I can’t breathe. I imagine asthma attacks as I try to keep moving. I hear a whimper – it’s me. I stop, fold over and catch my breath as tears merge with sweat, pricking my eyes.
I leave the green of the park behind me and run towards the ocean cliffs. I lean on the railing and suck in big lungfuls of salty air, the foam churning 100 feet below and, in the distance, with the land, people and the virus behind me, I look to the calm, grey horizon.
The accounts go on – ventilators puffing and emptying broken lungs. The suffocating coughing, the good samaritans and the thought of so very many, locked down, locked away and locked out. I miss you, Mumma. I’m not running, so this time, when the tears roll and my face crumples, I can breathe.
–Bondi is one of NSW’s most famous destinations, drawing 2.6 million visitors a year. Has its popularity made it vulnerable to Covid-19?–
A block from Bondi Beach six female travellers, all aged between 22 and 31, share a two-bedroom flat, each paying $200 a week in rent.
They came to Australia, and settled in Bondi, for the work opportunities, the sun and the freedom.
Last week, two of the women tested positive for Covid-19.
The Sydney beach suburb draws 2.6 million visitors each year, according to Destination New South Wales. It’s a place of contrasts. Sparkling natural bounty and dense urban living. Billionaires and backpackers. Instagrammed bodies and old-timers’ swimming clubs. A place obsessed with health and beauty but now, one of Australia’s Covid-19 hotspots.
Bondi, part of Waverley council area, has taken a heavy hit from the coronavirus, the local council’s 159 cases as of Friday (101 of them in Bondi alone) knocking the sunshine out of the surfside playground.
While the advice during the global coronavirus pandemic is to stay home, the reality for some, especially in a place like Bondi, is that crowded living conditions make physical distancing difficult, even for the most prudent.
“I couldn’t believe I was negative, I slept in the same room as two positive girls,” says one of the Argentinian housemates who was given the all-clear, who did not want to be named. “I was staying home, worrying about the virus outside, but it was in my own place.”
the others, a sense of gratitude has settled on the flat: they and their sick housemates are safe and isolated, friends are helping with food deliveries and a neighbour has lent them exercise equipment. She has heard of worse, including newly jobless, homeless travellers who cannot get to their home countries, and infected members of shared houses who have stayed put.
They’re like many temporary working visa holders who continue to share cramped homes, some of 12 to 15 people, across the suburb. Since 20 March, hostels, meanwhile, have had to comply with new distancing rules of one person every 4 sq metres. At Noah’s Backpackers, just along from James Packer’s erstwhile beach house, every room, including six-bed dormitories, were made single occupancy.
The landmark building has a view down on to the Bondi Beach that is usually alive with crowded surf and its famous lifeguards. On 21 March, the beach was closed, its entrances hastily fenced off. With no surfers and sunbathers, Bondi Beach has never looked so bare. Now in the spotlight as the centre of Australia’s coronavirus outbreak, the suburb has never felt quite so exposed.
The scene is a far cry from images just over two weeks ago, when crowds from well beyond Sydney’s east took to the sand on a 36C day, flouting social distancing rules and the new 500-person limit on outdoor gatherings. A hot Friday with family-friendly surf is what Bondi does best – but by the next afternoon and in the glare of global media, police were sweeping the beach of sunbathers, forbidding even surfers to enter the water. For the first time, the beach known around the world as an icon of Australia’s natural beauty and symbol of our love of the sea and sun is now associated with something far less glamorous.
When New South Wales chief health Officer Dr Kerry Chant singled out backpackers and their potential to infect the community when outlining the response, she directed public focus towards Bondi’s reputation as a destination for travellers, already in the headlines because of a coronavirus cluster traced to a tropical-themed party at a popular Bondi beachfront bar.
From Noah’s Backpackers, the view is bleak. A few weeks ago, the hostel was bustling with 266 guests. Now, it’s desolate, with manager Dylan Tenbrink closing its doors last Wednesday, saying it was “impossible” to stay open under the new regulations around social distancing as well as media scrutiny. Unfounded rumours of a positive case of the virus in the hostel were unfairly targeting backpackers and the result was fear among both visitors and the community, he says.
“Bondi’s one of the greatest suburbs in the entire world. There’s opportunity, it’s safe, there’s freedom for everybody,” Tenbrink told Guardian Australia in the days before the hostel shut. “Now, people see you walk [out of the hostel] and they shout at you and say it’s an epicentre of disease.”
With a young, international demographic and thousands of daily visitors, Bondi’s infection rate comes as little surprise to local photographer and Aquabumps gallery owner, Eugene Tan. He has photographed Bondi Beach at daybreak for the last 21 years, and the daily surf photos are known worldwide.
“Bondi’s a brand, everybody knows it. You come to Sydney, you come to Bondi. It’s a welcoming place,” he says. It’s that spirit that might have landed Bondi in the situation it’s in today.
“The police cleared the beach on Saturday and then all the bars filled up. It’s a melting pot, which I love, but Bondi gets out of hand easily – we have a lot of travellers and they have a carefree attitude.”
But to point to the backpacker community alone as responsible for local infection rates is to miss the reality of Bondi’s broader community.
The suburb has long been home to professionals and young families from all over the world and less than half of its population is born in Australia, with many residents from Europe, South Africa, America and Brazil. At a local childcare centre where a parent tested positive for the virus, children speak Italian, French, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and Italian. Long-haul travel, responsible for bringing the vast majority of Covid-19 infections into Australia but also for connecting expats with their families, is as much a way of life as the beach.
The Waverley mayor, Paula Masselos, says it is the kindness of the community and its adaptability that stands it in good stead for the future. “We are all in this together.”
Brand Bondi, after all, reaches well beyond its bay and, to Tan, its pull is stronger than ever. He has been receiving messages from people all over the world telling him how images of Bondi are keeping them sane during lockdown.
“Without the beach,” he says, “you feel a bit lost.”
–With children often asymptomatic and older people most vulnerable, the rules are clear: stay at home, stay apart, but stay in touch.–
There’s only been one breach of the new security protocol at Susan and John Slaughter’s home in the Brisbane suburb of Lutwyche.
“Harry, who’s three, popped his head over the stable door in the kitchen,” says his grandmother Susan, 74. “He had a cheeky grin and he knew he was being naughty.”
She’s making light of one of the crueller inconveniences – and starker truths – of the new Covid-19 stasis: safety means separation, especially for older people. Australia’s mortality rate from coronavirus is thankfully one of the lowest in the world so far, but most of the deaths have been people aged 70 and over. Globally, the mortality rate is highest for the 80-plus age group, which now stands above 10%. Children, meanwhile, seem less susceptible to the worst effects but carry the risk of infecting others.
For the grandmother of four and her husband, an 80-year-old psychiatrist, that means a strict new diktat: grandparenting from a distance. With their grandchildren living over the garden fence and their daily lives deeply entwined, familial distancing is no small undertaking.
“The last time we had any physical contact was the 14th of March,” Susan says. “All my time was geared around the children but it’s all changed. They’re not allowed into the house any more and so we see them over the fence and on FaceTime.
“I understand it but it’s hard. It goes against all our ideas of togetherness and contact and the bonds that you make with children. I keep thinking, ‘Why aren’t they here?’”
Susan’s daughter Lizzie is getting used to a new daily juggle of work, childcare and family life without the parental support she and her partner relied upon.
“The hardest thing is that, because we are working, we don’t have the option of taking our children out of school and daycare without the normal help from my parents,” says the medical device specialist, 42. “But letting them spend time together is not worth the risk.”
By erring on the side of caution, they are among the growing number of families without underlying illnesses who pre-empted, and went further than, the warnings of the likes of the Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who this week told parents: “If you have a grandparent who is unwell, who has one of those chronic conditions, you must not take your children to visit those grandparents. These are very clear messages.”
“Are children at greater risk of transmitting the infection than anybody else? Probably not,” Selvey says. But, as she points out, they are less likely to wash their hands properly and they want more physical contact than others, both factors in Covid-19’s spread. She adds that it’s important to include elderly people in decision-making processes around family distancing.
For grandfather and clinical professor in paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Sydney, David Isaacs, older people need our protection, no matter the age group they are exposed to.
“What evidence there is suggests that older people give it to children, if anything,” he says. “It then spreads within family groups.”
But children are often mildly infected or asymptomatic, and we don’t yet know how likely an asymptomatic person is to spread the disease. Because of that possibility of exposure to the virus, no matter how minimal, Isaacs is unambiguous.
“The actual risk that the children will give it to [grandparents] is probably not that high, but how would you feel if your children gave your parents the virus and then they got desperately sick or died?”
The question, then, becomes how to enforce separation without plunging vulnerable people into a contact void.
Isaacs – whose children have barred visits from his toddler grandson – stresses that this is no time to step away from interaction with elderly people. Now, more than ever, is a time for support – and physical distancing, not social isolation, is key to the health of our older population. Complete separation comes with its own set of complications, their importance often drowned out by the din around the immediate dangers of the virus.
Scientia Prof Henry Brodaty, co-director of UNSW’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing, is physically distancing himself from his own grandchildren yet warns that, for some elderly people, the dangers of not seeing their grandchildren might outweigh the alternative.
“One of my patients is very isolated and she’s depressed and she’s bereaved and really the one light in her week is her visit from her grandchildren,” he says.
For now, though, the official word remains. This virus kills. Stay at home, stay apart where necessary – but, also, make sure to stay in touch. And so the new normal for family generations living close is love at a sensible distance.
“It’s certainly made a difference to the house, it’s much tidier and quieter, but I do hear the occasional pierced scream and laughter from next door,” Susan says.
“I’m finding it hard but it’s still new. I don’t think I’ve come to terms with the fact that this isn’t short term – it’s strange to think that there’s a big expanse of time ahead and you don’t know what’s going to happen.” She pauses: “No one really knows.”
daisydumas.com 