If you’ve scrolled through Instagram, TikTok or Facebook lately, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a video of someone whipping together sugar, instant coffee and boiling water. This concoction is spooned over iced milk to create the foamy drink known as Dalgona coffee.
According to Google Trends, “Dalgona coffee” has become the most searched type of coffee worldwide, overtaking previous highest peaks for all other kinds of coffee.
The ingredients are whipped together.Shutterstock
Searches worldwide surged by 1,800% in mid-March and grew a further 1,700% in mid-April.
So what is Dalgona coffee, and why is it taking the internet by storm?
The food craze born of isolation
Dalgona coffee is reportedly named after a similarly sugary and foamy South Korean candy.
I’ve never tasted it but it’s not hard to see the visual appeal: the ingredients are mixed together to create a whole new foamy, silky, pillowy substance, the kind of transformation that always does well on social media.
Having studied food trends for almost a decade, I think the Dalgona coffee craze has everything to do with our current COVID-19 induced isolation. It’s a way to get a coffee that looks cafe-style but can be achieved with the very cheapest instant coffee and some basic household ingredients.
Like so many social media food trends, it’s about what can we share with our networks, what can we say we have done and experienced – even while stuck at home.
And that carries a certain amount of social capital, especially when other kinds of foodie Instagramming (like photographing beautifully displayed cafe foods) is off the menu. It might not be your cup of tea, but to have these experiences recorded on your social media feeds is very powerful for some people.
Yum?giphy.com.
Not the first food trend, won’t be the last
Dalgona coffee is the latest in a long history of food-related social media trends, including mukbang videos – in which the host consumes often vast amounts of food while interacting with the camera.
There’s also food-related ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response, where certain audio stimulus is said to soothe some people). In these videos, the host records the sound of every crunch, crackle, slurp and swallow for the benefit of their online followers.
Food videos can be very satisfying to watch and many users report getting lost in them for hours. In a world where so much of our food thinking is around what we can’t eat or do at the table, food videos offer a release – they’re a form of vicarious consumption. You get to understand and feel the senses at play without the health implications.
Food trends online are often not really about real life. There’s a great many people who may not really enjoy an incredibly sweet instant coffee in real life but have watched a full Dalgona coffee video with relish.
To me, the Dalgona coffee trend is part of this isolation trend of “making do”. We can still have our Instagram-worthy treats while staying home. To enjoy the satisfaction of watching ingredients transform into something different and sometimes unexpected – and share the experience with friends.
COVID-19 has left governments scrambling for balanced economic, social and ethical policy responses.
The Australian government’s A$130 billion JobKeeper payment – a wage subsidy to keep Australians in work – is vital for our response to the pandemic and future economic recovery.
But temporary visa holders, including international temporary graduates, have fallen through the cracks. The temporary graduate visa (subclass 485) is for international graduates of a qualification from an Australian institution. It allows them to stay in Australia for two to four years to gain work experience.
International graduates on temporary visas rely solely on wage income to cover their living expenses. These visa holders mainly work in industries that have suffered majored losses, such as hospitality, and they are not entitled to the JobKeeker payment.
This is a first from any state or territory government and will hopefully spur similar support from universities and other jurisdictions – including from the federal government.
It’s time for Australia to be reciprocal and take care of international graduates, who are major contributors to our economy and society, in their time of need. It’s both a humanitarian issue and a sensible economic strategy.
A major drawcard for Australia
International education is Australia’s third largest export – behind iron ore and coal – and its largest services export. It contributes almost $40 billion to the Australian economy and creates around 250,000 full time jobs.
The 485 visa was introduced in 2008 and updated in 2013, taking on recommendations from the 2011 Knight Review, which recognised post-study work rights for international students as crucial for Australia to remain competitive in the education export market.
Since then, the temporary graduate visa has become a drawcard for international students. In our 2017-19 study, 76% international students indicated access to this visa was an important factor when choosing Australia as their study destination.
The top five citizenship countries of 485 visa holders in Australia have mirrored the top five source countries of international enrolments in Masters by coursework programs since 2013.
Many temporary graduate visa holders become skilled migrants or international students again. Of the of 30,952 visa holders who transitioned to other visas in the 2018-19 financial year, 45.3% became skilled migrants and 34.9% became international students again.
While international temporary graduates contribute to Australian tax revenues, they are not entitled to subsidised government services. This means they bring net income to the Australian economy.
They do not want to compromise their career goals or permanent residency outcomes.
For this reason, they may be exploited and willing to accept jobs outside their field and in industries most vulnerable to job losses during a crisis.
Census data shows cleaning, sales and hospitality are among the top five jobs for international temporary graduates. And many are front-line workers serving the Australian community, especially in aged care, health care, supermarkets and the cleaning sector.
Other countries support them
Australia’s key competing destinations for international education are giving their international students, international graduates and other temporary workers access to their welfare schemes.
Australia’s current policy jeopardises not only these international graduates’ security but also its competitiveness as a destination for international students.
On April 3, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sent out a chilling message that international students and other temporary visa holders can return to their home countries if they were unable to support themselves.
Apart from the fact international graduates can’t return to their home countries due to border closures, many have signed rental contracts in Australia.
Others may be doing further studies.
Temporary graduates are no longer international students. As a result, they do not qualify for their former university’s hardship support funds, loans and food banks or any other resources for international students.
The international education sector and universities, which rely on the 485 visa to attract international students, have a duty of care to these visa recipients.
Universities are projected to incur significant losses for the next three years due to its loss of international students.
There are many factors that will determine how well Australia’s international education industry recovers. These include the recovery of other major provider countries of international education such as China and India who continue to grapple with this pandemic.
But when the appetite for international education returns, Australia’s efforts to manage its international students and alumni in this period could reinstate its reputation and help its economic recovery.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Sharman, Professor of Medical Research and Deputy Director, Menzies Institute for Medical Research., University of Tasmania
Maintaining healthy blood pressure is important during (and after) the coronavirus pandemic.
With about one in three Australian adults having high blood pressure, many people will be needing to monitor their own blood pressure in isolation.
So it’s a great time to make sure you’re accurately measuring and optimally managing your blood pressure at home.
When it comes to blood pressure, home really is better
Blood pressure measurements taken at home are a better indication of your true blood pressure. They’re also a better indication of your risk of heart attack and stroke than measurements doctors take in their surgeries or in hospital.
Blood pressure readings by doctors are generally even higher than those measured by other health professionals, such as nurses.
This is due to the “white coat” effect, where a doctor’s presence can lead to your blood pressure (and heart rate) rising, something we’ve known about since the 1980s.
So today’s guidelines recommend doctors confirm someone has high blood pressure using methods outside the clinic.
The ideal method while in isolation is to measure your blood pressure using your own device.
How do I measure my blood pressure at home?
Your blood pressure can vary depending on whether you’re talking, exercising or under stress, or if there is a change in the temperature. It can also vary depending on your posture, whether you’ve just eaten, taken medication, drunk a coffee or smoked.
So it’s important to measure your blood pressure at home the correct way each time, otherwise your readings might be incorrect or misleading:
use a validated device, one that has been rigorously tested for accuracy. Most devices available in Australia have not been validated. You can check if yours is here. Use an upper arm device (not a wrist cuff or one you wear on a wristband) with a correct cuff size (within the range indicated on the cuff). If you don’t want to buy a device, you can hire or borrow one from some pharmacies and medical clinics
take measures at around the same time, morning and evening, over seven days (five day minimum). Measure before taking medication, food or exercise, and as advised by your doctor (for instance, before visiting the doctor or after a medication change)
don’t smoke or drink caffeine 30 minutes before measuring, and don’t measure if you’re uncomfortable, stressed or in pain
sit quietly for five minutes before measuring, without talking or distractions from other people or television
sit correctly, with feet flat on the floor, legs uncrossed, upper arm bare, arm supported with cuff at heart level, and back supported.
What else can I do to manage my blood pressure in lockdown?
While high blood pressure is mainly caused by unhealthy environments, lifestyles and behaviours, you can modify some of these at home to lower your blood pressure, thus lowering the risk of heart disease.
A balanced diet low in salt, high in fruit, vegetables and wholegrains, as well as healthy proteins, can help control blood pressure and improve your overall heart health.
Being at home means you can prepare food from the basic ingredients, avoiding the high salt, fats and sugars found in processed foods.
Maintaining a healthy weight and having an active life with regular physical activity and decreased sitting time is good for your blood pressure and overall health.
Leaving the house for exercise is one of the few excuses you have available to you during lockdown.
People who regularly walk for as little as 15 minutes a day are more likely to live longer than people who are inactive. That’s irrespective of age, sex or risk of heart disease.
If your doctor starts you on medication to lower your blood pressure, this will lower your risk of a heart attack and stroke. So it’s important to stick with your treatment while in isolation, unless instructed to stop.
Don’t avoid a trip to your GP, or a telehealth consultation, should your blood pressure remain high.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced some elective surgery can start again in private hospitals, as it becomes clear the health system will cope with the additional coronavirus demand.
He said this week “all Category 2 or equivalent procedures in the private sector, and selected Category 3 and other procedures, which includes all IVF” can restart.
What’s this mean for you? It all depends on which category you are in – and what your surgeon has decided about how urgently your surgery is needed.
It also depends on whether you are a patient in a private hospital or public hospital. If it’s the latter, you can expect to wait a while until the hospital can tell you exactly when your surgery will happen.
Scott Morrison announced on Tuesday the ban on elective surgery would be lifted.Mick Tsikas/AAP
Category 1, Category 2, Category 3: what’s the difference?
Private hospitals have not had elective surgery waiting lists in the past and so have not categorised patients for elective surgery. So it’s no surprise this announcement has created enormous confusion.
States have not yet announced their plans for restarting elective surgery.
Category 1, the most urgent, is where patients should be seen within 30 days
Category 2 patients should be seen within 90 days
Category 3 patients should be seen within 365 days.
Categorisation is done by the surgeon and takes into account the specific circumstances of the patient. For example, they would consider the extent of the pain and mobility loss, and the impact on the work or education if the surgery was delayed.
Different surgeons can assign patients different categories
Unfortunately, different surgeons seeing the same patient may make different assessments of what category they should be in. This policy issue needs to be addressed.
There is no fixed rule about whether a particular procedure is always in a specific category.
However, generally cardiac surgery, such as a heart bypass, will be classified as Category 1. More than half of all patients awaiting this procedure are treated within three weeks.
A patient waiting for a hip replacement, on the other hand, will be typically categorised as Category 2 or 3. In fact, half the patients waiting for that procedure had to wait up to four months.
Categorisation is done by the surgeon and takes into account the specific circumstances of the patient.www.shutterstock.com
How do I know what category I’m in?
If you are scheduled for an operation in a private hospital, either the hospital or the surgeon will contact you.
They will let you know if your surgery is now going ahead, and discuss with you appropriate timing. Elective surgery will commence over the next week, so private hospital patients should hear from the hospital surgery within the next fortnight or so.
Because states haven’t yet revealed their strategies for restarting elective surgery, public hospital patients should not expect to hear from the public hospital until those announcements have been made.
Good systemic behaviour is acting for the good of all, not by making altruistic sacrifices but by following the golden rule (“behave towards others as you would have them behave towards you”). Or put another way, by acting to strengthen the whole, in the process we strengthen each part. So systemic behaviour is holistic behaviour. It can be summarised through the maxim: ‘be kind’.
The question to ask of ourselves (and our businesses) is: ‘if I do something and others in a similar situation also so that something, will the whole be harmed’? If the answer is yes, then we should choose to not do that something, and so would those others faced with similar circumstances. The problem is that if one (or a just a few) make the wrong choice it may give them a competitive advantage over those who make the right choice, thereby pressuring those who initially made the right choice to change their choice.
A simple example might be dumping effluent. If one business dumps its effluent in the nearest river, and its competitors pay to have their effluent sustainably processed, then the cheating business incurs lower costs and can then tender at a lower price. Governments and others, who tend to pay the lowest price possible, will purchase more from the bad business, and less from the good businesses. This places pressure on the good businesses to ‘go bad’.
The Invisible Hand
In economic liberalism – also known as classical liberalism (or for purposes here, ‘liberalism’) – the maxim is that the best way to be kind is to act in a self-interested manner. This is summarised by the metaphor of ‘the invisible hand’; the metaphor given to us through the political economy of Adam Smith, in the eighteenth century. The idea is that by acting in a manner of ‘enlightened’ self-interest, it is ‘as if’ there is a governing spirit that allocates resources and opportunities in ways that could not be bettered by governing institutions.
This idea that wellbeing (we’ll take it here as human wellbeing, while acknowledging that the ‘whole’ is wider than the human whole) can be maximised through self-interested behaviour contains a number of caveats, and is by no means equivalent to anarchism.
One of those caveats is that there is a small, powerful and honest state; what Smith’s English contemporary Jeremy Bentham called ‘Police’. The state constituted a legal environment which, most importantly, recognised and enforced private property rights. The presence of an invisible hand did not mean the absence of a visible hand. (Good names for Bentham’s ‘Police’ are THEY or THEM, as in “why don’t THEY do something about …?”)
The second caveat is the word ‘enlightened’. In ‘liberalism’ this means ‘not breaking the golden rule’, rather than explicitly following the golden rule. Thus, behaviour that is clearly harmful to others could not be classed as enlightened. Libertarians tend to interpret this as ‘harmful to identifiable others’, rather than as harmful to society as a whole (they tend to downplay ‘society’) or ‘harmful to the planet’. Further, behaviour that may be harmful but is not obviously harmful fosters ignorance – indeed wilful blindness – as a way to tolerate self-interested behaviour that may be harmful to others, or to the whole.
(If we consider my earlier example, voluntary unawareness of the harm a business does by polluting a river can give that business a competitive advantage without it having to admit to cheating.)
A third caveat is that Adam Smith’s conception of the whole was the nation state; in his case, Great Britain. To be fair to Smith, he was not an economic nationalist, and he believed that if people in other nations behaved in the enlightened way that he believed British small businesses did (by and large) behave, then that would strengthen humanity as a whole.
A fourth caveat was Smith’s use of the word ‘frequently’. So, even within his framework, he was not casting an economic law; rather expressing a rule of thumb.
The legacy of Adam Smith’s economic liberalism – and that of his liberal precursors such as philosophers John Locke and David Hume – is that governance came to be understood as creating the institutions and policies which would best facilitate the market and private property mechanisms that underpinned the ‘invisible hand’.
The Unkind Reality of Primitive Capitalism
Much of what we say and do is not kind. Indeed, bureaucrats can be very unkind; in the ways they apply their rules, and in their preference for systems with rigid sets of rules.
One form of unkindness which I have written about recently is mercantilism, where life is conceived as a competitive struggle with winners and losers, and where the perceived winners are the parties who accumulate the biggest hoards of money. (An irony of mercantilism is that, from an historical perspective, the ‘winners’ may actually be the losers. This explanation requires a separate essay; for a clue, however, consider two large countries, one of which has a trade surplus every year for a century, and another which has a balance of trade deficit every year for a century.)
Adam Smith’s most famous book – The Wealth of Nations (1776) – was an attack on mercantilism (the “mercantile or commercial system” as he called it). Smith was against mercantilism, but what was he for? Smith turned out to be for an individualist system that can be best described as ‘primitive capitalism’; a capitalism without a public component that went beyond Bentham’s ‘Police’. While we might have a sophisticated (if fragile) capitalist world economy, we do not have a sophisticated understanding of capitalism. We cannot properly evaluate our systemic whole without a theory of public liberalism that complements the existing theory of market liberalism.
While mercantilism is often understood as a zero-sum game (where winners and winnings exactly offset losers and losses), it is under many conditions a negative-sum game, where the losses of the losers outstrip the winnings of the winners. In an unkind world, the winners do not care about the losers’ losses.
In the two centuries of history since the Industrial Revolution (eg since 1820), the era of global economic growth, it can easily be argued (though certainly not universally argued) that the predominant human experience has been winning. That experience has been called economic growth; and global economic growth has been a byproduct of our hybrid (oxymoronic?) liberal-mercantilist order. (Economic liberalism itself is not about growth; rather it is about efficiency, the maximisation of per capita happiness through the mechanism of the marketplace.) The energy that has given us 200 years of economic growth has been that of mercantilism, the human drive ‘to make and accumulate money’.
This mercantilist drive has yielded many societal benefits, though as byproducts. It is also capable of yielding substantial systemic harm. Further, the productivity benefits that have happened might have been greater (and better distributed) had that mercantilist drive conferred more value to the public commons that primitive capitalism exploited, and paid more heed generally to the sustainable and equitable proprietorship of public resources.
Racing to the Bottom
We have all heard the terms ‘race to the bottom’ and ‘arms race’. In the 1960s’ the global arms race led to both technology-fuelled economic growth, and the terror that human (and other biological) existence might be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. (The new cold war between the United States and China has a hint of a technological arms race not unlike that of the 1950s and 1960s between the United States and the Soviet Union. China holds most of the cards’ in particular, it is the main supplier of the ‘rare earth’ materials that make our connecting devices possible.)
A race to the bottom occurs when we (as individuals or organisations) act – either cynically, in response to competitive pressures, or through wilful blindness – in ways that create gains (or perceived gains) to us while creating bigger losses to others. We understand this as cheating or ‘corruption’. But it’s more nuanced than that.
We see this when manufacturers pollute, and when land speculators drive up the price of land by making it unaffordable to all except other land speculators. We see it when we trade wild animals for profit, while being unwilling to pay enough to prevent one group of animals from infecting another. We see it in the lethal drugs trades, whether those lethal drugs be illegal (eg methamphetamine), prescribed (eg fentanyl) or legal (sugar fizzy drinks). The impulse for some to ‘make money’ outweighs (to them) the harm that they do to others. We see it when rich people and rich organisations seek to avoid paying taxes; they argue that they do this to gain a ‘competitive advantage’ (which is a mercantilist concept). We see it more generally as a process of miserliness, where people take money from the circulatory system without giving back to it. And we see it in the labour exploitation practices that exist to some extent in every part of the world.
While systemic actions may counter these races to the bottom, real-world competitive pressures make it difficult for individuals and capitalist organisations to make systemically beneficial choices. Hence we need institutions of governance – especially but not only governments – which we expect to act in ways which offset the private behaviours that are subject to ‘market failure’.
Economic liberals play down the extent of market failure, and also argue that governments are rarely competent enough to make good offsetting decisions. That’s a cop out. Democratic governments exist to make systemic decisions; to do so they have powers (albeit constrained) to levy taxes and create money. (Indeed, many non-democratic governments make many good systemic decisions, though they are not mandated to do so.) Only anarchists believe that governments are not needed to offset ‘race to the bottom’ behaviour. (Anarchists believe that individuals are inherently good, and universally choose to refrain from unkind behaviour.)
Money and Affordability
It is in matters of money that we find it hardest to behave in systemically beneficial ways. This is for two reasons; the first is our general ignorance of money (and by that I do not mean ‘financial illiteracy’). We (including many finance professionals) think of money as if it was inherently scarce; for the very good reason that for individuals and organisations it is scarce, and rightly so. Money would lose its utility to households and businesses if its value could be undermined by, for example, counterfeit.
Monetary theory is one area where economic liberalism falls flat. To economic liberals, the money supply is very much the tightly guarded responsibility of the inner ‘Police’, but not of the sovereign governments which they have never trusted. Throughout history, classical liberals have worried about the possibility that there could be too much money compelled to circulate, and that this might lead to an inflation that would depreciate the purchasing power of misers’ caches of unspent money.
Thus, economic liberals have always mystified money, playing down the reality that, to THEM (the Benthamite ‘Police’) money is infinitely cheap and can be created at will. (Felix Martin, in his 2013 Money, the Unauthorised Biography – suggests that John Locke, the founding father of economic liberalism, simply did not understand money. Nevertheless, due to his reputation as a philosopher, Locke’s naïve views on money prevailed in the public mind, despite there being other people in banking and commerce who did understand money.)
Much political theatre has been made by journalists asking politicians standing for office “where will the money come from?” to pay for their policies. These journalists faithfully reflect liberal-mercantilist assumptions that money is, in effect, a commodity like gold.
There are only three answers that aspiring politicians can give to this journalistic question. The first answer is that money could be reallocated from some other public use. Almost all people standing for office give a variant of this answer. The second answer is that new taxes will be raised, meaning that the future government will have more and the government’s private subjects will have less; this answer is generally seen as political suicide. The third (and honest) answer – the one that leads to ridicule (ask Russel Norman who contemplated ‘quantitative easing’) rather than political suicide – is that, in the event of a systemic money shortage, the Government can borrow what it needs from the Reserve Bank (in essence, the people can borrow from the people, the stock-in-trade of Japan’s Abenomics). (This option is pejoratively known as ‘printing money’, and is dismissed at ‘inflationary’ by classical liberals.)
The important thing to note here is that a country’s monetary system is controlled by THEM, in the form of a partnership between two public (and publicly accountable and publicly owned) institutions – the Government and the Reserve Bank. At times of monetary shortage, we need the Reserve Bank to mark up its balance sheet by advancing credit to the Government, and we need the Government – notionally in debt to the Reserve Bank – to ensure that the new money circulates. It means that there is never any need to have poverty amidst plenty. Any decision to have too little money in circulation is an unkind – indeed cruel – political decision. There is no need to have a general economic depression of trade during or after a public health emergency such as the present one. There is no technical reason that constrains the supply of money. Those who are empowered to act systemically for the good of the people they are accountable to, should indeed do so.
(We note that, for federally constituted nations, the money-creation mechanism is only available at the Federal level; the politicians subject to journalists’ questions will in many cases be operating at the provincial level. In this sense we note that Greece – and indeed France – are mere provinces of the Eurozone of the European Union.)
It would very much help if each nation had a mechanism already in place through which they could channel new money directly to the people. A system of universal productivity dividends (eg a basic universal income) is such a mechanism. When economic citizens are already receiving regular tax-funded weekly dividends – and no matter how small those regular dividends might be – then a time that would otherwise be an economic depression can be a time to raise those dividends to facilitate the circulation of new money.
To individuals, something is affordable if they have sufficient money or credit to buy it. At the systemic level, however, affordability means something quite different; it’s about whether resources such as labour or machinery can be deployed or redeployed. Sometimes items are not affordable to governments even when they have the money – eg houses can only be built if there are available builders. Other times items are affordable when governments do not have money; indeed much infrastructure was easily affordable in Auckland in the early 1990s, but was not purchased by government in the belief that it was unaffordable; a belief that prevailed despite there being many unemployed builders and hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers.
International Systems
One oft-cited constraint on domestic policies is the requirement to be internationally competitive. This is code for, if other countries are breaking the rules then our country must too. Thus, the workings of the international economy constitute a race to the bottom that cannot be offset by a global ‘Police’. (There is no global ‘Police’, the international economy is, literally, an anarchy.) There are ways to offset the unenlightened behaviour of other nations; for example, by restricting imports from foreign suppliers who do not pay all their costs; in the jargon, those suppliers who do not ‘internalise’ all their costs.)
It is also often claimed that countries which create too much money (or which are not fully trusted by the international community), will have their money depreciated. This has been a problem traditionally faced by Latin American nations. Additionally, centre-left governments in countries like New Zealand have been seen by international bankers as less trustworthy than centre-right governments; making centre-left governments especially cautious about running technical debts to their Reserve Banks.
In a liberal economic order, as conceived by Adam Smith for example, commerce would be conducted by a myriad of small to medium sized businesses supplying goods and services to households and other businesses. In the mercantilist order that Smith critiqued, governments conferred special ‘monopoly’ favours on small numbers of large businesses; businesses that played the international competitive advantage game with the military backing of their states, and which acted as agents of foreign policy as well as of commerce. Examples of these privileged companies include the various East India Companies, and the Hudsons Bay Company.
The reality then, as now, was a mix of big and small businesses. Likewise, the global reality is a mix of big and small countries. In the absence of a formally constituted global ‘Police’, it falls on the big companies and the big countries to act in systemically helpful ways; in ways that small tradable businesses and small nations cannot be expected to act. One form of systemically helpful behaviour is to support effective global institutions, such as the United Nations. Another way would be to enable the International Monetary Fund to operate as a global Reserve Bank (as per John Maynard Keynes’ original vision presented at Bretton Woods in 1944).
In the absence of effective global governing institutions, we look to nations such as the federal United States, China and European Union to take a global perspective in their decision making. Of the three, China has probably taken on this role more clearly than the others, since 2008. Indeed it was Chinese leadership that saved the world capitalist system from the financial blight of 2008 (the Global Financial Crisis). (While many have reservations about China’s domestic strictures, and indeed some of its global motives, nevertheless it did act to revive the global economy and sought to invest its surpluses in capital-poor regions such as Africa.) The United States has conspicuously absented itself from any obligation to act in a globally supportive manner, since 2017. And the European Union has, since 2008, waged its own North-South economic civil war. It now acts principally to maximise its annual trade surpluses with the rest of the world. The European Union and the United States, at present are mercantilist organisations, looking to their perceived competitive advantages within the world rather than to the wellbeing of the world as a whole.
The good news is that some smaller nations have assumed leadership roles beyond what would normally be expected of them. I count New Zealand among these.
In Summary
The human world of 2019 faced huge systemic challenges; challenges that could be understood by observing which behaviours were supportive of the whole, and which behaviours diminished the whole.
In 2020 we have the more immediate global challenges posed by the Covid19 emergency. The necessary immediate responses relate to the need for our governmental organisations to ensure the required monetary support; support to ensure that our scaled back economies operate productively, efficiently, and justly. The correct political responses to the Covid19 emergency will also be the responses that help us to address the pre-Covid19 challenges.
Global companies are positioning themselves to use little-known rules in trade agreements such as the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to claim millions of dollars in compensation for restrictions imposed during the pandemic.
They and other companies have successfully lobbied for rules in the CPTPP and other bilateral and regional agreements that give them rights to bypass courts including Australia’s High Court and sue governments in extraterritorial tribunals for income they claim restrictions have cost them, using so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedures.
Such provisions do not exist in the rules of the World Trade Organisation iteslf, which is the body formally charged with regulating global trade.
The Philip Morris tobacco company used such rules in a Hong Kong-Australia agreement to claim billions of dollars in compensation from Australian for plain packaging legislation.
There have been increasing numbers of such cases against governments regulating to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.
An international arbitration law firm Aceris Law LLC has told its clients
while the future remains uncertain, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to violate various protections provided in bilateral investment treaties and may bring rise to claims in the future by foreign investors
An Australian law firm Alston & Bird is advertising an event called “The coming wave of COVID-19 arbitration – looking ahead”.
Legal scholars critical of ISDS say governments could face an avalanche of ISDS cases after the pandemic is over.
ISDS clauses establish rights to sue
Phillip Morris lost its case against Australia’s plain packs law in the High Court, then went to an extraterritorial tribunal.LUKAS COCH/AAP
Foreign investors could allege that governments are breaching the “direct expropriation” clauses of ISDS rules by appropriating private health and other assets for public use.
Lock down rules that affect profits could be interpreted as “indirect expropriation”.
The pandemic is also raising questions about other aspects of Australia’s trade agreements.
Often the agreements open up essential services including health, to private foreign investment, with only limited carve outs to allow regulation which can be wound back, but not widened, over time.
It has assisted local firms to reestablish the capacity to manufacture equipment such as facemasks.
And it has ramped up screening of foreign investment by the Foreign Investment Review Board, in a way trade agreements would normally prevent.
Post-pandemic trade policies should reject both the extremes of recent agreements and the Trump and Hanson policies of building walls and a return to high tariffs.
Post-pandemic, we should wind such clauses back
Australia should also reject the trap of taking sides in the US-China trade wars.
Trade agreements should be negotiated openly in a system that takes account of the specific needs of developing countries.
They should reinforce internationally-agreed and fully-enforceable labour rights and environmental standards, allow countries such as Australia to maintain the manufacturing capacity that will be needed in the event of crises and enable governments to regulate for purposes of public health and the environment.
They most certainly should not strengthen medicine or other monopolies, or give additional legal rights such as ISDS to global corporations that already have enormous market power.
If you’ve scrolled through Instagram, TikTok or Facebook lately, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a video of someone whipping together sugar, instant coffee and boiling water. This concoction is spooned over iced milk to create the foamy drink known as Dalgona coffee.
According to Google Trends, “Dalgona coffee” has become the most searched type of coffee worldwide, overtaking previous highest peaks for all other kinds of coffee.
The ingredients are whipped together.Shutterstock
Searches worldwide surged by 1,800% in mid-March and grew a further 1,700% in mid-April.
So what is Dalgona coffee, and why is it taking the internet by storm?
The food craze born of isolation
Dalgona coffee is reportedly named after a similarly sugary and foamy South Korean candy.
I’ve never tasted it but it’s not hard to see the visual appeal: the ingredients are mixed together to create a whole new foamy, silky, pillowy substance, the kind of transformation that always does well on social media.
Having studied food trends for almost a decade, I think the Dalgona coffee craze has everything to do with our current COVID-19 induced isolation. It’s a way to get a coffee that looks cafe-style but can be achieved with the very cheapest instant coffee and some basic household ingredients.
Like so many social media food trends, it’s about what can we share with our networks, what can we say we have done and experienced – even while stuck at home.
And that carries a certain amount of social capital, especially when other kinds of foodie Instagramming (like photographing beautifully displayed cafe foods) is off the menu. It might not be your cup of tea, but to have these experiences recorded on your social media feeds is very powerful for some people.
Not the first food trend, won’t be the last
Dalgona coffee is the latest in a long history of food-related social media trends, including mukbang videos – in which the host consumes often vast amounts of food while interacting with the camera.
There’s also food-related ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response, where certain audio stimulus is said to soothe some people). In these videos, the host records the sound of every crunch, crackle, slurp and swallow for the benefit of their online followers.
Food videos can be very satisfying to watch and many users report getting lost in them for hours. In a world where so much of our food thinking is around what we can’t eat or do at the table, food videos offer a release – they’re a form of vicarious consumption. You get to understand and feel the senses at play without the health implications.
Food trends online are often not really about real life. There’s a great many people who may not really enjoy an incredibly sweet instant coffee in real life but have watched a full Dalgona coffee video with relish.
To me, the Dalgona coffee trend is part of this isolation trend of “making do”. We can still have our Instagram-worthy treats while staying home. To enjoy the satisfaction of watching ingredients transform into something different and sometimes unexpected – and share the experience with friends.
In critical times, we expect our public institutions to step up. Inevitably, we are going to judge them, as we should, because it is important that they get decisions right.
But judgements about an institution have to be based on an informed understanding of what it is doing; and what are the right and wrong ways for it to go about its job.
Last week the Daily Telegraph commentator Terry McCrann launched a broadside against the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
McCrann lambasted the ABS for having released labour force survey statistics that he called ‘hopelessly out of date’, relating to the period from March 1 to 14.
Instead, he argued, we should be aiming for the same “real-time” weekly figures on unemployment as in the United States.
There are three things wrong with McCrann’s claims.
First, the ABS moved at high speed to provide extra real-time measures of the effect of COVID-19 on the Australian economy. Take a quick visit to www.abs.gov.au/covid19.
The ABS began a new weekly survey of 1000 businesses on March 19. The near real-time results are providing valuable information on topics such as how businesses are adjusting hours worked by their employees.
The ABS has stepped up, quickly
This week saw the release of the initial versions of two extra publications. One is based on a survey of 1000 Australian households from the first week of April. It includes information on the impact of COVID-19 on jobs and hours worked by members of those households.
The other is derived from business payroll information from the Australian Tax Office. It gives a comprehensive perspective on what is happening to jobs. The data released this week covers the period to April 4, with updates to follow every two weeks.
These new data sources do record the fast loss of jobs and the large drop in hours worked that were expected. They will provide an important input to government decisions on what policies are needed in these difficult times. The speed at which the ABS has put these data together is impressive.
Other countries work no faster
Second, the real-time data from the United States is the number of new claims being made for unemployment benefits. That is a completely different data series to the Labour Force Survey.
Far from being real-time, labour force numbers for the United States for March, released by its Bureau of Labor Statistics in early April, relate to exactly the same time period as in Australia.
It’s certainly true, however, that Australia could make better use of its unemployment benefit payment data. The most recent release of those data is from last December.
An excellent way forward would be for the ABS to partner with the Department of Social Services (in the same way as it has with the Tax Office) to start providing two-weekly releases of detailed data on the number of Job Seeker and Job Keeper payments.
Good reasons for the labour force survey
Third, getting labour force numbers from the ABS in the usual way and supplementing them with additional surveys is the right way to go. The new data are especially helpful in the short term.
As the economy evolves the well understood and long running Labour Force survey data will become increasingly important. It remains our most authoritative way to track what is happening in the labour market. As well, it provides essential links to how the economy has responded to downturns and economic recoveries in the past.
So let’s keep our criticism for when an institution really does get it wrong. At a time where the value of accurate and relevant information on economy activity is at a premium, we’re lucky to have the ABS.
Though families have retreated into their homes, it seems that dads the world over are taking centre stage on social media and video sharing platforms – providing an antidote to COVID-19 anxiety.
Though we might expect a more serious response from fathers to an upended world, humour, laughter and playfulness help foster resilience and provide a coping strategy to better manage and reduce stress.
Cultivating a laughter mindset is an important tool to build connection and gain some mastery over things we can’t control. Not all play or humour results in laughter, but it primes the mind’s internal landscape towards positivity. As Laughter Yoga founder Dr Madan Kataria puts it, “laughter doesn’t necessarily solve a problem but it helps dissolve it”.
Dads as role models
No matter what country we’re from, viewers are all laughing in the same language at TikTok videos from around the globe.
Learning to laugh at yourself develops personal resilience, and that’s what children are perhaps seeing in their parents for the very first time. Self-enhancing humour – maintaining a humorous outlook in stressful or adverse situations – is linked to positive psychological well-being signs such as happiness, satisfaction with life, and an optimistic outlook.
So, if we can laugh at COVID-19 by making jokes about toilet paper or homeschooling it lessens the sting, making us feel more in control.
When dads (and mums) draw on humour, laughter and play, it teaches children there’s another way to respond to conflict and crisis. It helps provide a new perspective on challenging situations and, when initiated and modelled by adults, can be particularly effective in quelling anxiety.
Parents dancing around the living room, having fun, even being silly invoke a sense of ease. When we’re laughing and smiling the mind is anchored in a moment of positivity. Negativity in the shape of fear, depression or anxiety has no footing.
The family that boogies together …
With dads spending more time at home, the lines between their work life and home life are blurring, making way for daggy dad jokes and fish-out-of-water dad dance routines. Many families have taken on the challenge of learning a short dance Blinding Lights dance sequence set to a 2019 song by The Weeknd.
Familiar faces, such as late night television host Jimmy Fallon, are being shown onscreen in their role as fathers, highlighting the humour and absurdity that can come with working from home.
Some dads are using isolation as an excuse to show they can still throw down.
Family bonding
While physical distancing measures apply outside home, social isolation can also be occurring within them, with family members turning their attention to separate screens and potentially harbouring private fears and anxieties.
In family lockdown, how can we protect our children from the global and domestic anguish in the face of coronavirus infection and death? Laughing as a family creates stronger bonds and makes us feel part of the same team.
While experiencing stress with others helps us bond by cuing an oxytocin release in our brains, laughing provides an instant salve for anxious feelings by signalling the release of “feel good” neurotransmitters: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins.
Laughter doesn’t just lighten your load mentally – it induces a range of physiological, psychological, social, spiritual, and quality-of-life benefits for heart health, blood pressure in aged care settings, and pain tolerance. Laughter has a similar effect on the brain as meditation, anchoring our minds to a present moment of joy.
The apparent increase in entertaining dad content online shows families are reframing a stressful situation with a humour mindset. The more we train our humour muscle, the stronger our neural pathways towards positivity and humour. So in the future, we’ll have expanded our resources to respond to a stressful situation with more levity.
The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once said,
Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
Looking at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) today, it’s hard to say which of these tactics is most germane.
Getting the answer right will have enormous consequences for the United States and the future of the Indo-Pacific region. Underestimating the PLA breeds complacency and risks costly overreach. Overestimating the Chinese military grants it unwarranted advantage.
Similarly, for the Chinese leadership, miscalculating its military capability could lead to disaster.
As such, any serious appraisal of Chinese military power has to take the PLA’s progress – as well as its problems – into account. This was the focus of a recent study we undertook, along with retired US Army lieutenant colonel Dennis Blasko, for the Australian Department of Defence.
The PLA’s new-found might
By all appearances, the PLA has become a more formidable force over the past decade. The massive military parade in Beijing last October to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China showed off more than 700 pieces of modern military hardware.
One of these weapons, displayed publicly for the first time, was the DF-41, China’s most powerful nuclear-armed ballistic missile. It is capable of hitting targets anywhere in the US.
Under President Xi Jinping, China has also expanded its military footprint in the South China Sea. Military experts say China has used the global distraction of the coronavirus pandemic to shore up its position even further, drawing rebukes from neighbours. Tensions have heightened in recent days as the US and Australia have sent warships into the sea for drills.
In the past few years, China has also stepped up its military exercises around Taiwan and disputed waters near Japan, and last December, commissioned its second aircraft carrier, the Shandong, into service with the PLA Navy.
The most recent annual assessment of the PLA by the Pentagon acknowledges China’s armed forces are developing the capability to dissuade, deter or, if ordered, defeat third-party armed forces (such as the US) seeking to intervene in “a large-scale, theatre campaign” in the region.
The report also expects the PLA to steadily improve its ability to project power into the Pacific and beyond.
A recent study commissioned by the US Congress goes further, saying China’s strategy aims to
disrupt, disable or destroy the critical systems that enable US military advantage.
The report called for a “new American way of war”.
All of these highlight the increasing capabilities of the PLA and underscore the challenges China’s rising hard power pose to the United States and its regional allies. But what of the challenges the PLA itself faces?
A Chinese destroyer taking part in a naval parade off the eastern port city of Qingdao last year.Jason Lee/Reuters
Overcoming the ‘peace disease’
Interestingly, many of these problems are openly discussed in official Chinese publications aimed at a Chinese audience, but are curiously absent when speaking to a foreign audience.
Often, pithy formulaic sayings of a few characters summarise PLA shortcomings. For example, the “two inabilities” (两个能力不够), a term that has appeared hundreds of times in official Chinese media, makes reference to two shortcomings:
the PLA’s current ability to fight a modern war is insufficient, and
the current military commanders are also not up to the task.
Another frequent self-criticism highlights the “peace disease” (和平病), “peacetime habits” (和平积习) and “long-standing peace problems” (和平积弊).
The PLA was last at war in the mid-1980s, some 35 years years ago. Today’s Chinese military has very little combat experience.
Put more pointedly, far more soldiers serving in the PLA today have paraded down Chang’an Avenue in Beijing than have actually operated in combat.
Owing to these and many other acknowledged deficiencies, Xi launched the most ambitious and potentially far-reaching reforms in the PLA’s history in late 2015.
This massive structural overhaul aims to transform the PLA from a bloated, corrupt and degraded military to one increasingly capable of fighting and winning relatively short, but intensive, conflicts against technologically sophisticated adversaries, such as the United States.
But, recognising how difficult this transformation will be, the Chinese political and military leadership has set out a decades-long timeline to achieve it.
DF-17 ballistic missiles on parade in Tiananmen Square last year.Xinhua News Agency handout/EPA
In Xi’s estimations, by 2020, the PLA’s mechanisation will be “basically achieved” and strategic capabilities will have seen major improvements; by 2035, national defence modernisation will be “basically completed”; and by mid-century, the PLA will be a “world-class military.”
In other words, this transformation – if successful – will take time.
At this relatively early point in the process, authoritative writings by PLA leaders and strategic analysts make clear that much more work is needed, especially more realistic training in joint operations, as well as improved leadership and greater communications integration across the services.
PLA modernisation depends more on “software” — human talent development, new war-fighting concepts and organisational transformation — than on the “hardware” of new weapons systems. This underscores the lengthy and difficult nature of reform.
‘Know the enemy and know yourself’
The many challenges facing the PLA’s reform effort suggest the Chinese leadership may lack confidence in its current ability to achieve victory against a strong adversary on the battlefield.
owever, none of this means we should dismiss the PLA as a paper tiger. The recent indictment of PLA personnel for the 2017 hack of Equifax is a cautionary reminder of the Chinese military’s expansive capabilities.
Better hardware is not what China needs at the moment – it needs to improve its software.ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA
Rather, it means a prudent assessment of the PLA must take its strengths and weaknesses into account, neither overestimating nor underestimating either one. Should strategic competition between the US and China continue to escalate, getting this right will be more important than ever.
So, is China appearing weak when it is strong, or appearing strong when it is weak? Much current evidence points to the latter.
But this situation will change and demands constant reassessment. Another quotation from Sun Tzu is instructive:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
He added,
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
It was 2 am on a humid summer’s night on Sydney’s coast. Something in the distance caught my eye – a pod of glowing dolphins darted towards the bow of the boat. I had never seen anything like it before. They were electric blue, trailing swaths of light as they rode the bow wave.
It was a stunning example of “bioluminescence”. The phenomenon is the result of a chemical reaction in billions of single-celled organisms called dinoflagellates congregating at the sea surface. These organisms are a type of phytoplankton – tiny microscopic organisms many sea creatures eat.
Dinoflagellates switch on their bioluminescence as a warning signal to predators, but it can also be triggered when they’re disturbed in the water – in this case, by the dolphins.
You can see marine bioluminescence from land in Australia. Places like Jervis Bay and Tasmania are renowned for such spectacles.
But this dazzling night-time show is under threat. Light pollution creates brighter nights and disrupts ecological rhythms along the coast, such as breeding and feeding patterns. With so much human activity close to the shore and at sea, how much longer can we continue to enjoy this natural light show?
Lighting up the world has an ecological price
Light pollution is a well-known problem for inland ecosystems, particularly for nocturnal species.
In fact, a global study published earlier this year identified light pollution as an extinction threat to land bioluminescent species. The study surveyed firefly experts, who considered artificial light to be the second greatest threat to fireflies after habitat destruction.
Artificial light is one of the biggest threats fireflies face.Shutterstock
At sea, artificial light pollution enters the marine environment temporarily (lights from ships and fishing activities) and permanently (coastal towns and offshore oil platforms). To make matters worse, light from cities can extend further offshore by scattering into the atmosphere and reflecting off clouds. This is known as artificial sky glow.
For organisms with circadian clocks (day-night sleep cycles), this loss of darkness can have damaging effects.
Bioluminescence in Sydney in the wake of the boat the author was on.Vanessa Pirotta, Author provided
For example it can disrupt animal metabolism, which can lead to weight gain. Artificial light can also change sea turtle nesting behaviour and can disorientate turtle hatchlings when trying to get to sea, lowering their chances of survival.
It can also disorientate the foraging of fish communities; alter predatory fish behaviour (such as in Yellowfin Bream and Leatherjacks) leading to increased predation in artificial light at night; cause reproductive failure in clownfish; and change the structural composition of marine invertebrate communities.
What are lights along the coast doing to bioluminescent species?Shutterstock
For zooplankton – a vital species for a range of bigger animals – artificial light disrupts their “diel vertical migration”. This term refers to the movement of zooplankton from the depths of the ocean where they spend the day to reduce fish predation, rising to the surface at night to feed.
What does this mean for bioluminescent species?
Increased exposure to artificial light due to human activities, such as growing cities and increased global shipping movement, may disrupt when and where bioluminescent species hang out.
In turn, this may influence where predators move, leading to disruptions in the marine food web, potentially changing the dynamics of energy transfer efficiency between marine species.
Bioluminescence draws tourists and photographers in Tasmania.Shutterstock
Bioluminescence usually serves as a communication function, such as to warn off predators, attract a mate or lure prey. For many species, light pollution in the ocean may compromise this biological communication strategy.
And for light-producing organisms such as dinoflagellates, excess artificial light may reduce the effectiveness of their bioluminescence because they won’t shine as bright, potentially increasing their risk of being eaten.
Have you read Julia Baird’s new book? It’s a great introduction to the science behind the ephemeral bioluminescence at sea.HarperCollins Australia
A 2016 study in the Arctic revealed the critical depth where atmospheric light dims to darkness, and bioluminescence from organisms becomes dominant, was approximately 30 metres below the sea surface.
This means any change to light in the Arctic influences when marine organisms rise to the surface. If there is too much light, these organisms remain deeper for longer where it’s safe – reducing their potential feeding time.
Understanding the level at which artificial light penetrates the ocean is tricky, especially so when dealing with mobile sources of light pollution such as ships, which are becoming an almost permanent fixture in some areas of the ocean.
caption.Shutterstock
Pockets of darkness still remain in our oceans. But they are becoming rarer, making light pollution a serious global threat to marine life.
The spectacle of glowing dolphins should serve as a timely reminder of our need to conserve the darkness we have left.
Simple steps at home such as switching off lights and reducing unnecessary outdoor lighting, especially if you live near the ocean, is a step in the right direction to doing your bit for nocturnal species.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David MacKenzie, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, Social Work & Social Policy, University of South Australia
What would happen if we were able to redesign the homelessness services system so homelessness could be decreased and ultimately ended? Our newly released research report sets out an agenda of practical innovations. If implemented systemically, these changes could radically transform Australia’s response to youth homelessness within a decade.
Every year, about 42,000 people aged 15-24, seeking assistance on their own, receive help from homelessness services. Between 2001 and 2006, this figure was about 32,000 per year.
The current specialist homelessness services system consists of some 1,500 agencies throughout Australia that support and house people seeking help due to homelessness. The system has increased in capacity from 202,500 clients and funding of A$383 million in 2008, to 290,300 clients and A$989.8 million in 2017-18.
When the Rudd government issued its 2008 white paper, The Road Home, the bold objective was to halve homelessness by 2020. It’s now all too clear the status quo of homelessness programs and services has failed to reduce homelessness. So what needs to change?
Rethinking the system
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has just released the research report, Redesign of a homelessness service system for young people, by a team of researchers from Swinburne University and the University of South Australia. It provides “a systems rethink” of the response to youth homelessness. The report will be presented to the first AHURI research webinar to be held next Wednesday, April 29, in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
The researchers began by asking questions about what could be done to stem the flow of young people into homelessness and to extricate young people from homelessness. This led to a reframing of the system in terms of a community-level ecosystem of services, programs and supports, organised locally. It’s a contrast to the status quo of centrally managed, targeted and siloed programs.
The diagram below shows what can be done to stem the flow into homelessness at the “front end” and what needs to be done at the “back end”.
Author provided
3 key ways to ‘turn off the tap’
1.Effective early interventions are a priority. An innovative and now proven approach is the “community of services and schools” (COSS) model of early intervention. The Geelong Project, as well as newly established Albury and Mt Druitt sites in New South Wales, exemplify the COSS model.
This model reduced adolescent homelessness in the City of Greater Geelong by 40%. At the same time, it reduced disengagement from schooling and education for supported at-risk young people. The model has attracted international attention.
2. A second measure is extending state care and support for young people leaving the care and protection system at 18 years of age. This cohort is particularly vulnerable to becoming homeless.
A campaign has been under way to get the various states and territories to extend support until at least the age of 21. Victoria has begun a trial of this measure for 250 young people, but adequate support should be delivered to every care leaver in every Australian jurisdiction.
3.Creating entry points into the specialist homelessness services system for people seeking help is another Victorian reform. Anyone seeking assistance does not have to find their own way into the system – there is one point of contact in a community area where their needs can be assessed and appropriate support delivered. It’s a more efficient way of making use of limited resources.
No other state or territory has yet adopted the Victorian innovation.
3 ways to help create housing options
At the back end, there is a more costly set of options. Young people on their own are 16% of all specialist homelessness services clients and half of all single clients. But young people only manage to get 2-3% of social housing tenancies. A rethink of social housing is overdue.
1. In NSW, we have seen the founding of the first youth-specific social housing company in the world, My Foundations Youth Housing. In five years it has supported 885 tenants in some 300 properties with support from youth services partners. About 85% of the tenants are engaged in education, training and/or employment.
This approach could be and should be adopted across all Australian jurisdictions.
2. Many young people leaving homelessness services rely on Commonwealth Rent Assistance. Again in NSW, the Rent Choice Youth program provides a range of supplementary supports to complement rent assistance. Feedback from workers on the ground identifies this program as an effective innovation that merits being scaled up.
3. A third back-end measure is further development of the youth foyer model in Australia. Foyers provide supported accommodation on the basis of residents’ commitment to education, training and/or employment. In the past decade, some 15 foyers have been developed across Australia.
Apart from the high costs of building and operating foyers, the main issue is that if foyers are specifically part of the homelessness response, then new tenants should be exclusively selected from young people leaving specialist homelessness services programs. This is not necessarily standard practice.
There is a saying “same old thinking – same old results”, which will be a truism without system reform. As terrible as the current COVID-19 crisis is, it provides impetus and an opportunity for a major rethink of how we respond to youth homelessness.
The first AHURI Research Webinar Series event will be hosted on Wednesday, April 29 2020, from 10am to 11.30am. The free webinar will present findings from the research project, Redesign of a homelessness service system for young people. More details are available here.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stefan Volk, Associate Professor and Co-Director Body, Heart and Mind in Business Research Group, University of Sydney
As governments look to ease general social-distancing measures and instead use more targeted strategies to stop coronavirus transmission, we face a social dilemma about the limits of cooperative behaviour.
Consider the controversy over contact-tracing phone apps, which can help authorities identify people with whom someone diagnosed with COVID-19 has recently come into close contact.
Oxford University research suggests such apps could effectively stop the epidemic if 60% of the population use them, though even with lower uptake they still have some value.
The Australian government’s goal is for 40% of the population to use its app. It is hoping people will do this voluntarily.
That’s double the uptake so far achieved in Singapore, which launched its TraceTogether app on March 20. This despite a six-nation survey (including Australia) suggesting Singaporeans are the most relaxed about the personal privacy concerns.
My research into cooperative behaviour suggests there’s no reason to believe voluntary uptake will be higher anywhere else.
What is a social dilemma?
Economists define a social dilemma as a situation where individual interests conflict with collective interests. More specifically, it is a situation in which there is a collective benefit from widespread cooperation but individuals have an incentive to “free ride” on the cooperation of others.
For example, we would have collectively benefited if everyone had shown self-restraint in buying toilet paper and other items in the early weeks of the crisis. But selfish behaviour by some created a crisis for everybody else.
Economists, political scientists and evolutionary biologists have used social dilemma paradigms for more than half a century to study the evolution of cooperation in societies.
One of the most influential contributions to the field was a 1981 paper, The Evolution of Cooperation, by political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist William Hamilton. The paper’s key point is this: cooperation depends not on altruism but reciprocity.
Most cooperation is conditional
My research (with behavioural economist Christian Thöni of the University of Lausanne) confirms this.
Based on reviewing 17 social dilemma studies involving more than 7,000 individuals, we estimate no more than 3% of the population can be relied on to act cooperatively out of altruism – independent of what others do.
About 20% can be expected to act selfishly (i.e. free ride).
The majority – about 60% – are “conditional cooperators”. They cooperate if they believe others will cooperate.
Another 10% are so-called “triangle cooperators”. They behave similarly to conditional cooperators, but only to the point where they believe enough people are cooperating. They then reduce their cooperation.
The remainder – about 7% – behave unpredictably.
This infographic illustrates the four cooperation types and levels of cooperation over time. Altruistiic cooperation does not depend on others. Conditional cooperation depends on others cooperating. Triangle cooperation is similar to conditional cooperation to a point, then falls away. Free-riding behaviour is always uncooperative and can only be modified by the fear of punishment.Stefan Volk, Author provided
The need for punishment
The most important group to consider in social dilemma situations is, of course, the majority.
Conditional cooperators are very sensitive to what they believe others will do. They will only pay taxes, save water, donate to charities or protect the environment if they believe most others are doing the same.
To maintain their cooperation, therefore, it is essential to uphold their beliefs in equality and egalitarianism, where everyone does their part, nobody gets preferential treatment, and nobody gets away with free riding.
Research by Swiss economists Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher has found just a small minority of free riders is sufficient to cause a breakdown of cooperation over time.
Conditional cooperators will reduce their own cooperation as soon as they realise one or a few others are not complying with the collectively agreed rules. This in turn causes others to reduce their cooperation. It creates a downward spiral.
What stops this happening more is that many conditional cooperators will punish free riders, even at their own expense.
Fehr and Fischbacher demonstrated this through experiments involving “ultimatum games”.
They observed games in which one person got to propose how to split a pot of money between two players. If the other player rejected the split, neither got money.
In another scenario, the allocator was free to make the split however they liked. But a third party unaffected by the split could spend money from their own allocated pot to deny the allocator income. In 55% of cases, third parties were prepared to spend money to punish allocators who didn’t split the money fairly. Fehr and Fischbacher called this “altruistic punishment”.
Their results also showed anticipation of punishment deterred non-cooperative behaviour by free riders and reassured conditional cooperators’ beliefs in maintaining their commitment to collective cooperation.
Two-factor validation
The evidence from behavioural economics research indicates two mechanisms are essential to ensure cooperative behaviour on COVID-19 measures.
First, the majority of us must be reassured others are doing the right thing. This involves showcasing exemplary acts of cooperation and granting no preferential treatment to any kind of interest group.
Second, we must be assured others aren’t getting away with uncooperative behaviour. In other words, free riding must be swiftly and visible punished.
Without these conditions, an expectation of widespread cooperative behaviour is merely a hope.
Famous paintings are flooding the internet – but not as we are accustomed to seeing them. These are not just reproductions. Literally coming to life, paintings are being re-enacted at home with art lovers posing their way into everything from Girl with a Pearl Earring to American Gothic.
Given social distancing, it’s not surprising portraits are the favoured genre. Being home-bound also means using what is available: a bath towel in the place of a luxurious Renaissance dress; pots and pans instead of medieval headgear; pets taking on surprising roles.
These images invoke a humorous game of spot the difference. One especially cheeky example shows a couple recreating a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, with Bosch’s bizarre and whimsical world matched by contemporary verve.
These recreations are not just rooted in the boredom of quarantine. The impulse to recreate paintings has a long history that speaks to a need for shared cultural touchstones – and their subversion.
Parlour games
The recreation of famous paintings, or tableaux vivants (literally “living pictures”), was a party game in aristocratic circles in 18th-century France. The phenomenon then spread throughout Britain, Europe and America.
In Australia, there are records of these tableaux being enacted in theatres and households from the 1830s.
An 1871 American publication, Parlor Tableaux and Amateur Theatricals, capitalises on “the great desire among the rising generation to participate in this simple and elegant amusement”. It includes painstaking instructions for an evening of entertainment, including the number of tableaux (five to ten), types (classical and contemporary) and genres (serious and comic).
Curtains would roll up to the spectacle of costumed figures posing with props and backgrounds from paintings by artists such as Titian, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Shouts of appreciation or guessing games would ensue, with guests showing their knowledge of art history (or lack thereof).
The game was like charades, but silent and immobile. Part of the trick was the act of physical control needed to maintain the pose until the curtains rolled down and the actors prepared for another tableau.
Cultural touchstones
Dress-up and posing have been documented as far back as classical antiquity. In festive pageantry of medieval and Renaissance Europe, parades and processions by rulers featured tableaux that were charged with important political and didactic functions.
Perhaps the most spectacular example of a tableau occurred in 1458 on the entry of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, into Ghent. A contemporary account describes how over a hundred citizens greeted Philip the Good and his entourage in a recreation of the city’s celebrated altarpiece, Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (The Ghent Altarpiece), painted in 1432.
The Ghent Altarpiece from the Cathedral of St Bavo, Ghent, completed 1432.
This brilliant and complex polyptych presents a summation of Christian theology; its recreation would have been an incredibly ambitious undertaking.
The Ghent Altarpiece functioned as a shared cultural touchstone that its citizens could relate to. Only the nude figures of Adam and Eve would have been exempt from the recreation.
Controversy and subversion
This was unlike the later tableaux of Victorian societies, when female nudes were acceptable and even encouraged. During the late 19th century, morality laws were evaded by the stillness of the models: as long as the women weren’t moving, they could present the tableaux as art education, rather than titillation.
In defence of these displays, the American poet Walt Whitman wrote if the sight of these tableux is considered “indecent” then:
the sight of nearly all the great works of painting and sculpture […] is, likewise, indecent. It is a sickly prudishness that bars all appreciation of the divine beauty evidenced in Nature’s cunningest work – the human frame, form and face.
Pansy Montague, a Melbourne chorus girl, posing as the Modern Milo (with arms), c1898 -1905.State Library Victoria
Later tableaux created by well-known artists stem from very different motivations, from satire to critique.
Pier Paolo Passolini’s La Ricotta shows the making of several tableaux of mannerist paintings for comic effect. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #224 from 1990 is an appropriation of Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus created four centuries earlier.
In her re-enactment, Sherman uses make-up, prosthetics and props – yet there is never any doubt that we are looking at Sherman. Her appropriation raises important questions about identity, feminism and the status of images.
Art matters
In our era of self-isolation, institutions like the Getty are requesting recreations of works from their collections.
From homage to subversion, these recreations incite in us that jolt of recognition, nods of appreciation and boisterous laughter.
Most of all, tableaux vivants highlight an interest in shared cultural knowledge: an assumption that icons of art matter; that looking at and thinking about art is an essential activity.
As we face down weeks and even months in our homes, there also is a compelling participatory element: why just look at a masterpiece when you can be one?
Moonset the morning after TC Harold in the Lomaviti archipelago, Fiji. Image: Elisabeth Holland.
DISPATCH FROM THE PACIFIC:By Professor Elisabeth Holland. She writes from a remote island in Fiji’s Koro Sea where she went to stay out of the way of Covid-19, as named by the World Health Organisation (WHO), or SARS-CoV-2, as named by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. The island is in the Lomaviti archipelago. It is a short boat trip from Makogai, a leper colony tended by the Catholic sisters until the 1960s, a promising place to avoid Covid.
On Easter Sunday, Fiji had 16 cases of Covid-19 (see Fiji clusters image). Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama announced Fiji’s first confirmed case of Covid on 19 March, 2020 – a flight attendant on a Fiji Airways flight from San Francisco to Nadi who roamed around Lautoka and attending Zumba class before feeling ill.
The Fiji announcement was made within a week of the arrival of the WHO test kits. An isolation unit, just outside of the capital city Suva had been staffed since January, along with a test facility set up in February.
Coincident with the announcement of the first Covid case, Prime Minister Bainimarama announced the suspension of all Fiji Airways flights through May 29, a 14-day lockdown of the port city of Lautoka, isolation of the ill patient. his family and close contacts with thorough contact tracing, a 10pm to 5am curfew, a ban on gatherings of more than 20 people, and a call for social distancing.
With case number 5, inter-island transport of people was suspended to prevent the spread of Covid-19 among the islands.
On Thursday, April 2, with the announcement of cases 6 and 7 – haircutters in two separate popular local hair salons – Suva was locked down, and contact sports, including touch rugby, a national pastime, and social gatherings, including customary kava gatherings, were forbidden.
The curfew was extended from 8pm to 5am. The contact tracing for case #9, father of case #7 identified 830 contacts.
A woman and her son, with a history of possible Covid exposure, arrived on our remote island at 10pm on April 2, potentially compromising the health of 139 people on the island who had just completed a 14-day island quarantine.
The violation of the ban on interisland transport plus subsequent quarantine violations made the national news. Hundreds of people have been charged for quarantine and curfew violations.
Two rugby players were arrested and placed in isolation after violating quarantine restrictions.
On April 16, Fiji extended the quarantine period from 14 to 28 days for returning citizens and 28 days of isolation for positive Covid-19 cases.
Case isolation and tracing done by Fiji’s Ministry of Health for the first 16 confirmed COVID cases. Image: Fiji Ministry of Health
According to the WHO situation report #83 released on April 12, Easter Sunday, 16 Pacific countries and territories remained free of confirmed Covid-19 cases: American Samoa, Cook Islands 🇨🇰, Federated States of Micronesia 🇫🇲 , Kiribati 🇰🇮, Nauru 🇳🇷, Niue 🇳🇺, Palau 🇵🇼, Pitcairn, Republic of the Marshall Islands 🇲🇭, Samoa 🇼🇸, Solomon Islands 🇸🇧, Tokelau 🇹🇰, Tonga 🇹🇴, Tuvalu 🇹🇻, Vanuatu 🇻🇺, and Wallis and Futuna.
By April 22, independent Pacific island countries of Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste have seven and 23 confirmed cases of Covid-19 respectively.
By comparison, the French associated territories of French Polynesia have 56 cases, and New Caledonia has 18 cases. The US territories of the Northern Mariana Islands has 14 Covid-19 cases (two deaths), and Guam, home to a US military base, reported 136 Covid-19 cases (5 deaths). However, the April 12 issue of The New York Times reports 585 cases on the USS Theodore Rooseveltdocked in Guam, including the now famous Captain Crozier, fired for speaking up on behalf of his men.
Covid-19 and Tropical Cyclone Harold With Fiji, the Pacific and the world anxious about Covid, Tropical Cyclone Harold spun into existence and began its devastating Easter path across the Pacific. Imagine trying to practise shelter at home and social distancing while simultaneously preparing for a tropical cyclone that was gaining ferocity.
Windows were boarded, evacuation centers were prepared and adequate food and clean water were secured where possible. Generators were serviced and tested.
In early April, while awaiting confirmation of the first case of Covid-19, the Solomon Islands government ordered city dwellers to return to their home villages to reduce the density of people in the capital of Honiara in Guadalcanal and to provide security of place.
On April 4, some 600 Are Are residents of Honiara and Malaita boarded the MV Taemarehu ferry to make their way home.
MV Taemarehu ran into the rough seas generated by Tropical Cyclone Harold, then rated as category one. Twenty-seven people were washed overboard and reported missing.
Solomon Islands has no confirmed cases of Covid, partly due the difficulty of transporting tests to Australia when all aircraft into and out of the Solomon Islands are grounded. The situation is beautifully described in an article by the ever insightful Transform Aqorau, the Solomon Islands permanent representative to the UN, now stranded in New York City.
By Monday, April 6, Tropical Cyclone Harold had intensified to category 5 (Australian scale) with wind speeds in excess of 198 km/h. Four northern islands of the independent nation of Vanuatu: Santo, Pentecost, Ambrym, and Malo were directly hit by the TC Harold.
TC Harold battered schools and residences alike in Vanuatu. Image: Dan McGarry/The Guardian screenshot
Luckily, TC Harold arrived on Santo with the low tide. Luganville, on the island of Santo, the second most populous city of Vanuatu, suffered tremendous damage and is struggling to provide food, power and water.
“For Lord Mayor Patty Peter, the experience was overwhelming. In an emotional phone call to media in Port Vila Tuesday. he said, ‘We urgently need water, food and shelter at the moment. Many have lost their homes. Schools are destroyed. Electricity is down. I’m urgently calling for help. This is one of the worst experiences of my life.'”
Lord Mayor Peter later confirmed that food and water were being distributed, but “just for today and tomorrow. That’s all that we can do”.
The town has shrugged off smaller cyclones countless times in the past. “But this one, like, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for all the people in the northern islands,” said Peter.
One of my PhD students has launched a social media campaign to rebuild his family home, and his neighbor’s homes in Luganville after they more than 50 percent of the buildings were destroyed by TC Harold.
Montin Romone, a ni-Vanuatu master’s student in climate change at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, says in an e-mail:
“My family on North Malekula are safe despite all the root crops have been totally destroyed. Yesterday, I also was informed by my family on Malakula that my dad’s smaller brother died at Santo hospital when TC Harold blew off the roof of the emergency room he was sleeping in. He was so panic as there were no doctors around as well. No electricity due to power cut by the hurricane. Only my smaller brother was there but could not do anything to protect him so he finally died at 1:00 am on that night. As doctors did not allow him to be put into the cold room, so my brother with the help of 4 other boys had to dig a hole in the municipal cemetery and bury him that evening.
“Otherwise, family on Malekula are safe. Unfortunately, I lost two of my cattle but its better than losing another family member.”
With no confirmed cases of Covid, Vanuatu, has forbidden any relief workers from entering the country. Vanuatu will manage the TC Harold relief themselves, and permit delivery of specifically requested supplies.
All incoming supplies are subject to a three day quarantine in the capital before being shipped to the Northern Islands.
Since Vanuatu was hit by record-setting TC Pam in March 2015, the government has committed to building internal capacity for disaster relief. During TC Pam, managing the relief workers and their individual agendas proved to be more difficult than the relief work itself. Recognising the challenge of managing Covid in a small country with limited resources, and only two ventilators, Vanuatu declared a state of emergency and closed its borders in February.
In Covid-19 efforts to repatriate non-citizens, Fiji Airways airlifted at least two flights of expatriates out of the Pacific Islands just hours before Tropical Cyclone Harold arrived.
By 2am on Thursday, April 8, TC Harold’s winds arrived on the main island of Fiji’s Viti Levu on a more northerly, and more populated, track than originally forecast. The incoherent eyewall spun off two tornadoes one in Nausori and another in Tailevu.
TC Harold generated substantial damages through many of Fiji’s more than 300 islands. TC Harold arrived in Kadavu at midday with the king tide and impacted the small island communities of Buliya, Dravuni, and Narikoso in Astrolabe Reef in the Ono district.
A state of disaster for the next 30 days has been declared for the Viti Levu’s Central and Western divisions including Tailevu North, Korovou, Nausori, Nakasi, Beqa and Yanuca and in the district of Nadarivatu, Vatulele, Mamanuca Group, the Yasawa Group, coastal communities in the Coral Coast and along the Sigatoka River in the Nadroga/Navosa province, and the Southern Lau Island group on Fiji’s southeastern perimeter.
Himawari-8 visualisation of Tropical Cyclone Harold crossing just south of Fiji’s main islands Viti Levu on April 8. The larger islands of Vanuatu are shown in the top left sector. Image: Himawari-8
During the night of April 8, TC Harold left Fiji to continue onto Tonga passing south of the capital island of Tongatapu. The capital of Nuku’alofa experienced the worst storm surge ever seen when TC Harold arrived in the early morning hours of April 9 accompanying the king tide of the full moon.
The swathe of destruction focused on E’ua Island and several resorts on the north side of Tongatapu. The Tonga “no plastics” campaign has organised clean up campaigns on the seawall in Nuku’alofa.
Tonga has no confirmed cases of Covid-19. Tonga declared a state of emergency on 19 March 2020, closing its borders completely when Fiji announced its first Covid-19 case.
Climate change, disaster risk management and Covid-19 Fiji and the Pacific leaders work to lead with the concept of stewardship motivating their action. The 2016 anniversary of record setting Tropical Cyclone Winston was in February, just days after Fiji had been the first country in the world to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement.
With a population of less than a million people, Fiji went on to be both the President of the UN to host the UN Oceans Conference and serve as President of the UNFCCC COP23 in 2017.
Similarly, the 2015 record setting Tropical Cyclone Pam crashed into Port Vila, Efate, Vanuatu during the negotiation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Development donor investments in the region are guided by the Framework for Resilient Development which recognised the need to simultaneously address disaster preparedness, climate change and development of low carbon economies.
Symbolic of the collective nature of Pacific culture, Prime Minister Bainimarama calls upon Fiji to honour the power of the spirit of “vei lomani” – that profound sense of love and devotion to the protection of our people.
The Pacific leaders are determined to lead by example to prevent the devastation of Covid in their countries. With the fresh memory of late 2019 measles epidemic in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and American Samoa resulting in 83 deaths in Samoa, Samoan borders were closed in February.
None of the independent Pacific countries have robust medical or epidemiological research programmes, yet these leaders acted on the basis of science while leaders of other countries were still debating whether stay at home measures were required.
Pacific Islands countries suffered tremendously from the diseases brought by early explorers, including smallpox, measles, syphilis and gonorrhea. In recognition of their limited resources and the advantages of their remote location, Pacific countries have acted early to protect themselves and close their borders, with considerable success to date.
The alarm and fear accompanying Covid is a galvanising action. Papua New Guinea with an abundance of natural resources and people, but plagued by a lack of adequate medical facilities and decades of struggles will likely face the greatest challenges in dealing with Covid-19.
In recognition of the importance of UN support agencies, like the UN’s World Health Organisation, the Pacific leaders welcomed the WHO director Dr Tedras Adhanom Ghehreyesus to the 50th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting last August, establishing an effective network of relations just months before the arrival of Covid-19.
Professor Elisabeth Holland is the director of the Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD) at the University of the South Pacific. In 2007, she was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Greg Hunt is set to become the lead ministerial face of the sales effort for the proposed controversial new COVID-19 tracing app, aided by the government’s health professionals.
Federal cabinet discussed the app at its Wednesday meeting, and the national cabinet on Friday will be briefed on it.
The main ministerial responsibility for the app so far has been carried by the Minister for Government Services, Stuart Robert, who oversees the Digital Transformation Agency.
But it is recognised in government circles that having Hunt and the health professionals – the latter dubbed the “lab coats” – spearheading the app’s promotion will give a better chance of boosting its take up.
Brendan Murphy, the chief medical officer, has become a familiar and credible public figure in recent weeks, as have deputies Paul Kelly and Nick Coatsworth.
The use of the health experts is reinforced by government research.
Hunt has been carrying a great deal of the messaging during the crisis. Robert is a poor performer who blundered when he gave false information about a crash of the Centrelink computer system.
Kelly on Wednesday appealed to the public to “please consider” the app.
“It’s important because if we can really get on top of [contact tracing], it will allow us much more leeway to change the social distancing measures,” Kelly said.
When a person developed COVID-19 the app would enable the quick identification of the contacts they’d had with other people.
Currently tracking a patient’s contacts is done manually by so-called virus “detectives”. But it can be a slow process, and has the problem of relying on the patient’s memory.
It would also be logical to have Hunt as the frontman because downloading the information from the app, with the person’s permission, would be done by state health departments which are responsible for contact tracing.
The federal government, anxious to allay community suspicions, has been emphasising the states’ primary role. The federal government would not be able to access names or details from the app material. Information would disappear after three weeks.
It is not clear whether a multi-national company would be involved in the storage of the data, where it would be stored, and what penalties there would be for any misuse.
Scott Morrison is very keen on the app, which would be voluntary, but the government recognises there are extensive community doubts. To be most effective, a high proportion of the population would have to be willing to download the app, although just how high is a subject of dispute. Kelly claimed it would be advantageous even if only taken up by a small proportion: “anything more than zero is going to be useful”.
The government has emphasised the app would not be a geographic tracking device. But this misses the point that some people would be dubious about the device identifying who they were with, rather than being worried about the actual place of contact.
Material before Wednesday’s cabinet came from Robert, Hunt and Attorney-General Christian Porter, who oversees privacy.
Porter said in a Wednesday radio interview, “In terms of the type of information that any of your listeners might consent to being provided commercially or to government, there will be no information in the system more safe and more private and more narrowly used for the specific health purpose than this information”.
While the app, based on overseas experience, notably in Singapore, apparently originated from the Home Affairs department, it is understood no Home Affairs powers would be involved in its use.
Essential Research published responses this week to a series of propositions about the app.
Only 38% said they would download it onto their mobile phone and only 35% were confident the government would not misuse the data.
More than six in ten (63%) said they would be concerned about the security of their personal data if the app was on their phone.
Some 52% agreed the app would help limit the spread of the virus, and 42% said it would speed up removal of physical distancing restrictions.
Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce has criticised the app saying “I treasure the government knowing as little about me as possible”.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has given broad support for the app but says the government needs to be very clear about the protections that would be put in place.
Recent headlines have suggested COVID-19 can spread up to four meters, drawing into question the current advice to maintain 1.5 metres between people to prevent the spread of the virus.
The news was based on a study conducted in Wuhan, China, and published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Meanwhile, a review published last week in the Journal of Infectious Diseases has concluded respiratory droplets, which may carry the virus, can travel up to eight metres.
So what can we make of these findings? And should we really be standing much further apart than we’ve been told?
First, how does coronavirus spread?
Coronavirus spreads through droplets when a person with COVID-19 coughs, sneezes or talks.
This means it can spread during close contact between an infected and uninfected person, when it’s inhaled, or enters the body via the eyes, mouth or nose.
Infection can also occur when an uninfected person touches a surface contaminated with these droplets, and then touches their face.
Some respiratory pathogens can also transmit through the air, when tiny particles, or aerosols, hang around.
Aerosols can be generated through coughing and sneezing, and sometimes from breathing and talking.
We know some infectious diseases like measles can be transmitted this way. But we need more research to understand to what degree this could be true for COVID-19.
Aerosols containing viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are more likely to be generated through hospital procedures such as intubation and manual ventilation.
This may go some way to explaining the results of the four metres study, which took place in a hospital. Let’s take a look at the research.
Over 12 days, the researchers collected swab samples four hours after the morning clean from floors, bins, air outlets, computer mice, bed rails, personal protective equipment and patient masks.
To determine whether aerosolised particles containing SARS-CoV-2 were present in the air, the researchers also took samples upstream and downstream of the air flow in both wards.
What did they find?
They detected SARS-CoV-2 widely on hospital surfaces and frequently touched hospital equipment. The ICU had a greater amount of virus than the general ward.
Most swabs, including computer mice and doorknobs, were positive for the virus. The highest virus concentrations were found on the floor, likely from virus-containing droplets falling to the ground. People then tracked the virus to the hospital pharmacy, presumably on the soles of their shoes.
The study looked at possible transmission through aerosol particles in the ICU by taking samples from three sites. Two sites were along the direction of the airflow, about one meter away from patients’ beds. One site was further away, approximately four meters from a patient’s bed and against the airflow.
Virus was detected in 35.7% (5/14) of samples taken near air outlets, and 44.4% (8/18) of samples in a patient’s cubicle. At the site located against the airflow – four metres away from the patient’s bed – virus was detected in 12.5% (1/8) of samples.
Although virus was detected in air samples from the general ward, the numbers of positive samples were fewer. Studies have shown people with less severe disease shed less of the virus, so this may be why.
How should we interpret the results?
We should consider the results from this study with caution. The study tests for the presence of the virus on surfaces and in the air, but doesn’t indicate if the virus was living and infectious.
The authors didn’t describe the nature of medical procedures undertaken in these wards, particularly if any might be likely to generate aerosols.
The way a virus behaves in a hospital setting is likely to be different to the way it behaves in the community.Shutterstock
The virus sample detected four meters away was described as a “weak positive”. Both “intense positive” and “weak positive” samples were grouped together as positive samples in the results without defining what a “positive sample” was or explaining the distinction between the two outcomes.
The study had a small sample size and importantly, researchers didn’t use any statistical tests to determine the significance of their findings. So the results have limited utility in the real world.
What does this all mean?
The study adds to the evidence SARS-CoV-2 can be detected on surfaces.
But the finding that the virus could spread four metres is less convincing. Even if we disregard the study’s limitations, evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in the air isn’t evidence it’s infectious in that form.
The review assessed horizontal distance travelled by droplets from ten experimental and modelling studies. It found evidence droplets could travel beyond two meters, even up to eight meters using physical science experiments.
Of the ten studies, five were conducted using human subjects. These studies looked at the dynamics of droplet transmission but were not specifically related to SARS-CoV-2-containing droplets.
So we need more research to better understand transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in hospital settings.
But in the community, we’d encourage everyone to continue to practise the recommended physical distancing measures of staying 1.5 metres away from others.
The near-total shutdown of elective surgery across Australia will end soon, following National Cabinet consideration on Tuesday.
The shutdown was imposed to ensure there would be enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for doctors and nurses to manage a projected tsunami of COVID-19 patients in our hospitals.
But now there is a big backlog of Australians waiting for elective procedures.
Elective surgery waiting times are the bane of every state health minister’s life. Better ways to manage such procedures could be a major benefit from the shutdown and restart.
But we have to act quickly if we are to change how we manage these wait lists, as federal Health Minister Greg Hunt wants a staged reintroduction to begin on April 27.
Rethink priorities
Currently, elective surgery is classified as urgent (category 1), semi-urgent (category 2) and non-urgent (category 3). But different hospitals and different surgeons actually classify patients in different ways.
What’s worse is that some procedures are undoubtedly unnecessary, such as spinal fusion or removing healthy ovaries during a hysterectomy, and would provide no value for the patient, as Adam Elshaug and I have argued before.
Of course, not all of the backlog is low-value procedures. As states consider how to recommence elective surgery, they should seize this opportunity to introduce new systems, especially in metropolitan areas.
A properly managed elective procedures system should have three key elements:
there should be a consistent process for assessing a patient’s need for the procedure, and ranking that patient’s priority against others
the team performing the procedure, and caring for the patient afterwards, should be highly experienced in the procedure
the procedure should be performed at an efficient hospital or other facility, so the cost to the health system is as low as possible.
Unfortunately, Australia sometimes fails on all three measures.
Stop the inconsistencies
There is no consistent assessment process across hospitals. Even different surgeons in the same hospital seeing the same patient sometimes make different recommendations about the need for a procedure.
This means a patient lucky enough to be seen at hospital A may be assigned to category 2, but the same patient seen at hospital B might be assigned to category 3 and so have to wait longer.
Patient characteristics, such as gender or level of education, also seem to inappropriately affect categorisation decisions.
Yet most states ignore these facts. They have done little to rationalise services for the benefit of both the patient and the taxpayer.
Time for change
The large backlog of demand creates the opportunity for a new way of doing things. States should develop agreed assessment processes for high-volume procedures, such as knee and hip replacements and cataract operations, and reassess all patients on hospital waiting lists.
Reassessment could be done remotely using telehealth. Specialists in each area should be invited to develop evidence-based criteria for setting priorities. Where appropriate, patients should be diverted to treatment options other than surgery.
Private health insurers should be empowered to participate in funding diversion options so patients are able to have their rehabilitation at home rather than in a hospital bed.
A new, coordinated, single waiting list priority system in each state would enable all patients to know where they stand. A patient on the top of the list would be offered the first available place, regardless of whether it was closest to their home.
They could refuse the offer, without losing their place in the queue, if they wanted to wait for a closer location.
The health minister says it’s up to hospitals to decide which patients get to undergo elective surgery.Roman Zaiets/Shutterstock
The single waiting list should include both regional and metropolitan patients, to ensure as much as possible that city patients do not get faster treatment than people in regional and remote area.
Patients with private health insurance can opt to be treated as a private patient in a public hospital. So the waiting list should include public and private patients, to prevent private patients gaining faster admission to public hospitals.
The system should be further centralised in metropolitan areas. The full range of elective procedures should not be re-established in every hospital. Some surgeons would need to be offered new appointments if elective surgery in their specialty was no longer being performed at the hospital where they previously had their main appointment.
States should consider signing contracts with private hospitals, at or below the public hospital efficient price, for elective procedures to be performed in these hospitals to help clear the elective surgery backlog.
The pandemic is not over yet and policymakers are right to be turning their minds to the transition back to something approaching business as usual. But the new, post-pandemic normal should be nothing like the old.
Physical distancing seems to be beating the virus, but the second victim might be health reform. Not wasting the crisis is the cliché on everyone’s lips. Australia has the chance to improve our elective surgery system. For the sake of taxpayers and patients, we should grasp it.
Federal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher announced three measures last week to help commercial TV broadcasters deal with COVID-19 financial stress.
First, the spectrum tax broadcasters pay the government for access to audiences will be waived for 12 months.
Second, the government has released an options paper on how to make Australian storytelling on our screens fair across new and old platforms.
But it’s the third measure that is a shock: for the rest of 2020, all quotas requiring commercial TV networks to make Australian drama, documentary and children’s television have been shelved. Fletcher said networks can’t create the content because COVID-19 constraints have stalled most production.
But arts, screen directing and screenwriting bodies disagree. They say the quota pause across two financial years will cost jobs. And they’re worried this measure signals how the government will act on regulation options in the paper released at the same time.
Communications Minister Paul Fletcher in Canberra this week.AAP/Mick Tsikas
4 ways forward
The paper from Screen Australia and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) explores two issues: firstly, how to promote Australian drama, documentary and children’s television across all home screen platforms; secondly, how to level the regulatory playing field across those platforms.
Commercial TV broadcasters have had to meet a 55% Australian content quota for decades – including sub-quotas of drama, documentary and children’s programs. Meanwhile, the global streaming services Australian audiences are flooding to, such as Netflix and Stan, do not have to meet any quotas. Nor do other digital platforms in Australia.
The Screen Australia/ACMA paper presents four possible ways forward:
keep the status quo: leave commercial networks as the only platform bound to content quotas
minimal change: ask streaming services to invest voluntarily in Australian content and revise what commercial networks have to produce (maybe axing children’s TV quotas)
establish a “platform-neutral” system to compel and encourage Australian content-making across all of commercial television, digital platforms and global streaming services
deregulation: no one – including commercial networks – would have to meet any content quota requirements.
There is still time for industry bodies to respond to these choices. But option 3, cross-platform incentives and Australian content rules for all, would appeal most to the arts sector. It is the only option of the four which genuinely promotes Australian storytelling on our screens and the jobs that go with it.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Stan will hate that proposition. They and other digital platforms will resist having to follow content rules.
Would hit kids’ show Bluey have been made without content quotas?ABC
Levelling the field or throwing away the rules?
Commercial networks have long sought a level playing field – and the platform-neutral option offers that. But what they really want is the freedom the other platforms have now: to make and deliver whatever content they think audiences will watch. That’s option 4: total deregulation and all content obligations removed.
Deregulation would hurt Australian creative production jobs. A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study quoted in the Screen Australia/ACMA paper predicts that if quotas were dropped from commercial television, children’s TV production there would end, drama production would fall 90% and documentary making would halve.
Enter the government’s Relief for Australian media during COVID-19: commercial networks still have to broadcast 55% Australia content in 2020. But they don’t have to make drama, documentary or children’s content as part of that quota.
The Australian Writers Guild (AWG) – representing drama and documentary screen writers – has slammed the quotas pause. They say the government has abandoned creative workers to help a handful of media companies. They’re worried this trial deregulation will change the production landscape forever. And they accuse networks of using COVID-19 as “the excuse they need in their quest to end the quota system once and for all”.
The Directors Guild, Screen Producers Australia and the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance are also anxious about screen jobs – and where the federal government will go on the quotas issue.
That’s understandable.
We’ve just seen the government dismiss Australian content quotas as “red tape”. We can only guess where its sympathy for corona-stressed TV networks will take us next.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arnagretta Hunter, ANU Human Futures Fellow 2020; Cardiologist and Physician., Australian National University
Four months in, this year has already been a remarkable showcase for existential and catastrophic risk. A severe drought, devastating bushfires, hazardous smoke, towns running dry – these events all demonstrate the consequences of human-induced climate change.
While the above may seem like isolated threats, they are parts of a larger puzzle of which the pieces are all interconnected. A report titled Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century, published today by the Commission for the Human Future, has isolated ten potentially catastrophic threats to human survival.
Not prioritised over one another, these risks are:
decline of natural resources, particularly water
collapse of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity
human population growth beyond Earth’s carrying capacity
global warming and human-induced climate change
chemical pollution of the Earth system, including the atmosphere and oceans
rising food insecurity and failing nutritional quality
nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction
pandemics of new and untreatable disease
the advent of powerful, uncontrolled new technology
national and global failure to understand and act preventatively on these risks.
In October, low water levels and dry land was recorded at Storm King Dam near Stanthorpe, Queensland. The dam’s water level was at 25%.DAN PELED/AAP
The start of ongoing discussions
The Commission for the Human Future formed last year, following earlier discussions within emeritus faculty at the Australian National University about the major risks faced by humanity, how they should be approached and how they might be solved. We hosted our first round-table discussion last month, bringing together more than 40 academics, thinkers and policy leaders.
The commission’s report states our species’ ability to cause mass harm to itself has been accelerating since the mid-20th century. Global trends in demographics, information, politics, warfare, climate, environmental damage and technology have culminated in an entirely new level of risk.
The risks emerging now are varied, global and complex. Each one poses a “significant” risk to human civilisation, a “catastrophic risk”, or could actually extinguish the human species and is therefore an “existential risk”.
The risks are interconnected. They originate from the same basic causes and must be solved in ways that make no individual threat worse. This means many existing systems we take for granted, including our economic, food, energy, production and waste, community life and governance systems – along with our relationship with the Earth’s natural systems – must undergo searching examination and reform.
COVID-19: a lesson in interconnection
It’s tempting to examine these threats individually, and yet with the coronavirus crisis we see their interconnection.
It’s not possible to “solve” COVID-19 without affecting other risks in some way.
Shared future, shared approach
The commission’s report does not aim to solve each risk, but rather to outline current thinking and identify unifying themes. Understanding science, evidence and analysis will be key to adequately addressing the threats and finding solutions. An evidence-based approach to policy has been needed for many years. Under-appreciating science and evidence leads to unmitigated risks, as we have seen with climate change.
The human future involves us all. Shaping it requires a collaborative, inclusive and diverse discussion. We should heed advice from political and social scientists on how to engage all people in this conversation.
Imagination, creativity and new narratives will be needed for challenges that test our civil society and humanity. The bushfire smoke over the summer was unprecedented, and COVID-19 is a new virus.
If our policymakers and government had spent more time using the available climate science to understand and then imagine the potential risks of the 2019-20 summer, we would have recognised the potential for a catastrophic season and would likely have been able to prepare better. Unprecedented events are not always unexpected.
This photo from December shows NSW Rural Fire Service crews protecting properties as the Wrights Creek fire approaches Mangrove Mountain, north of Sydney.DAN HIMBRECHTS/AAP
The commission’s report highlights the failure of governments to address these threats and particularly notes the short-term thinking that has increasingly dominated Australian and global politics. This has seriously undermined our potential to decrease risks such as climate change.
The shift from short to longer term thinking can began at home and in our daily lives. We should make decisions today that acknowledge the future, and practise this not only in our own lives but also demand it of our policy makers.
We’re living in unprecedented times. The catastrophic and existential risks for humanity are serious and multifaceted. And this conversation is the most important one we have today.
Despite nearly three decades without a recession, Australia’s last proper budget surplus came a dozen years ago – just before the Global Financial Crisis hit.
Two or three months back, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg were on the cusp of fixing that.
Now, the next surplus may be further off again.
Yet so deep are the ideological battlelines that some will never give credit to the pair for finding A$214 billion of new spending in the most dramatic political shape-shift in the federation’s history.
Some reticence is reasonable given that:
the assistance came too slowly to save some enterprises
some employees and some sectors were excluded
as currently legislated, assistance would fall off a cliff in six months, risking a second wave of economic distress.
Announced in three eye-watering tranches as the scale of the coronavirus disaster revealed itself, the Coalition’s escalating response charts a stunning right-to-left expansion of government via colossal deficit spending freighted with intergenerational liability.
Until 2020, the Coalition’s somewhat niche lesson from the GFC was not a new appreciation of how Keynesian budget policy ameliorates economic pain, but rather a keener sense of what political advantage could be taken from the “fiscal hangover” from such anti-cyclical spending.
Grappling with the crisis, the Morrison government declared the usual ideology would be benched in order to protect the community, shield the economy and retain as much “snap-back” potential as possible following an enforced hibernation.
The biggest ticket spend is the A$130 billion (in just six months) JobKeeper package, which pays $1,500 a fortnight to employers to keep employees on the books. It follows a A$66 billion doubling of the Newstart pension (JobSeeker), and free childcare, among a suite of other measures.
Psychologically, it is not hard to see why entrenched Coalition critics would ask, “Where’s the catch?”
After all, how to make sense of such an about-face by a party that vilified Labor’s (smaller) GFC spending as excessive and the genesis of a “debt and deficit disaster”; lionised “lifters” over “leaners”; and most recently secured a third term on the prosaic pledge of delivering surplus budgets no matter what?
Of course, all this changed when the “what” turned out to be a global pandemic packing the harshest economic punch since the Great Depression.
Preening talk of large surpluses and even of economic growth disappeared. Australia’s enforced economic shutdown, its well-observed social distancing measures and a slice of good luck have combined to deliver remarkable progress against the disease threat. Even the suppression strategy now looks like eliminating the virus without the acute pain of eradication restrictions used in New Zealand.
And what if all of this non-ideological spending falls short anyway because at the margins, and for what appear to be ideological reasons, recovery is slowed down by deeper sectoral recession?
Aviation – the most visible and immediate casualty of the stay-home/don’t-travel imperative, stands out. The government has refused a A$1.4 billion loan to Virgin Australia on logic that appears partly ideological.
Telling Virgin’s international owners to look to their own “deep pockets”, Frydenberg explained on April 16 that more than A$1 billion had already been directed to the sector:
We want to see Virgin continue, we want to see two airlines in the domestic market, but we’re not in the business of owning an airline.
Yet even with that support, Virgin had grounded its fleet and stood down some 90% of its 10,000-strong direct workforce, while Qantas had done likewise with 20,000 of its 30,000 employees.
A game of ideological “chicken” is under way, with the Coalition betting that somebody else will step in to rescue the airline.
Several questions arise. Why let such a crucial sector crumble right now of all times? Why allow the shutdown to force a return to a monopoly? And, importantly, how would the collapse of such a large regionally significant employer, with all of its myriad interdependencies across the tourism and hospitality sectors, serve the ambition of a rapidly rebounding economy?
In 2009, the new Obama administration took equity stakes in automotive manufacturers to keep them afloat and was able to sell down those shares later when the car makers bounced back. Analysts argued that neither Chevrolet nor Chrysler were viable long term. They were wrong.
Beyond small government ideology, is that not a template for aviation now – especially if a monopoly is deemed unacceptable?
Another case is the JobSeeker payment. Generous though it is, this emergency assistance has eligibility limits. Those on work visas – who provide most of the regional seasonal workforce – are ineligible, and even Australian citizens employed on casual contracts of less than 12 months duration miss out. In some industries like education (university research assistants, casual school teachers, aged-care workers, entertainers), short-term contracts are the norm. Hundreds of thousands of workers – perhaps as many as a million – never receive contracts of greater than 12 months.
Again, given the importance of these workers in key sectors of the economy, the question arises as to why some jobs are worth protecting and others are not.
The ACTU warns that if Virgin falls over the Commonwealth could be up for hundreds of millions in workers’ payments from its “Fair Entitlements Fund”. And that’s before paying out unemployment benefits for some – particularly older workers – indefinitely.
If it would take three-and-a-half fire-tankers to save an apartment block that is on fire, and you stop at three to save water, haven’t you just wasted three tankers’ worth?
Morrison and Frydenberg have done extremely well in responding to this crisis. It would be a pity if, after all this spending, residual “old” thinking still left the recovery “a day late and a dollar short”.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Smith, Research Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne has led a bipartisan call for a global inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, noting Australia will insist on an independent review, not one conducted by the World Health Organisation.
Labor’s shadow health minister, Chris Bowen, has given his full backing to the idea, saying
we would expect and trust that China would cooperate.
Their views of the possibility of China — and the US — displaying moral leadership during this crisis are bleak.
In Nye’s blunt assessment, both countries are only interested in tactical leadership on global issues like COVID-19 and climate change. Both China and the US seem focused on wielding power, rather than achieving joint goals by exercising power with other nations.
As he put it,
Both the Chinese leadership and the American leadership are focused almost entirely on competitive power over who came out ahead [after COVID-19] and how well we dealt with it.
Re-opening the highway to Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus, after the city’s 76-day lockdown.Top Photo/Sipa USA
China has settled on its own telling of the story
The main barrier to Payne’s call for an inquiry is China has already settled on a narrative that the origins of the virus are unclear – Italy and the United States have been named as possible sources – and that if it did arise in China, it was not the result of a laboratory accident.
Researchers in China looking to publish anything related to the origins of the virus also now face an extra level of scrutiny.
As a result, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will have no interest in cooperating with any effort that might challenge that narrative.
Indeed, Payne’s call has already met with a sharp reprimand from China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang, who accused Australia of
dancing to the tune of a certain country to hype up the situation.
In disputes such as these, Australia is seen as a proxy for the United States, and by extension the colonial powers behind China’s “century of humiliation”, the term used to describe the period of foreign subjugation from the mid-19th century to the Communist Revolution after the second world war.
Overturning humiliation by foreign powers is the basis for President Xi Jinping’s project of national rejuvenation. Allowing a team of foreign investigators into China to ask awkward questions about biosecurity is never going to be on the agenda.
There was a brief period in February when China looked open to entertaining a different narrative around the origin of the virus. But that window quickly closed when the US media began to run stories questioning whether it was accidentally spread from one of two institutions in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses.
Unleash the ‘wolf warriors’
Here’s the rub: both China and the US are playing to domestic audiences.
In the case of China, that audience is not even the Chinese public, writ large. As Bates Gill argues,
the primary target of what we’re seeing in all the so-called soft power is the party itself. It is an attempt to remind party members, reassure them about Xi Jinping’s leadership and first and foremost, feel good about themselves.
While there is mixed evidence to support the lab accident theory, as soon as the story is taken up by outlets such as Fox News, the matter enters the realm of information warfare, which both the US and Chinese governments have turned to in this crisis.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called on China to “come clean” on what it knows, echoing language frequently used by President Donald Trump. A recent Pew Poll found nearly 30% of the US population subscribes to the theory the virus is a Chinese “bioweapon”.
Meanwhile, China has ramped up its own disinformation about the virus originating in the US.
The number of Twitter accounts opened by Chinese embassies, consulates and ambassadors has increased by more than 250% since March 2019. These diplomats are now being described as “wolf warriors” in China for their newly aggressive stance on social media toward western countries.
As Natasha Kassam observes in our podcast,
Conspiracy theories have been floated and then taken away, just trying to muddy the waters rather than actually change someone’s mind. This is reminiscent of Russian disinformation efforts.
‘Soft power is in the eye of the beholder’
In some countries, China’s “face mask diplomacy” – its recent move to provide protective equipment and respirators to all corners of the globe – will improve trust in the country as a global power.
You see Chinese companies delivering products to Serbia and Hungary and their leaders are … calling Xi Jinping a brother and a friend. When those same companies are delivering products to Australia, they get delivered late at night, no fanfare, no embassy reception at the airport.
China’s assistance is in stark contrast to the US ban on exports of personal protective equipment, as is their projection of competence in dealing with the virus.
But polling indicates that, as Nye puts it, “soft power is in the eye of the beholder”. Where China is not trusted, mistrust is likely to grow.
A recipe that can’t be altered
Herein lies the dilemma for Australia. Unless a broad coalition of countries from across the ideological spectrum back its call for an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, it’s going nowhere.
Thanks to China’s all-court disinformation campaign abroad, including an effort to own and influence global media, paired with an ever-more tightly controlled media landscape inside China, the transparency Payne and Bowen call for is simply impossible.
Under Xi’s predecessors, there was some room for divergent views, even from civil society. But under Xi, all information that meets Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang’s definition of “objective” and “scientific” is prepared in a centralised “kitchen”, as the Chinese media describes it.
The head chef has already decided on the dish. Regardless of how many deaths this virus will cause, alternative recipes from abroad are not welcome.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced school students would return to face-to-face classrooms in a staggered fashion from May 11, the third week of term. She said students would initially return for one day a week, and their time at school would be increased as the term progressed.
She said by term three, she hoped all students would be back at school full time.
But schools were given flexibility on how this return may look. NSW education minister Sarah Mitchell said
We want them [schools] to make sure they are having about a quarter of students [from each grade] on campus each day […] But how they break that group up will be a matter for them.
The NSW government said students would complete the same coursework whether they were at home or on campus during the staggered return.
This announcement is a quick turnaround from only a few weeks ago, when the NSW government said parents must keep their children at home if they could. In the latest press conference, the government said 95% of students were working from home during the final weeks of term one.
There are a few possible reasons for NSW to have made this decision. It allows children to re-connect with teachers and peers; it is one way to have fewer students on campus at any one time; it helps parents observe physical distancing during drop-off and pick-up times; and it allows a systematic escalation to two days, then three days and so on.
A staggered return to school starts moving the wheels of school campuses and infrastructure out of hibernation, at the same time helping some parents and carers return to work.
But as an educational psychologist, I am also considering this difficult decision from the perspective of the students who may be most at need of returning to class. These include those in year 12 and students in kindergarten.
Specific year groups should take precedence
It’s worth schools considering staggering the return to school from a “whole-cohort perspective” (such as all of year 12). This tries to take into account what specific cohorts of students need, developmentally and educationally.
Schools will differ in how they implement these ideas and will need to balance educational with physical distancing concerns – and their capacity to manage groups of students in the context of their physical and staffing environment.
Year 12s
The cohort that has the least amount of time to acquire time-sensitive learning would be all of year 12. There are university-bound year 12 students who would benefit from being well on top of the syllabus knowledge that is assumed in their target university course.
There are also students bound for TAFE and apprenticeships who need to get practical experience, key competencies or work placement hours.
So if the health advice allows for the staggered approach the NSW government is proposing, it is worth considering that all year 12s return to school five days per week.
Kindergarten
Moving into “big school” is a massive developmental transition which has been disrupted for the 2020 kindergarten cohort.
These children need a solid early foundation of core social, emotional, literacy and numeracy competencies.
Year six is the final year of primary school. It is where social, emotional and academic competencies are being honed and rounded ready for high school. And for year sevens, the transition to high school is a major psychological and academic adjustment, laying important foundations for their high school journey.
Year 11
Some universities are considering last year’s year 11 results for application for 2021 course entry. While the hope is everything will be back to normal come next year, there is the brutal reality that some nations have experienced second waves of COVID-19.
There is no vaccine yet, and we are only very gingerly taking baby-steps in easing restrictions.
This means we may need to take actions this year to insure year 11s against the possibility of school and assessment disruptions when they are in year 12 next year.
Disadvantaged students
We need to do our best to avoid widening any existing learning gaps during the remote learning period. Schools could encourage academically at-risk students – such as those with learning disorders, or executive function disorders such as ADHD – to start attending targeted in-class learning. This could allow for some bridging instruction so these students can make a strong start when the rest of their year group returns to in-class instruction.
Managing the numbers
An approach where initially only some year levels go to school while others remain learning remotely may make it easier for teachers.
It is not straightforward to develop both an in-class and a remote learning instructional program to accommodate a one day return, then two days and the like. Teachers are concerned at the extra workload this approach may mean for them.
There may also be significant between-school and between-teacher differences in how this is done – potentially leading to an uneven playing field for a given year group.
Teachers know how to teach a whole year group in class for five days of the week – and students know very well how to learn in this mode.
As we continue to navigate uncharted waters, there will be no perfect approach. Whatever the decision and however it is implemented, we must continue to be guided by our health experts, and we must hasten slowly.
While Virgin’s future hangs in the balance, over the one hundred years of civil aviation in Australia there has been a long list of airline casualties. Regardless of what the future holds for Virgin and its staff, the future of the company (and air travel) is certain to be irreparably changed by the pandemic.
Airline crew tend to consider their occupation as not just a job but a way of life. As teary cabin supervisor Tony Smith told the media:
Virgin is my home away from home. They are my brother, my sister, my mum and dad, my grandfather and my grandmother. They’re people I can turn to, to help me get through things, and it’s not just me, it’s a lot of other crew as well … It’s a sense of worth, it’s what keeps a lot of us sane, it keeps our mental health in check.
This strong allegiance to the company is due in part to the emotional labour required to be a flight attendant – the hard work of endlessly smiling and always being polite – and the personal sacrifices of the job. Flight crew routinely miss birthday parties, weddings, funerals and school concerts because of their service to an industry that works around the clock.
Pilots and cabin crew give up a lot to be in the industry – something of themselves and the lives that they might have otherwise lived. This means when airlines collapse they lose more than just a place to go to work: they lose a key part of their identity.
The luxury and the labour of air travel
There is a long history of loyal workers being badly affected by corporate collapses and changes in government aviation policies in Australia, but long-defunct regional airlines have dedicated custodians in regional museums and collections all around Australia.
The Queensland Air Museum maintains relics from an Australian-registered Douglas DC-6 airliner Resolution, which crashed outside San Francisco in 1953. Its loss was the final straw for the financially precarious British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines.
An advertisement for British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines in Australian Women’s Weekly, 1952.Trove
In Cooma, the Aviation Pioneers Memorial marks the loss of the Avro Ten airliner Southern Cloud in 1931, which spelled the end of the short-lived Australian National Airways established by Charles Kingsford Smith in 1929.
The shock of the 2001 collapse of Ansett Airlines was as profound and unsettling as the concurrent September 11 terrorist attacks. Two days earlier, the airline had gone into voluntary administration. On the 14th, the airline was grounded. Thousands of passengers and crew were left stranded.
Over the next few months there were attempts to keep a few flight services operational, but the company closed completely on March 4 2002, leaving 16,000 without jobs.
Established in 1935, by the 1960s Ansett was a mainstay of domestic air travel under the government’s “two-airline policy”. At the time of its collapse, Ansett accounted for almost half of the domestic aviation market.
The fallout ran deep: families were separated as pilots sought work overseas, there was a high rate of marriage breakdowns, and a number of crew died by suicide.
There wasn’t great value in being thrown around the sky every day. But the value was in the people that were there and what you could do for them. You were, very often, their lifeline.
A classified ad for TAA air hostesses published in 1968. Applicants should ‘be of attractive appearance with a good speaking voice’.Trove
If you visit the Trans-Australia Airlines Museum on any Tuesday morning, you will meet a vibrant group of volunteers who care for the unique collection of memorabilia for the company that flew from 1946 until it merged with Qantas in 1992.
The volunteers include former “hosties” who mingle with technicians and retired pilots. They are eager to share reminiscences about having to “weigh in” when flight attendants’ weight was monitored, or about apprenticeships working alongside fathers and brothers.
John Wren, president of the TAA 25 Year Club, remembers the airline as “a community and source of lifetime employment for my family. In comparison, Qantas was more like the public service!”
More than an industry
Our Heritage of the Air project has been researching Australia’s civil aviation to build a better understanding of what it is about this industry that inspires loyalty.
But aviation is not just an industry: it’s a complex linkage of technology, imagination, design and fashion, with a special kind of emotional attachment.
As airlines have been shut under coronavirus, the flow of people made possible through technologies of flight is being challenged in a way never seen before.
Yet, even as we see aircraft standing idle and airport halls eerily silent, we still rely on airlines and their workers to get everyone home. Air crews are frontline workers and are well aware of the value and necessity of their skills.
As Miranda Diack, vice president of the Flight Attendants’ Association of Australia, told ABC’s The Drum last month:
[The] aviation industry has been always there in every major disaster to rescue people. We’ve been there to bring our citizens home when they have needed help. Maybe it’s time for the government to remember … it might be time to rescue us for a change.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University
Landing in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, it may seem strange former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir has generated so much political controversy.
In A Bigger Picture, Turnbull deals candidly with his antagonists inside the Coalition, who fought him bitterly on the same-sex marriage reform and climate policy. Similarly, he names and shames those he blames for the leadership insurgency of August 2018. All of this was expected, but none of it must please the current government.
But is the book any more inflammatory than previous prime ministerial memoirs?
Political controversy is a trademark of political memoir publishing in Australia. A Bigger Picture is just another page in that story.
Until the 1960s, prime ministerial memoirs were the exception, not the rule. Between 1945 and 1990, just three former prime ministers chose to publish books about their political lives. Two of them – Billy Hughes and Robert Menzies – produced two books each, and both political veterans sought to avoid “telling tales out of school”. Both seemed more interested in foreign affairs, particularly our imperial relationship to the UK in the case of Menzies.
The dismissal of the Whitlam government provoked both Sir John Kerr and Gough Whitlam to publish their memoirs. After reading extracts of Kerr’s Matters for Judgement, Whitlam decided to “set the record straight immediately” by writing The Truth of the Matter. His second book, The Whitlam Government, was also designed to make a political splash. Promising to explain the “development and implementation” of his policy program, the book was timed for release on the tenth anniversary of the dismissal itself, ensuring maximum publicity.
Since then, political controversy has accompanied prime ministerial memoirs, in part because incumbent political parties and leaders have had a vested interest in how these books might affect their popularity.
In his 1994 political memoir, Bob Hawke accused his rival and successor, Paul Keating, of calling Australia “the arse-end of the world” during an argument about the Labor leadership. Further, Hawke accused Keating of failing to support Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Keating, who was attacked in parliament in October 1994 over the claims, called both allegations “lies”. Hawke offered to take a lie-detector test to prove his sincerity. Senior ALP figures recorded their outrage at Hawke’s memoir. But Hawke hit back, describing them as “precious self-appointed guardians of proper behaviour”.
Hawke’s predecessor also damaged his relationship with his own party in the process of publishing his memoirs. Malcolm Fraser’s Political Memoirs, written with journalist Margaret Simons, was recognised as one of Australia’s top ten books of 2010. His outspokenness – in the book and in his post-prime-ministerial life more generally – earned him many attacks from Coalition MPs.
John Howard handled the politics of his memoirs better than most politicians. Though the book was antagonistic toward his former treasurer, Peter Costello, Howard promised to “deal objectively” with events and relationships in Lazarus Rising. Ever the party stalwart, Howard and his publishers re-issued the book after the 2013 election with a new chapter that touted Tony Abbott’s “high intelligence, discipline […] good people skills”.
Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard both publicly took aim at one another in their memoirs, which made for plenty of media fodder. In My Story, Gillard described Rudd’s leadership as a descent into “paralysis and misery”. Rudd returned fire, calling her book her “latest contribution to Australian fiction”. However, he was unable to dent the book’s commercial success.
Four years later, Rudd in The PM Years accused Gillard of plotting “with the faceless men” to become prime minister. In a bid to patch over the historic rifts, he subsequently promised the Labor Party’s 2018 National Conference that the “time for healing” had come.
Critics of Turnbull’s book – such as Sky News’ Andrew Bolt and 2GB’s Ben Fordham – have argued that he and his publishers, Hardie Grant, were wrong to “betray confidences” and divulge “private conversations”.
In reality, political memoirs have always pushed against conventions of political secrecy. In the 1970s, British cabinet minister Richard Crossman published his Diaries, which included detailed descriptions of how cabinet functioned. The British establishment subsequently conducted the Radcliffe review into political memoirs and diaries. It found such material should be kept secret for 15 years, but that civil servants could do little to stop their political masters from publishing.
In 1999, Australia’s Neal Blewett was warned that publishing his A Cabinet Diary, recorded seven years earlier, could lead to prosecution under the Crimes Act because it revealed confidential cabinet discussions. Calling the public service’s bluff, Blewett published anyway. He explained in the book that “a few egos will be bruised, but cabinet ministers are a robust lot”. His diary shed significant light on the trials and tribulations of a ministerial life.
Since then, countless MPs and ministers have published books that claim to accurately represent personal conversations, some based on private notes (as Costello claimed in his memoirs), others on diary entries (as is the case in Turnbull’s book). In recent years, politicians have reproduced text messages and email exchanges in their books, as Bob Carr did in his 2014 book, Diary of a Foreign Minister. In each version of history, the author is the essential policymaker.
In his book, Turnbull reveals private conversations and WhatsApp exchanges with colleagues, world leaders, public servants and more. His accounts of cabinet discussions are hardly ground-breaking: cabinet debates about the economy and national security under the Abbott government, for instance, were thoroughly detailed in Niki Savva’s The Road to Ruin, while the acrimonious debates about energy policy, same-sex marriage and home affairs inside the Turnbull government were laid bare in David Crowe’s Venom. Similarly, Turnbull’s criticisms of News Corporation’s biased reporting have been aired elsewhere, and stop short of Rudd’s argument in The PM Years that Rupert Murdoch should be the subject of a royal commission.
Turnbull’s book is another addition to the history of incendiary political memoir publishing in Australia. Political parties and their media associates have confirmed once again that a successful parliamentary memoir requires deft political management.
Ultimately, A Bigger Picture is not the compendium of revelations that some may perceive. Instead, it is another picture of politics in which “character” and “leadership” reign supreme at the expense of all other political forces.
If you’re schooling your children at home, chances are you’re very time poor. By teaching your children to cook, you could bundle up some learning while also getting dinner or lunch prepared.
Teaching children to cook healthy food helps them gain knowledge and skills across a range of subjects simultaneously. The bonus is, you could get a healthy meal prepared as well.
Learning to follow a recipe and prepare food spans a number of core subjects such as English, through reading and comprehension. Being able to weigh and measure out ingredients draws on maths concepts of volume and measurement, and the skills of inquiry and problem solving are central to science.
Teaching children to cook, and focusing on preparing healthy foods, integrates knowledge from all these subjects and maximises learning opportunities by helping your children develop motivation and communication skills.
A review of classroom healthy eating interventions found active learning activities such as cooking, food preparation and school gardening had the biggest impact on improving nutrition knowledge and dietary patterns.
This was especially the case when it came to getting children to eat more fruit and vegetables and reducing their intake of sugar and total daily kilojoules.
The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommends we keep junk food intakes low, while aiming for five serves of vegetables and two serves of fruit daily to stay healthy and prevent chronic diseases like type two diabetes and heart disease.
Involving children and teenagers in food preparation helps promote healthy eating habits, including eating more vegetables and fruit. An experimental study with 47 children aged 6-10 found when children cooked with their parents, they ate 26% more chicken and 76% more salad and felt happier compared to when the parent cooked alone.
This clear link between cooking, nutrition and maths highlights the potential to enhance learning in both subject areas.
To challenge your children’s maths ability even further, try limiting the cooking utensils used so more calculation is needed. For example, when a recipe calls for one cup (250mL) of rice, use the ¼ cup (62.5mL) measure and ask your children to work out how many of these they need to add.
Cooking helps children put abstract maths concepts into practice.Shutterstock
Or use different types of kitchen utensils such as a measuring jug rather than a measuring cup to work out the gradations and pour the content of the cup into the jug and vice versa.
Cooking also provides the opportunity to discuss important nutrition topics with your child. Children find it easier to work out which foods are healthy and harder to identify which are unhealthy and why.
Arranging healthy foods in fun and creative ways helps kids like these foods more. An international study with 433 children from 14 countries showed beautiful food designs created using spinach and fruit increased children’s desire to eat these foods.
Using food art to improve enjoyment of healthy eating is a promising way to help picky eaters eat healthy foods.
Lots of resources are available to help make healthy cooking fun, fast and inexpensive.
Our healthy fast food cooking challenge is a collection of videos that show how well-liked classics such as burgers and pizza can be prepared in healthy ways, just as fast and at lower cost.
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.
If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz
I have a question about the charging of electric cars. I understand New Zealand is not 100% self-sufficient in renewable energy (about 80%, supplemented by 20% generally produced by coal-fired stations). If I were to buy an electric vehicle it would add to the load on the national grid. Is the only way we are currently able to add the extra power to burn more coal? Does this not make these vehicles basically “coal fired”?
New Zealand is indeed well supplied with renewable electricity. In recent years, New Zealand has averaged 83% from renewable sources (including 60% hydropower, 17% geothermal, and 5% wind) and 17% from fossil fuels (4% coal and 13% gas).
In addition to being cheap and renewable, hydropower has another great advantage. Its production can ramp up and down very quickly (by turning the turbines on and off) during the day to match demand.
Looking at a typical winter’s day (I’ve taken July 4, 2018), demand at 3am was 3,480 megawatts (MW) and 85% was met by renewable sources. By the early evening peak, demand was up to 5,950MW, but was met by 88% renewable sources. Fossil fuel sources did ramp up, but hydropower ramped up much more.
Even an EV charged purely on coal- or gas-fired electricity still has lower emissions than a petrol or diesel car, which comes to around 240g CO₂/km (if one includes the emissions needed to extract, refine, and transport the fuel).
An EV run on coal-fired electricity emits around 180g CO₂/km during use, while the figure for gas-fired electricity is about 90g CO₂/km. This is possible because internal combustion engines are less efficient than the turbines used in power stations.
Looking longer term, a mass conversion of transport in New Zealand to walking, cycling and electric trains, buses, cars and trucks is one of the best and most urgent strategies to reduce emissions. It will take a few decades, but on balance it may not be too expensive, because of the fuel savings that will accrue (NZ$11 billion of fuel was imported in 2018.)
This conversion will increase electricity use by about a quarter. To meet it we can look at both supply and demand.
More renewable electricity
On the supply side, more renewable electricity is planned – construction of three large wind farms began in 2019, and more are expected. The potential supply is significant, especially considering that, compared to many other countries, we’ve hardly begun to start using solar power.
But at some point, adding too much of these intermittent sources starts to strain the ability of the hydro lakes to balance them. This is at the core of the present debate about whether New Zealand should be aiming for 100% or 95% renewable electricity.
There are various ways of dealing with this, including storage batteries, building more geothermal power stations or “pumped hydro” stations. In pumped hydro, water is pumped uphill into a storage lake when there is an excess of wind and solar electricity available, to be released later. If the lake is large enough, this technology can also address New Zealand’s persistent risk of dry years that can lead to a shortage of hydropower.
On the demand side, a survey is under way to measure the actual charging patterns of EV drivers. Information available so far suggests that many people charge their EV late at night to take advantage of cheap night rates.
If demand gets too high at certain times, then the cost of both generation and transmission will likely rise. To avoid this, electricity suppliers are exploring smart demand responses, based on the hot water ripple control New Zealand began using in the 1950s. This allows electricity suppliers to remotely turn off hot water heaters for a few hours to limit demand.
In modern versions, consumers or suppliers can moderate demand in response to price signals, either in real time using an app or ahead of time through a contract.
New Zealand’s emissions from land transport continue to rise, up by another 2% in 2018 and almost double on 1990 levels.
To address climate change, we have to stop burning fossil fuels. Passenger cars are among the biggest users and also one of the easiest to change. Fossil fuel cannot be recycled or made clean. In contrast, electricity is getting cleaner all the time, both in New Zealand and in car factories.
If you switch to an EV now, your impact is far greater than just your personal reduction in emissions. Early adopters are vital. The more EVs we have, the more people will get used to them, the easier it will be to counter misinformation, and the more pressure there will be to cater for them.
Many people have found that switching to an electric car has been empowering and has galvanised them to start taking other actions for the climate.
Have you recently come across photos of cities around the world with clear skies and more visibility?
In an unexpected silver lining to this tragic crisis, urban centres, such as around Wuhan in China, northern Italy and Spain, have recorded a vastly lower concentration of air pollution since confinement measures began to fight the spread of COVID-19.
Likewise, the Himalayas have been visible from northern India for the first time in 30 years.
But what about Australia?
Researchers from the Land and Atmosphere Remote Sensing group at the Physical Technology Center in the Polytechnic University of Valencia – Elena Sánchez García, Itziar Irakulis Loitxate and Luis Guanter – have analysed satellite data from the new Sentinel-5P satellite mission of the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency.
The data shows a big improvement to pollution levels over some of our major cities – but in others, pollution has, perhaps surprisingly, increased.
These images measure level of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere, an important indicator of air quality. They show changes in nitrogen dioxide concentrations between March 11 to March 25 (before lockdown) and March 26 to April 11 (after lockdown).
Why nitrogen dioxide?
Nitrogen dioxide in urban air originates from combustion reactions at high temperatures. It’s mainly produced from coal in power plants and from vehicles.
High concentrations of this gas can affect the respiratory system and aggravate certain medical conditions, such as asthma. At extreme levels, this gas helps form acid rain.
Coronavirus: nitrogen dioxide emissions drop over Italy.
Declining nitrogen dioxide concentrations across Europe in the northern hemisphere are normally expected around this time – between the end of winter and beginning of spring – due to increased air motion.
But the observed decreases in many metropolises across Europe, India and China since partial and full lockdowns began seem to be unprecedented.
Nitrogen dioxide levels across Australia
Preliminary results of the satellite data analysis are a mixed bag. Some urban centres such as Brisbane and Sydney are indeed showing an expected decrease in nitrogen dioxide concentrations that correlates with the containment measures to fight COVID-19.
On average, pollution in both cities fell by 30% after the containment measures.
Like a heat map, the red in the images shows a higher concentration of nitrogen dioxide, while the green and yellow show less.
On the other hand, nitrogen dioxide concentrations have actually increased by 20% for Newcastle, the country’s largest concentration of coal-burning heavy industry, and by 40% for Melbourne, a sprawling city with a high level of car dependency. Perth does not show a significant change.
We don’t know why pollution has increased in these cities across this time period, especially since 75% of Melbourne’s pollution normally comes from vehicle emissions and most people are travelling less.
It could be because the autumn hazard reduction burns have begun in Melbourne. Or it may be due to other human activities, such as more people using electricity and gas while they stay home.
Pollution changes with the weather
Understanding how air pollution changes is challenging, and requires thorough research because of its variable nature.
We know atmospheric conditions, especially strong winds and rain, are a big influence to pollution patterns – wind and rain can scatter pollution, so it’s less concentrated.
Blue skies over Chinese cities as COVID-19 lockdown temporarily cuts air pollution.
Other factors, such as the presence of additional gases and particles lingering in the atmosphere – like those resulting from the recent bushfires – also can change air pollution levels, but their persistence and extent aren’t clear.
If the decrease in nitrogen dioxide concentration across cities such as Brisbane and Sydney is from containment measures to fight COVID-19, it’s important we try to keep pollution from increasing again.
We know air pollution kills. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates around 3,000 deaths per year in Australia can be attributed to urban air pollution.
Yet, Australia lags on policies to reduce air pollution.
COVID-19 has given us the rare opportunity to empirically observe the positive effects of changing our behaviours and slowing down industry and transport.
But to make it last, we need permanent changes. We can do this by improving public transport to reduce the number of cars on the road; electrifying mass transit; and, most importantly, replacing fossil fuel generation with renewable energy and other low-carbon sources. These changes would bring us immediate health benefits.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Davern, Senior Research Fellow, Director Australian Urban Observatory, Co-Director Healthy Liveable Cities Group, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University
We are witnessing changes in the ways we use our cities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The liveability of our local neighbourhoods has never been more important.
Right now, we are working together to flatten the curve by staying home to control the spread of COVID-19 and reduce demand on health services. This means spending a lot more time at home and in our local neighbourhoods. We are all finding out about the strengths and weaknesses in the liveability of our neighbourhoods.
This experience can teach us some lessons about how to live and plan our communities in the future. A liveable neighbourhood promotes good health and social cohesion, both now and after this pandemic passes.
Anybody who has left their home in the past few weeks will have noticed more people are using local streets and public open spaces. Parks and other public spaces are more popular than ever. Some are becoming too crowded for comfort.
Accessible public space is a key ingredient of healthy and liveable places. Public green spaces provide multiple benefits for mental and physical health, urban cooling, biodiversity, air pollution and stormwater runoff as identified in a previous review for the Heart Foundation.
Access to local public open spaces has become even more important as the current need to stay home adds to the impacts of increased density in the form of smaller houses, lot sizes and apartment living. Yet not everyone has access to local parks.
We looked at neighbourhood access to public open space using our liveability indicators included in the Australian Urban Observatory. Not all neighbourhoods have access to public open space within 400 metres. We see this in neighbourhoods just north of the beach in North Bondi, Sydney, as the liveability map below shows.
Residents of neighbourhoods north of Bondi Beach in Sydney lack good access to nearby public open space.Australian Urban Observatory, Author provided
We found a similar pattern in neighbourhoods of St Kilda East in Melbourne. It’s a pattern repeated in many neighbourhoods across cities in Australia.
Private green spaces and backyards are also being appreciated more than ever. Many people are rushing to plant fruits and vegetables at home.
Dogs are also enjoying more time with their owners in local green spaces and pet ownership is increasing. Office video conferences often feature furry friends at home. Let’s hope the increase in pet adoptions helps people cope with social distancing but also provides the animals with good long-term homes.
Fewer cars, more cycling and walking
Reduced car traffic is making local streets safer and more usable for residents.Tony Bowler/Shutterstock
One of the noticeable differences in our cities right now is the reduced car traffic in typically busy neighbourhoods where more people (including children) are out on bicycles and walking. Walkable environments with paths and cycleways are providing supportive and safe spaces for both recreational physical activity and for getting to places such as local shops and supermarkets and offices without unnecessary exposure to other people.
However, our new lives during this pandemic also highlight inequities in local access to health, community and social services. Research shows access to these services is poorer in the low-density outer suburbs that are common across Australian cities.
Homes, schools and care facilities located within 300 metres of major roads are more exposed to air pollution and risk of disease. Those risks are likely to have decreased during the COVID-19 crisis.
At the moment, many of us are living and shopping locally and enjoying the co-benefits of the “slow walkable city”: less traffic, more active modes of transport, better air quality and less noise.
Loneliness is a serious public health problem. It causes premature deaths on a scale similar to that of smoking or obesity.
Pre-pandemic lifestyles involved time-poor people travelling widely to destinations for employment, education, recreation, socialising and extracurricular activities. The suburbs were places of much social isolation.
Neighbourhoods have joined in a mass ‘bear hunt’ to entertain children during the coronavirus lockdown.Michael Dodge/AAP
With these activities now reined in, are we are seeing a rise in neighbourhood social connections due to people staying at home? Anecdotally, yes. It’s emerging through new or reinvigorated conversations with neighbours, support and sharing of goods (toilet paper anyone?), and coordinated neighbourhood support systems, such as WhatsApp groups and neighbourhood happy hours. Across the world, we can see this sense of neighbourhood belonging in the form of bear hunts and rainbow chalk drawings.
These are just some of the more obvious reflections about the liveability of our neighbourhoods as we stay home to help contain the spread of COVID-19. No doubt there will be many more lessons to come that we need to remember and act on after the pandemic passes.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Nickl, Lecturer in International Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, University of Sydney
War film is serious business. It has been from the beginning, when William Wellman’s Wings (1927) became the first World War I romantic drama to win an Oscar for best picture. One hundred years later, the supply of war films seems inexhaustible and their box-office attraction unbroken.
There we sit, watching generations get wiped out. We see terrifying technological inventions like the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. Removed from actual war in time and place, these big-screen productions are horrible yet spellbinding at the same time.
War Horse (2011) is a particularly effective exploration of this experience and what it gives to audiences. Steven Spielberg’s film tells the story of a young horse and his owner forced from the idyllic fields of rural England into the bloody trenches of first world war France.
War Horse illustrates the fragile balance of peace, and how sacrifice forms lasting bonds across borders, languages and species, echoing the Great War’s hard-won reconciliation process as Europeans bonded over grief and common trauma. Spielberg pairs moral guidance and a sense of what really matters in life with breathtaking landscape shots and fast-paced action sequences.
But this is only one story and only one way to present war as a noble sacrifice to forge unity. There is no standard formula to explain why the experience of war continuously attracts millions of viewers. The answer is different for each war story, and it is different in each nation.
The national war complex
The first Australian film to win an Academy Award was Damien Parer’s documentary of the fighting in New Guinea in 1942. The film garnered a Best Documentary Oscar for bringing the immediate experience of humanity at war to Australia: the wounded; the anxiety; the young soldiers’ fear of death far from home.
Parer himself was killed in action in 1944 in the Palau archipelago in Micronesia. His cinematic legacy is a sobering documentation of Australians at war without flagwavers or hyper-masculine action heroes.
Damien Parer also shot photographs while in New Guinea, including this one at a rest spot on the Kokoda Trail.Australian War Memorial
SBS recently ran a week of war films in the lead-up to ANZAC Day, leading with Churchill (2017), which portrays the inner world of Britain’s wartime prime minister.
Downfall (2004) looks at Hitler’s final days barricaded in his Berlin Führerbunker. Testament of Youth (2015) is a heart-swollen romance of WWI nurse Vera Brittain’s literary memoirs and her calls for pacifism.
SBS’s War Week included no actual documentary footage like that of Parer’s.
Today, the idea of an authentic representation of war seems less appealing to audiences. Marvel Studios broke box-office records all over the world with its fantasy battle and sci-fi war film Avengers: Endgame (2019). Perhaps too much reality in depicting war, the starkest of all modern realities, is simply unbearable. And so the re-enchantment of war comes with laser battles and magic gauntlets.
Fact versus fiction
How we explore war on film has sparked heated debates.
One argument holds the true horror of war is increasingly obscured by technology, Hollywood star power, and clever marketing campaigns.
The popular HBO documentary television miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010) caused controversy among military historians who accused the series of endorsing war nostalgia, making the audience take sides, and actively shaping collective modern memory through re-enacted combat scenes.
War has been co-opted as an entertainment favourite in countries all across the world, allowing audiences to think of it as a metaphor to explore issues like sexism or mortality.
One of the most popular South Korean war films, Jang Hoon’s The Front Line (2011), suggests the meaning of life cannot be found in senseless wars. The Cave (2019), a war documentary by Syrian director Feras Fayyad, shows how a group of female doctors in Ghouta struggle with systemic sexism while tending to thousands of the injured.
Jackson’s film produces a modern war experience by enhancing documentary footage of the first world war. We see the real faces of war: they talk, they smoke makeshift cigarettes, they are shellshocked victims of their time.
Jackson used computerised colouration and recordings of veteran interviews as voiceovers. He hired forensic lip readers to superimpose dialogue on the previously silent combatants’ voices.
The result is a conflicting truth about war and how its memories grow truer and more real before our eyes and in our ears if we want them to, rather than feeling safe in the fact those bombastic Hollywood scenes on screen can never become our reality.
We have just witnessed an oil price crash like never before taking prices of West Texas Intermediate into deeply negative territory.
The spot price of West Texas, the US benchmark, reached minus US$40.32 a barrel and the May futures price (which is deliverable in a physical form) went to minus US$37.63 a barrel, the lowest price in the history of oil futures contracts.
There has been no better indicator of the extent of the economic impacts of coronavirus. With borders closed and much of the world’s population being urged to stay at home, transport has come to a near halt.
How can a price turn negative?
Oklahoma’s Cushing oil storage facility, the largest in the world.Crude Oil Daily
The industry has not been able to slow production fast enough to counter the drop in demand. The other mechanism that normally stabilises prices, US oil storage, appears to be nearing capacity.
West Texas Intermediate is typically stored at the Cushing facility in Oklahoma which is on the way to being full.
Cushing is said to be able to hold 62 million barrels of oil – enough to fill all the tanks of half the cars in United States.
That’s why prices have gone negative. Traders with contracts to take delivery of oil in May fear they won’t be able to store it. They are willing to pay not to have to take it and have nowhere to put it.
Not all oil contracts went negative. West Texas Intermediate contracts for June and subsequent months are still positive, reflecting a feeling that the supply and demand imbalance will soon be corrected.
Brent, the international price benchmark, remained positive, dropping to US$25.57 – a fall of about 9%. Unlike West Texas Intermediate, Brent deliveries can be put on ships and transported to storage facilities anywhere in the world.
Not confined to the US
There is no guarantee the problems of storage evident in the US won’t spread to other markets.
This is despite the decision of OPEC-Plus (the mainly Middle Eastern member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries plus Russia and other former Soviet states) to respond to the free fall by cutting output by 9.7 million barrels per day, ending the recent duel over production levels between OPEC and Russia.
Adding another element to the COVID-19 story, on March 9, the day of the Black Monday stock market crash, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a new daily record for West Texas Intermediate trading, reaching 4.8 million contracts, surpassing the 4.3 million recorded on September 2019 following the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
The future does not look good. With rising unemployment, stuttering economies, and collapsing financial markets the prospects for substantial recovery in the oil markets seems far away.
Restrictions are to be eased on elective surgery, enabling a “gradual restart” to procedures next week.
But as national cabinet took early baby steps towards restoring normality, Reserve Bank Governor Phil Lowe warned the first half of this year would likely see the biggest contraction in Australia’s national output and income since the 1930s depression.
After Tuesday’s national cabinet meeting, Scott Morrison announced that from Monday, category 2 and some important category 3 procedures can restart in public and private hospitals. These were earlier suspended amid uncertainty about how hard COVID-19 would hit the hospital system.
Category 2 covers cases needing treatment within 90 days; category 3 are ones that require treatment in the next year.
The easing will cover:
IVF
screening programs (cancer and other diseases)
post cancer reconstruction procedures (such as breast reconstruction)
procedures for children under 18 years of age
joint replacements (incl knees, hips, shoulders)
cataracts and eye procedures
endoscopy and colonoscopy procedures.
More dentistry services will also be available.
The elective surgery easing has been facilitated by the extra availability of protective equipment; also, the low numbers of COVID-19 cases has meant the pandemic has not placed as much demand on beds as had been feared.
It is estimated the announced easing will lead to reopening about 25% of elective surgery activity in private and public hospitals.
Morrison said the situation would be reviewed on May 11 to decide whether all surgeries and procedures could recommence and numbers increase.
Clinical decisions will determine the priority given to cases.
The Prime Minister said the easing “is an important decision because it marks another step on the way back. There is a road back”.
On aged care, national cabinet was concerned some nursing homes are being too extreme, with full lockdowns that do not allow residents to have any visitors.
People in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus and there have been outbreaks and deaths in the sector.
But “there is great concern that the isolation of elderly people in residential care facilities, where they have been prevented from having any visitors … is not good for their wellbeing, is not good for their health,” Morrison said.
The national cabinet gave a “strong reminder” that its earlier decision was “not to shut people off or to lock them away in their rooms.”
This decision was to allow a maximum of two visitors at one time a day, with the visit taking place in the resident’s room. Apart from that, residents should be able to move around the facility.
Further restrictions would apply where there was an outbreak in a facility, or in the area.
On the economic front, in an indication of the devastating job losses that have already occurred, Morrison said since March 16, 517,000 JobSeeker claims had been processed. JobSeeker used to knwon as Newstart.
“By the end of this week we will have processed as many JobSeeker claims in six weeks than we would normally do in the entirety of the year,” he said.
In a speech at the Reserve Bank Lowe said it was difficult to be precise about the size of the contraction underway.
But on the bank’s current thinking:
national output was likely to fall by about 10% over the first half of 2020, with most of the decline in the June quarter
total hours worked were likely to decline by about 20% in the first half of the year
unemployment was likely to be about 10% by June, “although I am hopeful that it might be lower than this if businesses are able to retain their employees on lower hours.”
Lowe said inflation would turn negative in the June quarter, and was likely prices would turn out to have fallen over the entirity of this financial year, the first time that had happened in 60 years
Lowe expressed confidence the economy would “bounce back”, but stressed the recovery’s timing and pace would depend on “how long we need to restrict our economic activities, which in turn depends on how effectively we contain the virus”.
“One plausible scenario is that the various restrictions begin to be progressively lessened as we get closer to the middle of the year, and are mostly removed by late in the year, except perhaps the restrictions on international travel.
“Under this scenario we could expect the economy to begin its bounce-back in the September quarter and for that bounce-back to strengthen from there.
“If this is how things play out, the economy could be expected to grow very strongly next year, with GDP growth of perhaps 6–7%, after a fall of around 6% this year,” Lowe said.
He said unemployment was likely to remain above 6% over the next couple of years.
“Whatever the timing of the recovery, when it does come, we should not be expecting that we will return quickly to business as usual.”
“It is highly probable that the severe shocks we are now experiencing will change the mindsets of some people and businesses. Even after the restrictions are lifted, it is likely that some of the precautionary behaviour will persist.
“And in the months ahead, we are likely to lose some businesses, despite best efforts, and some of these businesses will not reopen. There will also be a higher level of debt and some households might revaluate the risks of having highly leveraged balance sheets.
“It is also probable that there will be structural changes in the economy. We are all learning to work, shop and travel differently. Some of these changes will probably stay with us, requiring a rethinking of business models. So the crisis will have reverberations through our economy for some time to come.”
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise D. Hickman, A/Professor and Director Palliative Care Studies at IMPACCT (Improving Palliative, Aged & Chronic Care through Clinical Research & Translation), University of Technology Sydney
If you become seriously unwell with COVID-19 and are likely to benefit from active treatment and need a ventilator or are dying, do those closest to you know what type of care you would want?
COVID-19 steals the luxury of time but these are the questions busy health-care providers assessing you will want to know to inform your treatment.
If you haven’t had these important conversations, start them today. Have them with someone who will be able to advocate for your care preferences and wishes when you are unable to do it yourself.
Who should be having these discussions?
Older people have more chronic health conditions that place them at higher risk of severe illness or death. They are more likely to find themselves in a variety of situations where health-care decisions need to be made.
Although older people and those with chronic conditions are at more risk, no one is protected against COVID-19, so everyone should have these conversations.
What are the options?
COVID-19 is a respiratory virus that can cause lung infection. If you were likely to benefit, you could be sent to an intensive care unit (ICU). Some patients will need to have a tube put down their throat so they can be attached to a ventilator to help their body breath. Would you want this to happen to you?
In crisis situations, who can be with you in hospital while you are sick or dying changes. You may be allowed one person with you or no-one.
Health-care providers are working creatively to ensure patients and their families remain connected through the use of technology, such as FaceTime, WhatsApp, Viber, Zoom or texting. Would you still decide to go to ICU if you knew you could only communicate with those you love using technology?
What if you don’t want aggressive treatment?
Good health care involves understanding people’s preferences and wishes, and developing clear goals of care. Not everyone will want to have aggressive treatment, which can be burdensome and difficult to cope with if you have other chronic illnesses or are very old.
If you elect to have good symptom management only, rather than aggressive treatment, do you know what palliative care might look like for you in this situation?
Palliative care aims to relieve symptoms and promote quality of life.
COVID-19 symptom management is focused on making you as comfortable as possible, by managing any distress, breathlessness, anxiety and pain. The health-care providers will endeavour to communicate regularly with your family and keep them informed about your situation and how you are responding to these comfort measures.
If you do not want to receive aggressive medical treatments, then Advance Care Planning Australia has some great resources to help you frame and document your care preferences.
What questions do you need to think about?
This list provides some helpful questions for a written plan. You can also give your answers to your advocate, someone you want to speak to the treating doctor or nurse on your behalf if you’re too sick to talk.
1) Who is the nominated person you want to speak on your behalf?
2) What are your:
goals of care?
health priorities?
current conditions?
3) Do you know what treatment you want or do not want should you be too sick to tell health professionals yourself?
4) If it becomes clear you are dying, what does a comfortable dignified death look like to you?
5) What is your preference if your condition gets worse, even after health professionals try everything? If you are dying, do you want to be put on a ventilator?
6) Do you want be resuscitated (with CPR) if your heart and lungs stop working?
7) Would you rather not go to the hospital and prefer to stay in your home or residential aged care home if given the choice?
8) Have you had your wishes documented and does your advocate have a copy of your care preferences and wishes?
If we fail to have these conversations now and are unfortunate to present to hospital acutely unwell, then there may not be the luxury of time to discuss these issues in detail with our family and the treating health-care team.
With its plea for a $A1.4 billion government loan rebuffed, Australia’s second major airline has entered voluntary administration.
Virgin Australia’s chief executive, Paul Scurrah, said the decision to appoint external administrators (from Deloitte) “was about securing the future of the Virgin Australia Group and emerging on the other side of the COVID-19 crisis”.
Voluntary administration means the board of an insolvent company – one that can’t pay its bills – hands full control to independent administrators. They then work out if it can be saved by being restructured or sold to other investors. This is similar to what is called Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States.
If the administrators can’t save the company, their job is to wind up operations and sell off assets to pay creditors (including staff owed entitlements).
For now, with almost all of Virgin Australia’s fleet grounded and the federal government subsidising it flying a few critical routes, voluntary administration won’t make much difference to customers. The company says it will continue to operate its scheduled international and domestic flights.
Virgin Australia isn’t the first airline victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Norway’s largest airline, Norwegian Air, announced on Monday it had “no choice but to apply for bankruptcy” for three subsidiaries in Denmark and one in Sweden.
Like Virgin, it too entered this crisis in far from tip-top shape, as it struggled over several years to make its long-haul low-cost airline model work.
Virgin Australia has long been financially fragile. Last financial year it posted a A$349 million loss, its seventh consecutive annual loss. In response the airline announced a “rightsizing” program that included cutting about 750 jobs (about 7.5% of its workforce).
The question now is whether the Deloitte administrators can do better.
It is possible.
Three of the world’s biggest airlines – Delta, United, and American Airlines – have survived near-death experiences.
Delta filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005, United in 2002, and American Airlines in 2011. All were restructured over several years and all emerged from the process as more efficient operations. They are now the world’s first, second and fourth-biggest airlines (by passenger capacity).
Reports suggest, however, that Virgin Australia’s administrators are looking for a much shorter timeline – about eight weeks – to find new owners for the airline.
This would make the process far different to that of Ansett Australia, the last major Australian airline to go into voluntary administration. Ansett entered administration on September 12 2001. Its last flight landed in Sydney on March 5 2002. Liquidating its assets and paying money owed to creditors and staff took almost a decade.
If the administrators can work out a deal that injects new investments and wipes Virgin’s debts of about A$5 billion – a major obstacle to the federal government lending it A$1.4 billion – Australia’s airline industry will arguably be more competitive than it is now.
Consequences for customers
If new owners cannot be found, Virgin Australia’s collapse would leave the Australian market dominated by Qantas (and its budget subsidiary Jetstar) – at least in the short to medium term.
Less competition almost always means reduced services and higher prices for customers.
But the airline market is complicated. As I’ve noted previously of the US market, there can be many competitors yet still effective monopolies on some “thin” routes. What economists call “multi-market contact” can lead to “tacit collusion”, in which competition is tempered without any explicit agreement among the market participants.
Research shows, for example, that airfares are about 5% higher in markets with two legacy airline competitors than on the monopoly routes. But when a legacy carrier faces new competition from a low-cost airline, the prices can go down by as much as a third.
Demand factors
Tempering the likelihood that market dominance by one company will lead to higher prices is that demand will take time to return to pre-pandemic levels after restrictions are lifted.
In China, for example, domestic passenger numbers for 2020 are expected to be 20% lower than 2019, and international passenger numbers 50% lower.
Fuel costs, which accounted for about 24% of the global airline industry’s operating costs in 2019, are also likely to be lower. The oil price is at its lowest level in history – so low, in fact, oil producers are now paying customers to take it.
Both these factors suggest ticket prices won’t rise in the short term.
In the medium term, once demand recovers, lack of competition could well lead to higher airfares.
But in the long run there is better news.
As any economics textbook will tell you, profitable markets attract new competitors.
With more airline bankruptcies around the world quite likely, conditions will be ripe for new airlines to be established. There will be no shortage of aircraft and skilled workers. If oil prices stay low, new entrants could even be competitive using older, less fuel-efficient aircraft.
For the sake of Virgin Australia’s 10,000 employers, and the jobs of thousands more that depend on it indirectly, I hope the airline survives administration and emerges better for it, as US carriers have done with Chapter 11 bankruptcies.
But if it doesn’t, the pain for customers through higher prices is likely to be temporary. The laws of economics tell us that, so long as governments ensure markets remain open to new entrants, monopolies do not last.
The curve of the COVID-19 epidemic has been flattened in many countries around the world, and it hasn’t been new antivirals or a vaccine that has done it. We are being saved by non-drug interventions such as quarantine, social distancing, handwashing, and – for health-care workers – masks and other protective equipment.
We are all hoping for a vaccine in 2021. But what do we do in the meantime? And more importantly, what if no vaccine emerges?
The world has bet most of its research funding on finding a vaccine and effective drugs. That effort is vital, but it must be accompanied by research on how to target and improve the non-drug interventions that are the only things that work so far.
Debates still rage over basic questions such as whether the public should use face masks; whether we should stand 1, 2 or 4 metres apart; and whether we should wash our hands with soap or sanitiser. We need the answers now.
Across all health research, non-drug interventions are the subject of about 40% of clinical trials. Yet they receive far less attention than drug development and testing.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of dollars have already been given to research groups around the world to develop vaccines and trial potential drug cures. Hundreds of clinical trials on drugs and vaccines are under way, but we could find only a handful of trials of non-drug interventions, and no trials on how to improve the adherence to them.
While holding our breath for the vaccine …
We all hope the massive global effort to develop a vaccine or drug treatment for COVID-19 is successful. But many experts, including Ian Frazer, who developed Australia’s HPV vaccine, think it will not be easy or quick.
If an effective vaccine or drug doesn’t materialise, we will need a Plan B that uses only non-drug interventions. That’s why we need high-quality research to find out which ones work and how to do them as effectively as possible.
Aren’t non-drug interventions straightforward?
You might think hand washing, masks and social distancing are simple things and don’t need research. In fact, non-drug interventions are often very complex.
It takes research to understand not only the “active components” of the intervention (washing your hands, for example), but also how much is needed, how to help people start and keep doing it, and how to communicate these messages to people. Developing and implementing an effective non-drug intervention is very different from developing a vaccine or a drug, but it can be just as complex.
To take one example, there has been a #Masks4All campaign to encourage everyone to wear face masks. But what type of mask, and what should it be made of? Who should wear masks – people who are ill, people who are caring for people who are ill, or everyone? And when and where? There is little agreement on these detailed questions.
Washing your hands also sounds simple. But how often? Twice a day, 10 times a day, or at specific trigger times? What’s the best way to teach people to wash their hands correctly? If people don’t have perfect technique, is hand sanitiser be better than soap and water? Is wearing masks and doing hand hygiene more effective than doing just either of them?
These are just are some of the things that we don’t know about non-drug interventions.
Existing research is lacking
We recently reviewed all the randomised controlledtrials for physical interventions to interrupt the spread of respiratory viruses, including interventions such as masks, hand hygiene, eye protection, social distancing, quarantining, and any combination of these. We found a messy and varied bunch of trials, many of low quality or small sample size, and for some types of interventions, no randomised trials.
Other non-drug options to research include the built environment, such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning circulation, and surfaces (for example, the SARS-CoV-2 virus “dies” much more rapidly on copper than other hard surfaces).
Are some of the things we are doing now ineffective? Probably. The problem is we don’t know which ones. We need to know this urgently so we’re not wasting time, effort, and resources on things that don’t work.
At a time when we need to achieve rapid behaviour change on a massive scale, inconsistent and conflicting messages only creates confusion and makes achieving behaviour change much harder.
What about the next pandemic?
If a successful COVID-19 vaccine is developed, we’re out of the woods for now. But what happens when the next pandemic or epidemic arrives? Vaccines are virus-specific, so next time a new virus threatens us, we will again be in the same situation. However, what we learn now about non-drug interventions can be used to protect us against other viruses, while we wait again for another new vaccine or drug.
We have had opportunities to study non-drug interventions for respiratory viruses in the recent past, particularly during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. However, the chances for rigorous studies were largely wasted and we now find ourselves desperately scrambling for answers.
To prepare for the future and Plan B, the case where a vaccine doesn’t arrive, we need to conduct randomised trials into non-drug interventions to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses. The current pandemic is presenting us with a rare opportunity to rapidly conduct trials to answer many of the unknowns about this set of non-drug interventions.
Concentrating all our funding, efforts, and resources into vaccine and drug research may turn out to be a devastating and costly mistake in both healthcare and economic terms. The results will be felt not only in this pandemic, but also in future ones.
We investigate how principles of wellness such as healthy eating and exercise are incorporated into health care, particularly in general practice. I spent the summer planning how to support my team for the next five years, focusing on impact and research translation into real-world settings.
Big things were in the works. It was an exciting time. But as it turns out, wellness in health care isn’t a priority during the COVID-19 crisis.
Many of my team’s projects relied on doctors, nurses and other health professionals to collect or provide data. With the strain placed on health care by the pandemic, continuing was no longer viable. Grant applications, domestic and international travel, conferences and meetings have all been cancelled or postponed indefinitely.
As a supervisor, the hardest part was withdrawing research students and interns I’d lined up to start projects in clinics. This pandemic has challenged the relevance, impact and productivity of our work.
This shock comes shortly after a summer of devastating bushfires which hindered research progress by forcing experts out of fire-affected regions, destroying expanses of equipment and reportedly setting some studies “back months or years”.
This photo was taken in Junee, New South Wales, in January. According to reports, the total tangible cost estimate of the summer bushfires was close to A$100 billion.Shutterstock
Stoppages across the field
Social distancing, travel bans and quarantine restrictions mean scientific fieldwork across the world has almost completely stopped.
The Australian Antarctic Program, led by the federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment has been reduced to essential staff only to keep the Antarctic continent COVID-19-free. Instead of sending 500 expeditioners in the next summer season, the Australian Antarctic Division will only send about 150.
Delays have also impacted one of the world’s largest efforts to investigate the nature of dark matter. The XENON experiment based in Italy is worth more than US$30 million, according to the New York Times. It faced a multitude of roadblocks when the country was forced into lockdown earlier this year.
Young research stars missing opportunities
For young researchers, social distancing and event cancellations are especially damaging to professional development. Scientific conferences and meetings foster collaboration and can also lead to employment opportunities.
This crisis has left the next generation of researchers unsupported, and have negative flow-on effects for all research areas. In health and disease prevention, research efforts apart from vaccinations are still vital, as the onset of COVID-19 hasn’t stopped the rise of chronic disease.
There are positives
Australia boasts a robust and passionate research workforce, which means we can divert resources to a united cause such as the coronavirus crisis. As the race for a vaccine continues, the value of research has never been more apparent to the non-scientific community. This may help weaken anti-science messages.
The pandemic is also providing opportunity for future university leaders to understand university management, funding and governance decisions. Never before has information been so accessible on where funding comes from.
Online conferencing and collaboration related to research has also made participation more accessible and affordable. This increases inclusively by removing barriers for people who may not be able to attend in-person gatherings, such as people living with a physical disability, full-time carers and people experiencing financial hardship. Less domestic and international travel is also helping reduce carbon footprints.
Charging forward
The health system isn’t working normally, which means my team’s research isn’t working normally. Nonetheless, we’re pivoting well in this uncertain time. We’re helping plan the first online conference for Australian primary care to improve access to relevant research across the country.
New grant opportunities are aligning COVID-19 to our research focus, such as the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’s and the Hospitals Contribution Fund’s special call for projects on COVID-19 in general practice.
Some may think non-COVID-19 research isn’t currently necessary, but it will be once we combat this disease. And when that happens, we’ll be ready to continue right where we left off.
But some people don’t even get symptoms. Recent studies suggest as many as 80%or more of those infected are “silent carriers”, showing no or very mild symptoms.
But to calculate the true proportions of people who have no symptoms right through to severe illness, testing would need to be expanded across whole populations, and this hasn’t been feasible yet.
We don’t know exactly why some people with coronavirus are asymptomatic while others develop life-threatening illness. But here’s what we know so far.
What happens when coronavirus enters your body?
Like all viruses, SARS-CoV-2 needs to get inside human cells to multiply and survive.
To do this, a particle on the outer shell of the virus latches onto a matching protein receptor, called ACE2, like a lock and key. ACE2 receptors are normally found in the lungs, kidneys, heart and the gut.
Here the SARS-CoV-2 virus (in green and orange) attaches to the ACE2 receptor (in pink).Shutterstock
Once a person has been infected with the virus, it can take up to 14 days for symptoms to appear (if they do at all) – known as the incubation period.
The path from the point of infection can vary enormously. The body’s immune system is critical for determining this.
Having a strong immune response during the incubation period can prevent the infection taking hold, reduce the actual quantity of virus in the body and prevent it from getting to the lungs.
Our immune system offers us two lines of defence against viruses.
The first is the innate system and includes physical barriers such as skin and mucous membranes (the lining of the throat and nose), various proteins and molecules found in tissues, as well as some of the white blood cells that attack invading organisms. This immune response is general, non-specific and kicks in quickly.
Children have immature immune systems, but one hypothesis to explain why they don’t seem to get as sick with COVID-19 is that their innate immune response to coronavirus is greater than in adults.
This may lead to a reduced viral load – the quantity of virus particles that survive in the body – because they’re able to clear the virus more quickly.
Children’s resilience to coronavirus might be due to their innate immune response.Shutterstock
The second line of defence is the adaptive immune response. This takes longer to initiate but once established, is much more efficient at eradicating a specific infection when encountering it again.
It’s thought that very specific genetic variations in some people might play a part in how sick they get. By generating an early adaptive immune response, the body seems to recognise the virus during the incubation period and fight it off.
After the incubation period, what determines how sick you get?
If the SARS-CoV-2 virus survives beyond the point of entry to the body (nose, eyes, throat) it might then make its way down the respiratory tract into the lungs.
In the lungs, it latches onto ACE2 receptors and continues replicating itself, triggering further immune responses to clean out infected cells. The amount of virus that gets deep into the lungs may be another important factor determining how sick you get.
As the battle between virus and immune responses proceeds, infected airway linings produce large amounts of fluid that fill the air sacs, leaving less room for transferring oxygen into the bloodstream and removing carbon dioxide.
Symptoms of pneumonia appear, such as fever, cough with sputum (phlegm) and shortness of breath.
Fluid in the lungs makes it difficult to breathe.Shutterstock
For some people, the immune response is excessive or prolonged and causes what’s known as a “cytokine storm”. Cytokines are a group of proteins that send signals to cells in the immune system, helping direct the response.
A cytokine storm is a catastrophic overreaction that causes so much inflammation and organ damage, it can be fatal.
Elderly people and those with chronic lung disorders are more likely to develop ARDS and therefore to die. This is currently thought to be due to these groups of people having fewer ACE2 receptors in their lungs.
This seems counter-intuitive, because the virus attaches itself to these receptors. However, ACE2 receptors have an important role in regulating the immune response, particularly in managing the degree of inflammation.
So the reduced levels of ACE2 receptors in the elderly may actually make them more at risk of a cytokine storm and severe lung disease.
Conversely, children have more ACE2 receptors in their lungs which might explain why they do not get as sick.
In some cases, medications that work to suppress the immune system have successfully treated this excessive immune response in people with COVID-19.
Older people’s immune systems respond very differently to children’s.Shutterstock
Can people without symptoms pass it on?
Some studies have indicated people with COVID-19 tend to have a high viral load just before and shortly after they start getting symptoms.
This suggests they can transmit it when they first get sick and up to 48 hours before, while they’re pre-symptomatic.
However, there is no good evidence that asymptomatic people who never develop symptoms are able to pass it on.
Researchers and clinicians are working around the clock to understand the complex relationship between humans’ immune systems and SARS-CoV-2 but it remains very much a work in progress.
Few people can fault the government’s zeal in staring down the coronavirus and steering a path for Australia to emerge on the other side ready to do business again.
Unlike the crowds amassing in some US cities to declare their scorn for “stay at home” rules, Australians, generally speaking, have been supportive of federal and state government strategies to tackle the pandemic.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has added a potential new weapon to his armoury – a COVID-19 tracing app. Government Services Minister Stuart Robert has been spruiking the plan to introduce the app, which is based on technology in use in Singapore.
But the idea of a government potentially monitoring our daily travels and interactions has drawn suspicion or even scorn. Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce says he won’t be downloading the app.
So if your app has been within 15 minutes’ duration of someone within 1.5 metres proximity, there’ll be a ping or swapping of phone numbers, and that’ll stay on your phone. And then of course if you test positive … you’ll give consent and those numbers will be provided securely to health professionals, and they’ll be able to call people you’ve been in contact with … Those numbers will be on your phone, nowhere else, encrypted. You can’t access them, no one else can.
Downloading the app is to be voluntary. But its effectiveness would be enhanced, Robert says, if a significant proportion of the population embraced the idea.
On ABC Radio National Breakfast this week he backed away from a previously mentioned minimum 40% community commitment. Instead, Robert said: “Any digital take-up … is of great value.”
He has strong support from other quarters. Epidemiologist Marion Kainer said the adoption of such an app would allow contact tracing to occur much more quickly.
Having the rapid contact tracing is essential in controlling this, so having an app may allow us to open up society to a much greater extent than if we didn’t have an app.
This all sounds well and good. But there are potential problems. Our starting point is that governments must ensure no policy sacrifices our democratic liberties in the pursuit of a goal that could be attained by other, less intrusive, schemes.
The immediate concern comes down to the age-old (and important) debate about how much freedom we are prepared to give up in fighting an existential threat, be it a virus, terrorism, or crime more generally.
Law academic Katharine Kemp last week highlighted her concerns about the dangers of adopting a poorly thought-through strategy before safeguards are in place.
The app, she said:
will require a clear and accurate privacy policy; strict limits on the data collected and the purposes for which it can be used; strict limits on data sharing; and clear rules about when the data will be deleted.
Other commentators have warned more broadly against “mission creep”: that is, with the tool in place, what’s to stop a government insisting upon an expanded surveillance tool down the track?
True, downloading the app is voluntary, but the government has threatened that the price of not volunteering is a longer time-frame for the current restrictions. That threat fails any “pub” test of voluntariness.
On the other hand, there is a privacy trade-off that most people are willing to make if the benefits are manifestly clear. For example, our in-car mapping devices are clever enough (based on the speed of other road users with similar devices) to warn us of traffic problems ahead.
Remember, too, that Australians have had a 20-year love affair with smart technologies. We’re a generation away from the naysayers who argued successfully against the Hawke government’s failed Australia Card in the mid-1980s.
By the same token, the Coalition does not have a strong record of inspiring confidence in large-scale data collection and retrieval. One need only recall the lack of enthusiasm healthcare provider organisations showed for the My Health Record system. In 2019, the National Audit Office found the system had failed to manage its cybersecurity risks adequately.
So where do we go from here? The government sought to allay public concerns about the metadata retention scheme, a program introduced in 2015 to amass private telecommunications data, by giving a role to the Commonwealth Ombudsman to assess police agencies’ compliance with their legislated powers. In the case of the COVID-19 tracing app, the government has, appropriately, enlisted the support of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Robert has said:
Right now a privacy impact assessment is being conducted, the Privacy Commissioner is involved, and all of that will be made public.
While that is an admirable sentiment, one would hope the government would put specific legislation in place to set out all of the conditions of use, and that the commissioner would not be asked for her view unless and until that legislation is in order. The Law Council of Australia has today joined this chorus.
Once the commissioner gives the “all clear”, I will be happy to download the app. Let’s hope it then works as intended.
