Here are a few snippets of life after lockdown in Sydney…
Nothing ground-breaking but certainly not something you will see or read in the mainstream media. Partly written in jest although factually accurate and (I hope you’ll agree) with a serious side. Just a few things to make you think perhaps…
Do dwarfs need to wear masks?
Walk around the shopping centres and you have to wear a mask. Sit in one of the many cafés and restaurants and you don’t. Kids are not required to wear masks. Wait a moment. Most kids are the same size as an adult sat at a table. Ahaa…Is it a height thing I wonder? Would they stop a dwarf or midget if they weren’t wearing a mask?
Then of course nobody thinks to mention the HVAC. But I will. Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning – aka HVAC. All shopping centres have them. Basically circulating the air around the whole building. Sometimes heating it, sometimes cooling it, depending on the settings and season of course. Well, at least that’s the theory. They don’t always work that well. I know. I have worked on HVAC systems in the pharmaceutical industry amongst others. Some installations are anything but ideal; there are cowboys everywhere eh?
So regardless of where you sit or stand, mask or no mask, the same air is being recirculated. Even on another level in the shopping mall the exhaled breath of those (maskless) in the café on the ground floor will reach you sooner or later.
A good HVAC system will have some kind of filtration. But in public buildings it will not be that good. It (kind of) cleans the air before blowing it back out. In the meantime air is drawn into the filter/blower part of the HVAC system so freshly exhaled air is constantly being flung around the room. It’s a bit like those smoking and no-smoking sides they used to have at the cinema. If you are as old as me you will remember. The smokers sat on one side and the non-smokers (or should that be passive smokers?) sat on the other. When the film started, thanks to the lights of the projector, you could clearly see the smoke rise, loop along the ceiling and fall on the passive smoking side. Hilarious! We really didn’t give a shit in those days though so it was fine.
And speaking of smoking…
Double Tobacco !!
I noticed there are now twice as many tobacco shops on one street. An odd thing to spot, granted. But hey: When shops have been closing down these days and reopening (often as something else) all over, it is something you tend to notice…
OK there was one and now there are two. Not exactly doubling all over but you get the point surely… We are told that smoking, as a habit, is dying off (no pun intended but obviously one there). So, how can there be more of these places selling the dreaded weed?
Lung cancer kills around 2880 every year in New South Wales. That’s about 55 people per week. That’s way more than covid has supposedly killed this past (almost) 2 years. At the height of the lockdown we were constantly fed daily data to bamboozle us. Including the number of people in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) in New South Wales. It hovered around 70 on average. You would expect there to be about 55 each week in hospital ICUs to be there due to lung cancer right? Considering that number die from lung cancer each week in New South Wales! They should be in a bad way and needing all the breathing apparatus an ICU can find eh? Think about that one…
(Regarding the ICU numbers: probably less than an average of 70, I can’t be bothered doing the calculations but I did keep all the data. At its ‘worst’ it peaked at less than 25% occupancy however so was never as bad as they would have us believe.)
In 2020, it is estimated that there will be 8,641 deaths from lung cancer in Australia *. Averaging that out to about one third (as NSW has about 1/3 the country’s population) that’s about 2880 in NSW. Over a full year that makes (2880÷52=) 55 people per week on average will die of lung cancer.
* Source: Cancer Autralia.com.au
UPDATE: I actually noticed a third tobacco shop (2nd new one) on the same street a few days after drafting this post.
If they put half the effort into telling people about smoking and lung cancer as they have been scaring them about covid, would there be more tobacco shops? Indeed; would there be any?
The Library
I popped over to a “Public” Library recently. At least that’s what they still call them. Just to check it out. Bear in mind that this time of year is when students are studying for their high school leaving exams, so the library study areas are busy. They are only allowing people with a vaccine certificate to enter. Then they are asking them to wear a mask and allocating seating based on socially distancing the students. (The distancing thing has since been relaxed I hear.) So what was the point of the vaccines then? Weren’t we already doing the masking and social distancing before? And of course these buildings are fully “HVAC’d…” Makes you think eh? It should do…
Odd how you need to mask up and socially distance to study but not to go in the café/pub. Maybe finding it hard to breath with the mask on focuses the mind…
Avoid The Rowdy Pubs
People are back in the pubs of course. Let’s hope it’s not a rowdy pub they choose. Because while the bouncers at the door are asking people for their covid vaccine certificates they aren’t asking to see any proof of Hepatitis ‘B’ shots. Yes! Hep-B is actually quite common in Australia. Far more so than most realise (see below). It’s a particularly nasty disease and very hard to get rid of for some. Most police officers are required to get a Hep B shot as they are often involved in bloody situations (fights, accidents etc). And if a fight breaks out in a pub then it is more or less guaranteed that blood will flow and the pub bouncers will be involved. Don’t you think we have a right to know if the bouncers in a pub have had their Hep-B vaccines? Why not? Their blood could splatter in any direction. Just like your breath – mask or no mask, vaccine or no vaccine!
The prevalence of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) in Australia is estimated to have increased by more than 50,000 people in the past decade, affecting approximately 1% of the population…
Source: https://www.racgp.org.au/afp/2013/july/chronic-hepatitis-b/
Note: Only one source has been quoted here in each case, but there are others. Please do your own research…