Australia ends 2020 as it began - with Scott Morrison refusing to act on mental health policy and program reform

The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 2020:

At the end of one of the most challenging years we have ever faced in Australia in terms of our collective mental health, and following Prime Minister Morrison’s impassioned release of the long-awaited Productivity Commission report, many have asked what’s the government’s plan of actions for 2021?

Well, it turns out that the answer is yet another inquiry! The terms of reference for this new “Select Committee on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention” were tabled quietly in the Federal Parliament last Thursday, just before it closed. They state that an interim report is required by April 15, and a final report by November 1, 2021. The Labor spokesperson, Chris Bowen, made it clear the Opposition was not consulted.

No, this is not a repeat episode of Yes, Minister or its sequel Yes, Prime Minister. This committee’s deliberations will sit alongside a range of other reports still being prepared by the National Mental Health Commission (Vision 2030) and the Prime Minister’s special advisor on suicide prevention, Christine Morgan.

At this point, I’d suggest that Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot may now be essential Christmas reading for those who as a consequence of where they live, their family income or the severity of their illness are locked out of essential mental health services. For many others, only limited primary care responses were available pre-COVID-19. 

 

The mental health sector is often criticised by political leaders, and other social commentators, for not being more united in its advocacy or focused in its key "asks" of government. Consequently, it is easy for governments to argue that it is still necessary to hold more stakeholder consultations, parliamentary enquiries, inter-governmental meetings, royal commissions or human rights investigations. 

Frankly, in 2020, these delaying tactics are no longer acceptable. In late October, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its annual cause of death data for 2019 . In terms of productive years of life lost, suicide dwarfed all other causes. It accounted for 115,000 years lost annually, with heart disease a distant second (78,000 years lost prematurely). In the COVID-19 era, many expect a worsening mental health toll, particularly among younger people. 

Prior to the October 2020 budget, a broad cross section of the mental health sector presented the Morrison government with a four-year $3.7 billion proposal to implement immediately a range of widely agreed priorities. The sector assumes that the states and territories will also commit funds, workforces and infrastructure to deliver a regionally focused program of work..... [my yellow highlighting]

Australian Society 2020: and the annual female death by violence count grows

 

Destroy The Joint

 

There are 52 weeks in every year. As of 22 December 2020 the Counting Dead Women project has recorded a a total of 54 women who have died violent deaths in Australia, predominately at the hands of their partners, family members or people they knew socially.

A satirical comment on Australian politics and society in 2020

 

‘QAnon Anonymous’: a support group for people addicted to insane conspiracy theories, including … wait for it … #WarOn2020 pic.twitter.com/OE5Hlz8tlH

— The Shovel (@TheShovel) December 17, 2020

Australia's unique plant species declining in population numbers faster than mammals and birds

The Conversation, excerpt, 16 December 2020:

Plants, such as WA’s Endangered Foote’s grevillea, make our landscape unique.
 Andrew Crawford / WA Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions

Australia’s plant species are special - 84% are found nowhere else in the world. The index shows that over about 20 years up to 2017, Australia’s threatened plant populations declined by 72%. This is faster than mammals (which declined by about a third), and birds (which declined by about half). Populations of trees, shrubs, herbs and orchids all suffered roughly similar average declines (65-75%) over the two decades.

Of the 112 species in the index, 68% are critically endangered or endangered and at risk of extinction if left unmanaged. Some 37 plant species have gone extinct since records began, though many others are likely to have been lost before scientists even knew they existed. Land clearing, changed fire regimes, grazing by livestock and feral animals, plant diseases, weeds and climate change are common causes of decline.

Vulnerable plant populations reduced to small areas can also face unique threats. For example, by the early 2000s Foote’s grevillea (Grevillea calliantha) had dwindled to just 27 wild plants on road reserves. Road maintenance activities such as mowing and weed spraying became a major threat to its survival. For other species, like the button wrinklewort, small populations can lead to inbreeding and a lack of genetic diversity.... 

Threatened plant conservation in fire-prone landscapes is challenging if a species’ relationship with fire is not known. Many Australian plant species require particular intensities or frequencies of burns for seed to be released or germinate. But since European settlement, fire patterns have been interrupted, causing many plant populations to decline. 

Three threatened native pomaderris shrubs on the NSW South Coast are a case in point. Each of them – Pomaderris adnata, P. bodalla and P. walshii – have failed to reproduce for several years and are now found only in a few locations, each with a small number of plants. 

Experimental trials recently revealed that to germinate, the seeds of these pomaderris species need exposure to hot-burning fires (or a hot oven). However they are now largely located in areas that seldom burn. This is important knowledge for conservation managers aiming to help wild populations persist.... 

A quarter of the species in the threatened plant index are orchids. Orchids make up 17% of plant species listed nationally as threatened, despite comprising just 6% of Australia’s total plant species. 

The endangered coloured spider-orchid (Caladenia colorata) is pollinated only by a single thynnine wasp, and relies on a single species of mycorrhizal fungi to germinate in the wild. 

Yet even for such a seemingly difficult species, conservation success is possible. In one project, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, aided by volunteers, identified sites where the wasp was still naturally present. More than 800 spider orchid plants were then propagated in a lab using the correct symbiotic fungus, then planted at four sites. These populations are now considered to be self-sustaining. 

In the case of Foote’s grevillea, a plant translocation program has established 500 plants at three new sites, dramatically improving the species’ long-term prospects.

The coloured spider orchid, found in South Australia and Victoria, is endangered. 
Noushka Reiter/Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

It would appear that there are some Northern Beaches residents who don't believe that NSW COVID-19 public health orders apply to them

 

On the morning of 21 December 2020 the Northern Beaches local government area COVID-19 cluster had grown to 86 individuals.

Commencing at 5:02pm on Saturday 19 December, public health orders were put in place for Northern Beaches residents who have been told they are not to leave their home except to go shopping for food or other goods and services, receive medical care or for compassionate needs, exercise and work and education, where these cannot be done from home.

On 21 December 2020 public health orders were also made for Greater Sydney and the NSW Central Coast as contact tracing showed how far infected individuals and their initial contacts had travelled.

However, nine and a half hours into Monday 21 December Queensland Police had already turned around 81 vehicles and directed 112 people into quarantine as a result of random border checks which revealed they may have come from areas covered by these public health orders.

Unfortunately Queensland Police have also discovered that 4 NSW residents allowed to cross the border on condition that they self-quarantine for 14 days have decided to breach quarantine,

Those who have been in Greater Sydney since 11 December are now being denied entry into Queensland and a 'hard border' is being re-established by the Queensland Government, with returning Queenslanders now having to hotel quarantine if they did not cross the border before 1am today.

To date there have reportedly been 27 close contacts of confirmed Sydney Northern Beaches COVID-19 cases found in Queensland, all of which are now in quarantine, with one returning to NSW. Of these 7 appear not yet to be classified as testing negative for the virus.

People from the Northern Beaches are also travelling within New South Wales, though some may have left the Northern Beaches before public health orders were in place.

Over the last 4 days around 674 individuals from the Northern Beaches LGA in Sydney have turned up for testing at hospital COVID-19 clinics in the Northern NSW Local Health District https://t.co/k7zCG1EHmO @noplaceforsheep

— no_filter_Yamba (@no_filter_Yamba) December 21, 2020

A Northern Beaches resident was discovered in Shoalhaven on 21 December 2019, having left his/her home after public health order restrictions came into force in the early evening of 19 December.

School holidays began in New South Wales on 21 December and one can almost guarantee we will hear of more Northern Beaches residents deciding that public health orders don't apply to them.

Trump Administration actively sought to spread COVID-19 infection as late as June 2020 in order to achieve "herd immunity"

"Consistent with a “herd immunity” approach, the evidence obtained by the Select Subcommittee shows that Dr. Alexander privately acknowledged to other appointees that “[w]e always knew” that “cases will rise” as a result of the Administration’s policies. Yet even as he advocated for letting the coronavirus spread widely, Dr. Alexander also attempted to pass blame for the Administration’s failure to contain the virus to career scientists and public health officials. He also urged colleagues to suppress scientific information about the risk posed by the virus to minority communities that he admitted was “very accurate” out of concern that it would be “use[d] against the president.....Documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee show that top Trump Administration officials repeatedly communicated about pursuing a dangerous herd immunity strategy as far back as June 2020, despite public denials that the Administration was adopting this approach.” [U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Corona Virus Crisis, Memorandum dated 16 December 2020]

On the morning of the day this article was published the number of COVID-19 deaths in the USA had reached 305,268 men, women and children, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at John Hopkins University.

Bloomberg, 17 December 2020: 

A Trump administration official sought to speed the spread of the coronavirus among children and young adults in order to achieve “herd immunity,” according to documents released by a top House Democrat. 

Paul Alexander, a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Humans Services, repeatedly encouraged adoption of a policy to increase the number of virus infections among younger Americans, saying they have “zero to low risk,” according to documents released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. 

In one email message, Alexander said “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc” should be used “to develop herd…we want them infected,” according to the documents released Wednesday. 

“Achieving herd immunity before a vaccine is widely available — which requires a very large portion of the population to get infected with the coronavirus — has been widely rejected by scientists as a dangerous approach that would lead to the deaths of several hundred thousand Americans at a minimum,” Representative James Clyburn, chairman of the panel, said in the memo to members of the committee.....

In a series of messages during the summer, Alexander continued to make the case to other officials to open up college campuses and businesses to increase the spread among the young and relatively healthy, while maintaining distancing measures for the elderly. 

“The issue is who cares? If it is causing more cases in young, my word is who cares,” Alexander said in a July message. “As long as we make sensible decisions, and protect the elderely [sic] and nursing homes, we must go on with life….who cares if we test more and get more positive tests.”

Is opening Sydney back up for Christmas and New Year 2020 the biggest mistake Berejiklian and Morrison can make?

 

It is an open secret that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has managed to cow fellow Liberal NSW, Premier Gladys Berejiklian, into submission and that she alone of the state and territory leaders now follows his personal position of open state borders and the economy over all other considerations during this global pandemic.

The fallacy that communities, states and the nation can safely learn to live alongside SARS-COV-2 has already been played out in the United Kingdom and the United States of America with catastrophic effect.

Four days out from Christmas Day 2020 and the U.K. has already recorded 67,503 deaths from COVID-19 within the last 11 months and the U.S.A. 316,749 deaths within the last 12 months.

Because Australian states and territories have largely resisted embracing that dangerous fallacy, nationally the country has only recoded 908 COVID-19 deaths in the last 11 months and New South Wales 55 of these deaths.

However, this could change in a heartbeat.

This was Head of the Biosecurity Research Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Medicine, Professor Raina MacIntyre, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on 20 December 2020 on the subject of the current Northern Beaches COVID-19 cluster:

“Forty new cases today may become 120 new cases by Christmas Day. Half of them will have no symptoms and the rest will have mild symptoms so will carry on as normal. The peak infectiousness of this virus is very early in the infection, before symptoms appear, making Christmas Day a ticking time bomb.

People infected today and tomorrow may travel half-way across Sydney for the family Christmas lunch and maybe to another household for dinner, possibly infecting a minimum of 360 new people. The 360 people infected on Christmas Day will be at their peak infectiousness on New Year’s Eve, and could infect more than 1000 others. We could be looking at 3000 cases by January 8. You could not plan a disaster more perfectly if you tried.....

If we do not act urgently, Christmas Day will be a super-spreader, followed by the mother of all super-spreading events, New Year’s Eve. The exhausted NSW public health team may begin 2021 with the largest COVID-19 epidemic the state has ever faced.

The idea of “living with a bit of COVID-19” and soldiering on is a falsehood because of exponential growth of epidemic infections. The health system is the weak link – it is the first part of society to break during pandemics. When hospital and ICU beds are full, health workers dead, ill or quarantined, all other medical care becomes compromised. Even in the Ruby Princess-related outbreak in Tasmania, more than 1000 health workers were quarantined, forcing a hospital shutdown. 

Every city that has laboured under the misapprehension that they can carry on with a bit of community transmission has been forced into lockdown when the health system collapsed.....

Mandating masks across greater Sydney will make a difference, especially as people flood shopping malls in huge numbers for Christmas shopping. Without a mandate, we can expect 30-50 per cent at most to wear masks compared to 100 per cent with a mandate. Making masks compulsory early in an epidemic will prevent many more infections and deaths than one issued at the peak.....

Distorted messaging and hygiene theatre have seen people frantically washing hands and wiping surfaces but remaining unaware of masks and ventilation to reduce airborne transmission, which is the dominant mode of spread. Further, 80 per cent of spread occurs indoors.....

If this epidemic has not dwindled to single-digit numbers by Christmas, we need to ban indoor gatherings on New Year’s Eve, including dance parties, nightclubs, pubs and restaurants. If we don’t, these businesses may face even longer closures in the months ahead, as occurred in Melbourne with a three-month lockdown. 

Finally, we must prepare and protect our health and aged care workers. More than 7000 health workers had died of COVID-19 by September globally, and Australian health workers had three times the risk of COVID-19 compared to the general community. We should not wait until 3500 of them are infected (as occurred in Victoria) before providing them better respiratory protection. We should be using the precautionary principle and recognising that the occupational health and safety of health workers lags far behind other industries. 

All planning must consider the exponential growth of epidemics, the role of social mixing and movement in transmission of SARS-COV-2, the calamitous timing of New Year’s Eve within one incubation period of Christmas Day on, and the magnitude of risk this poses. At the same time, we must aim high and aim for herd immunity through vaccination so we do not have to face this situation again.”