The Small Parasite and the Raging Virus

Back to front pictures. Kahu peels off tape on the outside of the kitchen window. I've been meaning to do this for ages. I list the bottom end of the oak bed, another job. There's a bit of stuff I bought for the house lying around cluttering up the place. Not to mention the piles of laundry up and down the house...in the living room, the laundry, the garage, the hallway, the spare room, Kahu's room, my walk in, my room. It's everywhere and is swamping us. I dream of returning to normal. But that's impossible, we have mountains of scabies washing and the weather is cold and rainy. I'm doing most of the work and I'm over it. 

Meanwhile Covid continues to rumble on. My friend Jill tells me there have been over 18 million deaths world wide. Sounds like a lot. I check up and Wikipedia says 4.96 million. New Zealand, 28 deaths.

8th October 

• There are 44 community cases of COVID-19. 41 are in Auckland, and 3 are in Waikato.
• There are 3 cases in managed isolation.
• Today's cases are higher than recent days. This is not unexpected because there have been a number of contacts of new cases and we can expect to get fluctuations from day to day.

9th October

There are 34 new community cases today, of which 23 have already been linked to the outbreak (of which 11 are household contacts) and 11 are still being investigated to determine how they are linked. 

All the new Waikato cases are linked to the initial Hamilton East case.

10th October

There are 60 new community cases today, 56 in Auckland; 3 in Waikato and 1 in the Bay of Plenty.

The three new Waikato cases are linked to the initial Hamilton East case.

And there's a Vaxxathon....this article from The Guardian, UK

Covid ‘vaxathon’: over 2.5% of New Zealanders get jabbed in one day

Celebrities encourage turnout as response surpasses Jacinda Ardern’s call to administer 100,000 shots

• Coronavirus – latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage

The Thompson family arrive en masse to get vaccinated in Auckland. Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images

Associated Press in Wellington

Sat 16 Oct 2021 15.15 BST

New Zealand’s “Super Saturday” of Covid vaccinations has proved a hit, with more than 2.5% of the population responding to the call to get jabbed on a single day.

The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, set an ambitious goal of administering 100,000 shots on the day, aiming to push vaccination rates towards her 90% goal.

But New Zealanders turned out in even greater numbers. As of 7pm local time (0700 BST), health workers had administered 127,342 Pfizer doses on Saturday, jabbing at a higher per capita rate than any day of the rollouts in Australia, the UK, US or Canada.

Lining up to be vaccinated outside Manurewa Marae, a Maori meeting house, in South Auckland on Saturday.Credit...Natasha Frost/The New York Times

11 October- 35 new cases and an announcement that teachers will have to be vaccinated by 1st January next year. That's gonna annoy anti-vaxxers.

12 October -43 new cases of Covid. Police are still turning vehicles away from Covid-19 border checkpoints despite being weeks into alert level 3 boundary settings in Auckland.

There were 22,460 vehicles processed at the checkpoints yesterday with 196 of those vehicles being turned around, police said.

A total of 50 out of 4699 vehicles were turned away at the northern checkpoints yesterday, while 146 vehicles out of 17,761 were turned around at the southern checkpoints.

October 13th- 

• 55 community cases of COVID-19 — 53 are in Auckland, 2 are in Waikato
• No cases in managed isolation
• More than 2 million second doses of vaccine administered to date
• 25,799 tests were taken yesterday

October 14th- 

• 71 community cases of COVID-19 — all are in Auckland
• 1 case in managed isolation
• 87% of Aucklanders have 1 vaccine dose
• 28,646 tests were taken yesterday.

• So far two deaths from Covid in this outbreak. The first on September 4th, a woman in her 70's, and a younger man from an anti-vacc church. 

Life goes on. Maxine drives up to pick up a wagon wheel to make a light for a bar in Clyde. I drive around town picking up Marketplace purchases, I've really got to stop this, but I get a really good buy of Halswell Quarry stone which I need for the path I'm trying to organise down the living room side of the house. It's from the back of Chch Boys' High, a common finishing material back in the day. Now I need to find the money to get someone to make the path. That's the trouble with finishing a house, there are lots more costs. I borrow the school trailer and the vendor helps me load. At the other end Kahu does his usual spit the dummy before he settles down to help.

The garden goes gang busters with the constant rain and flowers pop up everywhere. The newly planted area where the garage was is thriving. I keep putting cuttings and odd roots and bulbs in spaces. The potatoes push their heads above ground. I visit Daryl who grows seedlings to give away as a hobby and pick up an armful of plants. An important part of planting is figuring out where everything will grow. 

It's 150 years since Ernest Rutherford's birth and I go to a lecture on his connection with Russia. He was an amazing mentor and apart from splitting the atom did lots of chemistry work. 

Luke arrives from Ranfurly with the tui. She looks so life like, especially the eyes and feet, and the iridescence pops blue. She'll be kaitiaki of the entrance. As he leaves, Luke tells me he has a huia which was returned. Hmmm. 

My last job for the week, taking the frame into Commercial Mirror and Glass to cut and fit a mirror. Amazing what you can do you had no idea of. Custom make the perfect mirror.

   My garden hose in this carcinogenic contraption

     Where the heck did all this laundry come from?

Central Otago Maxine and the wagon wheel

Blue haired Hana and the mirror frame

The vaccination push- getting big and little things sorted

Covid has begun its inexorable march south- we better be prepared. I consider my vaccination status. On Sunday, it will be 4 weeks since my first jab. I would still like a 12 week gap before the second but when Covid gets to the South Island I will jump. I feel sorry for Auckland but grateful for the relative freedom and safely of the South Island.

I get to the holidays exhausted. I'm just hanging in there and whatever this skin thing is is making life harder. On Friday Kahu finally gets to Student Health after a lot of nagging and they diagnose scabies. My doctor had mentioned it and her prescription of anti-fungal has not worked. Less than a week after treatment the itch is well and truly back. I have a near melt down in the work room after a colleague and friend tells me off for putting a coffee cup in the sink. Makes me realise how run down and pushed to the limit by dumb boy behaviour I am. Fed up, exhausted and itchy, I walk out the door after the last bell and don't look back. It's not just me, another colleague was in tears yesterday. Kahu and I start treatment for scabies- a topical cream, easier to apply, and generates a cool feeling as I lie down to sleep.

I wake up itchless and relieved. Fingers crossed. Takes me back to travelling in Ethiopia in 1996 where disease was of Biblical proportions: elephantitis, HIV, leprosy, polio. I remember seeing a young boy whose skin was white. He couldn't stand still he was so itchy, irritated. It was a miserable day and he was wearing a long coat with wrists sticking out the end of his sleeves. The image is imprinted. The impossibility of treatment makes me think he didn't survive. There was no health system to help anyone and I have pictures of mad people wandering the streets. David and I were magnets, we looked so different the curious and insane were drawn to us: the guy who escaped a prison babbling about political freedom, he was wearing chains and was picked up by guards as we sat with monkeys grooming each other for knits, the mad woman beating her forehead, the immaculately dressed constantly walking man who told us about his shoes, the shouting and scuffling while we were at a doctor's trying to figure out David's mysterious illness which nearly sent us home. After a treatment for malaria and more illness we got tests done and figured out it was stomach issues. The constant itching and using all our tea tree oil to get respite. Bed bugs, mosquitos and figuring out we were carrying fleas.

Back to Christchurch, 2021 and the comparative safety of New Zealand where Covid is the looming threat and vaccination the universal topic of conversation.

3rd October- New Zealand's Delta variant outbreak spread beyond the largest city of Auckland, prompting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Sunday to put additional regions into a snap lockdown. There were 32 new coronavirus cases on Sunday in Auckland, which has been in lockdown since mid-August, and two cases in the Waikato region, some 147 kilometres (91 miles) south of Auckland. Ardern said parts of the region will go into a five-day lockdown.

 5th October - 24 community cases of COVID-19, including one historical; two border cases including one historical; more than 55,500 vaccines doses administered yesterday.

6th October- There were 39 new cases of Covid-19 in the community. A man in his 50s died from covid-19 after spending 40 days in intensive care at Middlemore Hospital. Thirty of today's cases are in Auckland and nine are in Waikato.\

7th October- Twenty-nine new community cases were reported today, including five in Waikato. All of the Waikato cases are linked but there are seven in Auckland yet to be linked.

There are now 22 cases in Waikato in the current outbreak, and Waitomo and Waipā districts will move to level 3 from 11.59pm tonight.

• There are a total of 1448 community cases in this outbreak
• Two new cases have been detected in MIQ
• There are 10 active sub-clusters in Auckland, down from 12 yesterday.
• There are 23 people in hospital with Covid-19, with four in ICU

Leading epidemiologists say everyone in New Zealand should plan to encounter Covid-19 before Christmas, and they had better be prepared.

The beginning of the holidays is indeed a relief and I start to tidy some of the house build jobs. Pete comes round on his Monday off to fix the laundry door and redo finishes. I make him lunch and he helps secure the bed heads to the wall. They've been annoyingly loose and bang against the wall. I drop off boots for soling, see Greg about picture framing, organise a PPTA womens' brunch, tidy up correspondence, find a frame for the main bathroom mirror, buy a dresser, and generally get odds and sods under control. The piles of laundry, however, defeat me. I'm filing my clothes and sheets into separate piles from Kahu's. It's hard not to get OCD at this point as scabies is so transmissable. On Tuesday the constant irritation itch has morphed to what I assume if parasite activity itch. By Wednesday evening I decide to redose myself with pyrethrum rather than wait the recommended week which is the life cycle of the scabies mites. These buggars have hatched at different times. I'm not overjoyed to add more chemicals to my biosystem but I can't live with this parasite. I lie in bed and feel the cool relief of the insecticide crossing my finger that this will get most of them. This process is time consuming and absorbing. I'm grateful for the time and space of school holidays.

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