Covid diary, a couple of weeks in

This has been a very strange time for the world. Sometimes when you pause, it's almost like nothing is really happening - is Covid really happening? When I am in the garden or stirring a pot of soup, I can almost forget. But then when it quietens down, the calamity that has befallen the world is so incredibly striking. So many people have become unwell and so many unfortunate people have died.

We have done incredibly well in Australia to stave off the crisis. With each passing day, we hear news of lesser numbers of new infections. I feel this quiet pride in being Australian - even there are plenty of idiots who are still doing the wrong thing, I believe the majority of Australians have listened to the government and done the right thing.

The hospital has become an eerily quiet place too. With most non-urgent elective surgeries cancelled, the wards are quieter than usual. The surge in numbers of doctors and nurses with the altered rostering means that we actually have time to pay attention to our patients, sometimes a luxury that we do not have with skeleton staffing. It has highlighted to us how over stretched we usually are, and how incredibly hard the staff work every day (even outside the Covid crisis). We looked after about a dozen Covid patients in the ICU, most of them requiring either a short stay for observation and not requiring intubation, or intubated for several days and then successfully recovered. A couple of patients died, and it was a strange feeling to read about them in the newspaper afterwards. People die in the ICU every day, sometimes I think, why don't we hear about those deaths?

I have been fortunate to have so much social support from people around me. Friends I haven't heard from for ages have texted to wish me well. I got some nice emails from music friends too, encouraging me to remember a time when we created music with joy and carefreeness. I have also been doing fun music projects with friends around the world, each of us recording tracks to be put together. I feel grateful for these little tokens of connection - we are not alone, and we will get to the other side of this. Life still goes on, it hasn't been put on hold - our human connections are still there despite all the difficulties that have arisen in these times.