Lockdown 5.0

We're currently sitting in Lockdown 5.0 (as I've seen it called) here in Melbourne, and while I've been pretty sanguine about the first four lockdowns, I'm starting to feel the teeniest bit annoyed by this point. For those not in Victoria, a brief history lesson (going from memory, so not super precise):

1. Lockdown #1 happens in March 2020, and lasts till around the middle of May. This is The First Wave that pretty much the entire country goes through together. (It's much less worse than most of the rest of world, only notching a few thousand cases total and much less than a thousand deaths, country-wide.)
2. In June 2020, breaches of the hotel quarantine lead to The Second Wave starting in Melbourne (and a bit in the rest of Victoria). Lockdown #2 happens around the end of June, and it's The Big One, lasting until November, with peak case numbers of over 700 per day being reported at its peak (I want to say around late August?). By the time it finishes Victoria has had something like 90% of all cases in the country. It's important to keep in mind that the rest of Australia mostly didn't experience anything like this; New South Wales had the occasional flare up, and I think there might've been a few sub-week lockdowns in South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia, but for most of the rest of the country there was one wave and that was basically it.
3. Lockdown #3 happens in February 2021, and it was a pretty short one; I don't remember exactly, but I want to say it was only about a week (comparable to the few that had happened in other states).
4. Lockdown #4 happens in late May 2021 and was slightly bigger, for perhaps two or three weeks. Unknown to us at the time, it helps sets the stage for the next one, as some Victorians unknowingly bring COVID-19 with them as they flee to Sydney, setting off an minor outbreak there. (The Delta strain shows up in Melbourne for the first time during this lockdown, but luckily the restrictions stamp it out before it can blow up.)
5. Sydney's dealt with the occasional outbreak over this past year-and-a-half, but they coincidentally get a case of the Delta strain that spreads in the community sometime around when the fourth Melbourne lockdown lets up. This pretty quickly blows up beyond the ability to contain it, triggering what looks to be at this point a Sydney equivalent to Melbourne's second wave, forcing Sydney into its first major lockdown since the first wave back in March 2020.
6. Unfortunately, some infected movers unknowingly bring some cases of the Delta strain back to Victoria in the early days before New South Wales really locks down, setting off another outbreak in Victoria a scant six weeks or so since the last one finished (Lockdown #5, which started July 16). Thankfully, it looks like the rapid lockdown here in Melbourne has managed to squelch unrestrained growth and it looks like we might be able to exit as planned midnight as Tuesday, as long as the large anti-lockdown/anti-vaccination protests in Melbourne (and Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane) over the weekend don't trigger too many new cases. (Sydney's likely to be hit pretty hard by this given that they keep finding people who've been out and about while infectious and they had several thousand people in a protest that got a bit out of hand, but we probably won't find out for a week or more.)

Now, the first two (Melbournian) lockdowns were last year, before there was any vaccine available. Given Australia's ability to control and quarantine foreign travel, they were an excellent way to eliminate COVID-19 from the population (and repeatedly did so, with new cases only arising from leaks in the quarantines program over time). The February lockdown was still pretty early on in the vaccination roll-out, and excusable for a population still vulnerable. By May it was starting to become evident that there were issues with the pace of the roll-out, with barely a tenth of the population vaccinated. By now, while the lockdown's still the only conscionable tool for handling an outbreak, it's becoming more and more annoying given that only some ~12.5% of the population is vaccinated. (According to the latest numbers I've seen, though it might be a week or two old at this point. It certainly hasn't climbed more than a percentage point or two, however. [Edit 7/22/21: apparently it was up to ~15% the Thursday before this post was written.]) We could be sitting in this lockdown with the feeling that this might be the last one necessary before enough people were protected not to need them anymore, but instead we have no idea when that'll happen; almost certainly not before the end of the year unless something drastically changes.

Part of the problem is the vaccine supply; Australia invested heavily in the AstraZeneca vaccine which could be produced locally, with a small order for additional Pfizer doses, but the doses available right now are nowhere near enough for everyone. AstraZeneca has been linked with (literally) one-in-a-million deaths from blood clotting in young people (under 50 or so, I think), which has resulted in it not being officially recommended for people in that age group…i.e., a very significant chunk of the population. A very constrained vaccine supply, which a large fraction of the populace can't even get without discussion with their physician, has led to this point where just over one in ten people are vaccinated, with the numbers rising glacially slowly each week. Currently, I can't even find a government vaccination site nearby that'll give me an AstraZeneca shot even knowing the risks (and the rare Pfizer doses are being prioritized for older people and essential personnel, I think—at any rate not available to someone under 40!). At this rate I might get vaccinated faster by moving back to the US around October—there's supposed to be a moderately large shipment of Pfizer does arriving in Australia that month which'll be enough to open them up to a larger age range, but that'll be too late for me. While I'm generally quite approbative of how Australia handled the pandemic in 2020 (certainly orders of magnitude better than the US did), the vaccine roll-out is a pretty dismal failure by any stretch of the imagination at this point. (Currently, Australia is ranked 38 in the OECD countries on vaccination rate…out of 38. [Edit 7/22/21: we're up to 37 now!])

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. The reality of moving in around two months is starting to sink in—I've got a video call with a moving company this week to see what I'll be bringing, and am starting to think about things like “flights” and “travel exemption requests.” I'm also still working furiously to finish up my PhD in the meantime, so it's going to be a wild ride to the finish line in the next few months here. A hui hou!

A topsy-turvy week

It's been something of an up-and-down week this past seven days, or rather, down-and-up. Last Wednesday I learned that my paternal grandmother had suddenly passed away back in Nebraska, possibly due to a blood clot or stroke from a fall a few days earlier. She'd been in good health otherwise, having sent me a birthday card just last month (like every year), so it came out of the blue. I wouldn't say I got to know any of grandparents as well as I'd like to, due to living in either different states or different countries from all of them for practically my entire life, but having been born in Nebraska myself some of my earliest fragmentary memories are from visiting my grandparents' house way out in the country: the scent of baby's breath or dill growing in the gardens, the sound of driving down the long gravel road out of town, the feel of the wind over the Nebraskan prairie. (The same feeling is found thousands of feet up the sides of Maunakea where the wind blows over the same low grass and gently rolling slopes, bringing those memories back unexpectedly.)

There'll be a funeral in a few days which I'l be attending via Zoom—there's virtually no way I could get a travel exemption from the Australian border control (out and back in) on such short notice, and the cost of flights is prohibitive: the absolute lowest were still over $12,000 this close to the event. To be honest, the death of a relative has been something of a nightmare scenario for me ever since both my maternal grandparents came down with COVID-19 about a year ago (they both survived and are doing well, but it was a bit dicey for a while), since getting back to the US (or, more accurately, back into Australia) has been non-trivial since March last year. I guess I can stop worrying about it happening now that it's happened, at least, in the same way the mother of the boy playing ball indoors can stop worrying that her expensive vase might get broken.

To complete the emotional roller coaster this past week, I also received some very welcome news indeed: three weeks ago I had an interview for a position with Gemini Observatories, and yesterday I got (and accepted) a job offer! Gemini Observatories operates two identical telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and, as the job was for software development and could be done from either location, I indicated my preference for Hilo during the interview and as a result will be heading back there in a very short time, nominally less than three months. I put nearly two months' effort into polishing my résumé and cover letter before applying, and the position sounds like I'm definitely going to enjoy it (as I've come to realize that I really love software development over the past few years), so I was ecstatic to have been selected. And, of course, there's the whole “getting to return to Hilo” bit as well, all the more alluring in the grip of a Melbournian winter. I'll be working on Gemini's Python package for reducing data from Gemini instruments, but I'll have more to say about it in the future as I figure out how that looks in practice.

These next few months are going to be rather busy it looks like: not that they weren't already, as I work furiously to finish up the two papers I'm working on and submit my thesis, but now I'll have moving preparations on top of that. Still, I now also have both some positive motivation and a lack of stress about what I was going to do after wrapping up my PhD, so hopefully I can really buckle down and get things done these next few weeks. That may or may not have an effect on my posting schedule here, but I'll try to keep things going at a low level, at least; there should be no lack of subjects as I prepare, only time! And that's been my roller coaster of a week: somber, a little sad, yet looking forward to the future with a renewed optimism. A hui hou!