Merry Christmas from Australia

             Compliments of the season to all my readers

A Summer Storm

When we saw the radar map we knew we were in for a bit of ‘fun’.

And down it came.

Extended video here.

So that’s another 70mm of rain here over the last 24 hours.

Where are you El Niño?

No, we’re still not complaining.
The Cairns area in north eastern tropical Australia was just recently impacted by cyclone Jasper.

Some places had +1.3m of rain over 7 days. That’s over 50inches.
The flooding has been devastating.

COVID-19 / Our Experience

Both of us had avoided Covid for nearly four years despite two overseas trips in the last two.
We had taken the necessary precautions during and post pandemic and our vaccinations, six, were up to date.
I had come home from the USA in early November with some sort of flu thing.
Regular Covid tests during this period were all negative. I had passed this virus onto the co driver and were both coming out the other end of that not feeling too bad.
So it was a bit of a surprise in early December to suddenly not be feeling well again.
A very sore throat made us suspicious that this was something new.

And Covid RAT tests proved positive.

Where we picked this up who knows.
We don’t go out in public much.
Anyway we were both feeling pretty awful presenting with most of the typical symptoms.

A call to our local medical clinic organised prescriptions, after tele consultations, for the Pfizer antivirals *Paxlovid™ which were duly picked up from our local pharmacy within hours of our initial call.
Here’s where we are glad the Australian socialised medicine scheme kicked into action.
Original cost for the tablets according to the pharmacy details on the package was $A1114.
Our cost $A0.

I had experienced the cost of medical treatment recently in the USA where I needed antibiotics for cellulitis of the foot. Not the best diagnosis for a diabetic.
There was no doubt the service was exceptional but that hour at the local hospital ER cost the equivalent of 30 GP visits here.
Thank goodness for Travel Insurance.
Anyway, we are coming out of the covid phase which was quite unpleasant for the initial few days.
The ongoing problems are sudden onset of fatigue and loss of taste and smell.

How long this will last is anyone’s guess.

Everyone’s experience with that seems to be different.

*How does Paxlovid work in the body?
It's used to treat early COVID-19 infection and help to prevent more severe symptoms. Paxlovid is a combination of 2 medicines called nirmatrelvir and ritonavir. Nirmatrelvir stops the virus from growing and spreading, and ritonavir helps nirmatrelvir from being broken down in your body long enough to do its job.