The 400th post - Te Urewera & The Daintree rainforest

 

This is the 400th post. I started this blog shortly before I met my wife, and have tried my best to write at least once a month. We celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary this year. May this blog lives on for at least a little while longer yet!

Melbourne is still in lockdown - in fact, we went from one of the world's most liveable cities to the most locked down. Yes, apparently no place on earth has endured longer "stay at home" order. The irony of that just has to make you laugh. With the projected number of COVID patients is set to increase over the coming weeks, I don't want to talk about COVID anymore. Yet, let's just see, the modellers might get it wrong, and if so, it won't be the first time as you just can't model human behaviours to the tee, right?

Yet it's just so hard not to relate our everyday life to COVID... If not for COVID, we might just have returned from a day tour of the Daintree rainforest and enjoying sunset in Port Douglas as a family of four, in this second week of Term 3 school holiday. So I'm thrilled to hear the Queensland government struck a deal with the local Aboriginal people to protect Daintree. Clearly a long time coming but at least it's a start. We must go to Daintree when this calamity is over.

Australia, the government and it's people, of course, remains a bit behind the Kiwis in mending their relationship with the First People of the land. The recital of the "Acknowledgement of country" before a meeting still sound hollow and pretentious every time I hear it and is no where near as natural as, for example, hearing someone closing of a speech in NZ with "tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa". But then again, that might just be my kiwi bias.

Lockdown 6.0 - upgraded!

 

Less than a month ago, I wrote the collapse of Afghan's Western backed government was imminent. Well, this photos says it all - inside the Presidential Palace - yesterday.

All forms of governments exist on Earth - from the absolute monarchy of Bhutan, to the constitutional monarchy of the Commonwealth, to the meritocracy free market democracy of the United States, and of course, the faux democratic autocracy of Putin's Russia and Xi's Communist People's Republic of China. To claim one form of government is superior to another will be ill-informed. There is no better, and definitely no "best". Anyone who thinks a little deeper will admit the pros and cons of various forms of governments. 

So, for one country to claim superiority over another is just wrong. I can't help to think how any Western Afghan war veterans will feel right now. They were told that they were on the "right side of history" repeatedly over the last 20 years of American occupation. With literally a stroke of a pen, the Americans are now gone. I don't like to compare the current situation to Vietnam because it is not quite the same. But how do you, and would you, find meaning in all your sacrifices if you are a Afghan veteran? 

Lockdown 5.0

 

This post has very little to do with Lockdown 5.0, of which we are in the middle of here in Victoria. Are we the lockdown capital of the world? Probably, but I gathered Singapore is also in lockdown - despite their far better fully vacinated rate. The Delta variant apparenly is no joke.

With lockdown, there are naturally a bit more time spent at home. My beef today is really to do with the Americans. Look at the map, the American "wiped out" the Taliban in under 2 months back in 2001.. but since then, the Taliban was always in the background. 20 years has passed, now the Taliban again is regainning control of swaths of land. Can anyone seriously think the Afgan government in Kabul has a chance of surviving - or at least in its current form?

For a kid who was born in 2001, just what the future holds for him or her?

And we like to blame people for things......

 

There is a reason we should all pay for our news. If we don't, someone else would have paid for the production of the news.

Journalists, like people from all trades, having to earn a living. This is why after not being a subscriber for news for many years, I finally decided paying for your news is a good idea. At least that way, there is some hope of getting quality reporting. I think when Gay Alcorn, Editor of The Age, says the byline "Independent, always" is true, there is meat to it. Of course, a few months into subcribing to The Age, I also signed up for the Herald Sun, just, to balance things up!

Just look at this article for example, it's an opinion piece, but nevertheless a very balanced opinion from the science reporter of The Age. I particularly love how the Professor pointed out that we human - like to blame people for things...

Are we ignoring the hard truths about the most likely cause of COVID-19?

Examine, a weekly science newsletter written by national science reporter Liam Mannix, is sent every Tuesday. The latest instalment is below. Sign up to get it in your inbox here.

I am growing increasingly troubled by the momentum building behind the lab leak hypothesis surrounding COVID-19, which has built an enormous head of steam over the past month without any new evidence emerging.

It is my strong sense, based on my reporting over the last 18 months, that the majority of Australian experts believe the evidence is strongly slanted towards the virus having emerged naturally from animals – as most other pandemics have.

I double-checked this on Tuesday with leading virus scientists across Australia’s research institutes. With almost no exceptions, this was everyone’s view.

If this is the case, then the coverage the lab leak theory has received is way out of whack with the actual likelihood of it happening.

To be clear, we have not yet found a group of animals that unequivocally gave the virus to humans.

That means we cannot say with 100 per cent certainty it jumped from animals, and we cannot say with 100 per cent certainty it did not leak out of a lab – or arrive some other way. Meanwhile, Australian officials have put the chance of the accidental lab leak causing the pandemic at 40 per cent and natural origin at 60 per cent. US intelligence agencies have arrived at a similar figure.

But as far as I and other science journalists reporting on COVID-19 can tell, the majority of leading Australian virology experts are firmly of the view this virus had a natural origin.

The Australasian Virology Society, Australia’s leading experts on this question, tell me while they are yet to formulate an official position: “It is likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated from an animal reservoir like many other zoonoses such as SARS and MERS.” The Australian Academy of Science declined to comment.

Journalism fell into a trap with the climate crisis. By balancing the arguments of scientists and deniers early on, the media gave the public a distorted view of the expert consensus.

We now live with the outcome of that coverage: less than half of Americans surveyed in 2016 believed the climate crisis was caused by human action, compared to 97 per cent of climate scientists.

I worry much of the media is doing the same with the lab leak hypothesis. I worry the very scientists in Wuhan who tried to warn us, for years, about the threat posed by bat coronavirus pandemics are now being blamed.

We have explored the issue in this in-depth feature and in this story, but I worry elsewhere the arguments are being presented as competing when one of them – the lab leak – is viewed as far less likely than the other by most experts.

It does not help that the lab leak is such a compelling theory.

Human brains intrinsically are designed to join dots between events, says Mathew Marques, who lectures in social psychology at La Trobe University. We struggle with uncertainty. And we like to blame people for things.

The natural origin theory of COVID-19 says that the pandemic was both random chance, but also our fault: the climate crisis, deforestation, animal trafficking, mega-cities, air travel and intensive agriculture have all been dramatically increasing our risks of a pandemic.

Fixing that will be hard and necessitates uncomfortable conversations about how we live now.

Set against that, the lab leak theory is positively compelling. Scientists doing scary and dangerous experiments! A conspiracy among foreigners to cover up a lab accident! Something bad that happened to us that wasn’t our fault!

And China is the perfect foil: the nation we trust the least and increasingly view as a security threat.

“We’re drawn to understanding, I think, chaotic events that leave us in turmoil. Pointing the finger at people, usually powerful or not part of the in-group – and at the moment China does seem to be a political target for some in the West,” says Dr Marques.

Allowing this theory to run and gain mainstream prominence may have serious real-world consequences because it distracts from a focus on reducing the human-caused risk factors that drive pandemics.

“The discourse detracts from the fact that epidemiologists and veterinary pathologists and other scientists in this area have been warning governments and the community for years that a zoonotic spillover with pandemic potential was increasingly likely to occur,” says Dr Katie Woolaston, a Queensland University of Technology international wildlife law researcher.

“It takes focus away from the fact that the drivers of zoonotic spillover are human-induced environmental changes, and that needs to be addressed. I am concerned that an increased belief that the virus originated in a lab further detracts from the real and urgent need to enact preventative laws and policies.”

The case for a natural origin

There has been plenty of ink spent in the last month on laying out the case for the lab leak hypothesis.

I thought it might be valuable to spell out the other theory. Why do most experts believe COVID-19 has a natural origin?

As I noted earlier, we don’t have definitive, 100 per cent proof. So it is helpful to think of this argument in probabilities. What is more likely?

Consider first a shortlist of viruses that have come from animals: the coronaviruses MERS and SARS, the plague, rabies, West Nile virus, HIV, Ebola, Influenza, Nipah, Zika and Yellow Fever.

The best example we can point to of a lab leak pandemic: swirling speculation about a 1977 Russian influenza outbreak, points out University of NSW coronavirus researcher Professor Peter White.

“The most likely explanation, in my opinion, is it was a zoonotic transmission and did not escape the lab,” he told me. But, he added, he did not believe there was a consensus among his colleagues on which explanation was more likely.

Consider the maths: there are something like 1.67 million viruses circulating among complex life, but just 219 affect humans.

If we expose ourselves to animals, it becomes a simple maths problem for viruses to solve: there are so many of them, mutating so often, that it is inevitable one will pick up the right combination of genetic changes to thrive in humans. Indeed, COVID-19 can infect a wide range of other animals; the virus itself is nearly identical to a virus isolated in bats. Samples of the virus were found at the Wuhan wet market, at or below floor level.

And we are exposing ourselves to animals more and more. Some 60 per cent of new diseases to emerge in humans between 1940 and 2004 came from animals, with that proportion increasing over time. And new viruses jump into humans all the time without us knowing. Surveys find antibodies to strange bat coronaviruses in the blood of people living near bats.

That’s why scientists had long warned about pandemics jumping from animals to humans, and why they were not surprised when COVID-19 arrived (coronaviruses, for reasons we don’t yet understand, seem particularly prone to jump).

“We have been monitoring these coronaviruses. They’ve been jumping species boundaries,” Professor Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney told me last year.

“We knew this was going to happen.”

Liam Mannix

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Liam is The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald's science reporter

Lockdown... 4.0?

Here we go again, 7 days, "stage 3" lockdown in Melbourne. Effectively no school 5km radius limit, and non-essential shopping only.

I really only have one thing to say to people, get vaccinated. In many parts of the world, getting the jab is a luxury!

Mount Buffulo

Breathtaking view from Mount Buffalo - a a short but rather windy road from Bright. Photos do not do justice to the amazing view.

It's April in 2021 - in the lucky country we are more or less free from COVID in the community - probably not too many places in the world can claim that. Calgary, a place I'm all too familiar with, still recording hundreds of new cases a day, in contrast to our zero cases for the last month or so. 

All this, of course, comes with real human cost that, unless you're directly affected, would not really think about it day and night. The thousands of stranded Aussie overseas who can't return home. All this, in the backdrop of a "Trans-Tasman" travel bubble where no restrictions, testing or quarantine is required. A win for residents of the residents in the Downunder - that is if you're already living in Australia or New Zealand and not one of our fellow citizens stranded overseas.

Parents meeting

 

Jono has been going to Chinese school on Saturday morning during school terms for the last 2 years. How to make it fun? How to make it relevant? While watching cartoon on "Chinese idiom" may not be too relevant, at least the animation is cute, lively and short. I'm surprised to find a link on the interent with almost all the episodes in one place - gem. Bookmarking here for my benefit!

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1JT4y1M763/?p=2&spm_id_from=pageDriver

2021 so far...

So far, so good. 2021 is, at least for now, not looking like 2020.

I'm acutely aware I have this impression probably because I'm living in Australia. In many countries around the world, COVID is still causing tens and thousands of death. We are in lucky country, an island nation, a continent, that shut oursevles from most visitors. It comes with a cost, no doubt.

My best found so far this year? Koorong bookshop. I love bookstores, ever since a kid. I meander around the aisles, reading gives me joy. Period.

In under 100 pages, David McDonald, an Austrailian pastor, emphatically described how his lung cancer diagnosis "sharpened" his focus on his life. 

Last year, I have decided to start reading books again, after being unable to finish reading any books since Jonathan was born. Too busy! Excuse I gave myself really. 

The Hill We Climb - Amanda Gorman

You have to see the clip to really get a sense of the energy of this. Nearly half my age, what a stunning performance by a person with maturity far beyond her years. 

Simply Amazing.

Speechwriters

 

Reading this piece from The Age today reminded me how long it has been since I have heard a "good" speech. The speeches of the incumbent American president typically get the most airtime but with Trump, there really was nothing. The orations from President Obama were mostly uplifting, and left you with room to imagine a better future. In sitcoms, the "Openings" and "Closings" in Boston Legal were brilliant  - so good that I used to think if only I can speak like that in real life - I truely will be set for life.

As 2020 draws to a close, with vaccines in sight, I can only plagiarise from Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”