I love aeroplanes. I grew up with them in my life in a kind of peripheral presence. My paternal grandfather was an engineer in the Chinese air force, and so I was born in a military hospital. In fact, my Chinese name, when spoken in Shanghainese, my mother’s regional language, sounds exactly the same as “to fly far away”. After kindergarten every day (at the air force base kindergarten), my father would load me onto the back of his bicycle, and we’d go to the international airport together to watch planes take off and land for a little while before going home. International flights were more fun than domestic ones. They were bigger and more exotic. They made my childhood imagination daydream of faraway places with cheeseburgers and fries. Back then, in a more closed-off era of Chinese foreign policy, my only exposure to Western food was McDonald’s.

And so, one of the nicest surprises with my current accommodation is discovering that it is underneath a point in the sky where planes turn to line up with the glide slopes of one of the runways at Sydney Airport. It’s the best alarm clock every morning, to wake up to the sound of big international planes slowing and turning above me. I’m sure all my neighbours hate it, but for me, it has the comforting familiarity of something that I’ve known ever since I’ve had some form of memory. It’s a sound that reassures me that things in the world are OK.

And then it stopped. The early morning ones that I woke up to, at least. More and more international flights were cancelled as part of the tightening travel restrictions. My early mornings became uncomfortable in a way that I can’t describe. It’s more than just a void. That implies too much of a passive emptiness. The feeling is more like a restlessness. More like an itch that can’t be scratched. More like wanting to thrash around on the ground, throwing a tantrum, because all of a sudden I am a three-year-old who can’t figure out why she is cranky.

Luckily, there is more structure to the rest of my day. As I was saying in my previous post, I am now one of the worker bees in the state COVID-19 response. When I get to work, I am absorbed into the buzzing hive with its 3 briefings and 2 meals per day, all at their fixed, predictable times. The work itself isn’t predictable at all, though. It is completely dependent on how the epidemic is panning out and the positive case notifications that we receive and need to manage. I am discovering that I really enjoy this aspect of the job, which is somewhat unexpected given that I’ve worked as a doctor for a while now, and in my clinical jobs I’ve always felt more comfortable on days when I had a better idea of the types of cases that might be walking through the door. There is also a constant shift in the general type of work that needs to be done. Now that we’re getting fewer flights, and strict quarantine requirements for incoming arrivals, we are having to spend less time and effort trying to track down exposed plane crew and passengers.

Often it is difficult to go home at night. It’s not so easy to choose to break with the flow of the action, rather than just let myself be dragged along for another 30, 60 or 90 minutes. There are always things that need to be done. In this kind of an outbreak situation, with every new case, you do the best that you can initially in terms of scrambling to prevent any ongoing spread. But if you get a chance to breathe, you go back to analysing the situation in a little bit more detail. You start trying to understand how the new case arose in the first place, and how the situation evolved. It’s potentially the more interesting part of the job.

Our top bosses, too, lead by workaholic example. I’m quite fond of them. They really care about the people of New South Wales, and keeping them safe. For example, I overheard a colleague tell our Chief Health Officer about a new cluster of cases. Her first response was, “And how are they? Are they OK?” I have an unhealthy tendency to fangirl when it comes to strong, capable women, and so I have many stories about how admirably badass she is, but given how important her media presence is to the current public health response, I’ll stay quiet on these for the moment. Sometimes, working with the epidemiologists, we would get requests from them for specific pieces of statistics to answer media enquiries. Quite often, this becomes a case of, “Oh no! That’s not really possible with our data, but we can’t let her down in public!” A mad rush to code and recode the data then follows, in order to provide at least some form of a solution in a hurry. Such is loyalty.

Another reason why I have been avoiding going home is that my flatmate has started to see me as the personification of the virus. Despite the fact that I tell her that I don’t physically see patients at the moment during the COVID-19 response, and that I do most of my work over the phone and internet, she (and her mother, over Skype), refuse to believe that I’m not putting her life in danger. So I’m not wanted at home. And this has happened after a few months of being shunned in public because of being Asian. A couple of days ago, I had an incident at work where I went to some of the human resources staff, and they refused to sit with me to show me how to access particular portals on my laptop screen, because they told me that all interactions with people from the bunker room should occur at least 2 metres away. They actually actively recoiled from me, either leaning away or physically moving their chairs. After this extended period of feeling like I was an unsightly blight upon society despite putting in hard work, that finally made me crack. I went away to the work bathroom and had a cry.

If a plane passes overhead and I’m too far away in the bunker to hear it, does it still make a sound? Some days I feel so small and insignificant in this outbreak that I think these oddly illogical thoughts in order to confuse myself enough that I just stop thinking. The other solution is to absorb myself in my work. One issue that I come up against, these days with long work hours, is being able to get to the shops when they’re open. Fortunately, though, we do get fed at work. Sometimes meals even come with dessert. One of my friends had, a couple of months ago, challenged me to regular sending of cake photos from some of the cafes of Sydney. While I can’t get to those anymore, I can still fulfil requirements by taking pictures of overtime workplace lemon and poppyseed cake.