Andrew
Thanks very much for this, and for all the work you've done over the years
keeping us all in touch. Here's some news from me, in the Adelaide Hills.
I'm now in my second retirement. I had been doing some teaching in the
medical course at Flinders Uni, and planned to retire at the end of first
semester in 2020. I was teaching public health to second and third years---an
interesting challenge: how do you give students some idea of public health in 8
sessions of 2 hours each over 2 years? And what knowledge should they have when
they walk out at graduation? And then covid arrived. I have to say, sadly, all
my predictions about the pandemic to the students have come true.
Then I had a phone call in March 2020 from SA Health: would I come and work
for them again? So I did, and for my pains wound up as Director of Covid
Operations, running contact tracing in the state, with about 120 staff. In
those days we tried to eliminate transmission. We had one big fright with local
transmission in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, which we successfully managed
to stop after what seemed like aeons of 24 hour days. And it wasn't fun
wrecking people's lives by ordering them in to quarantine, sometimes for weeks,
as the disease spread from one family member to the next. I did that until
February 2021, when I moved over to Covid Immunisation. I ran the adverse
events surveillance system, and was a general troubleshooter. Most of my time
was spent giving GPs advice about the vaccines, and organizing vaccination for
people who didn't quite fit criteria. I have worked in immunization for 35
years, and this was the first time I had ever seen convincing evidence of
people dying after vaccination. SA Health wanted to renew my contract, but I thought
I had done my bit after 2 years, so at the beginning of 2022 I retired for
real.
We now live on 20 acres of paradise in the Adelaide Hills. I am in the local
bushfire brigade (the Cudlee Creek fire was another interesting story), the
local landcare group, and I still keep up with a few friends from 1978.
All the very best to everyone.
Robert Hall
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