Restaurants are a high-risk setting for Covid. Cooks have the highest death rate from Covid of any occupation. Food services staff have by far the top quit rate. So there are many legal and economic reasons for Covid mitigations to be taken more seriously. Understanding the vulnerabilities, including airflow architecture, serving staff exposure, and the susceptibilities to inflammation from cooking fumes are addressable, if recognised early. Consequences for ignoring them might not only be long Covid, but long, distracting litigation, and closures.

Two things COVID patients at home should consider doing:
1. Use an oximeter to monitor blood oxygen levels - it can make a 50% difference to survival
2. Prone - instead of lying on your back, do 30 minute rotations with cushions to lie semi-upright, on both sides and on your stomach. Repeat regularly.

To help remote carers (family/friends) systematically manage your care, use:
1. SMS Sinch for monitoring oximeter readings, and
2. Presence, a remote-controlled system that uses old phones or tablets to manage awake proning. Both systems are free to use.

COVID-19 patients are dying because they have few symptoms and are getting to hospital too late, particularly with Delta. A Sth African study suggests deaths could be “significantly” reduced with oximeters. One reason is that patients at home do not realise their oxygen levels have dropped dangerously low. Hence, in late 2020, NHS England purchased 200,000 pulse oximeters to measure oxygen levels for the more vulnerable among those with coronavirus at home. In July 2021, Singapore set out to supply every household with an oximeter. They had seen their successful use a year earlier when they gave out 20,000 oximeters to their migrant workers.[2, 2a]

There’s been little mention of oximeters in Australia. More needs to be said, as the trick with COVID is acting early both individually with treatment, and population-wise with isolation.

An eagerly awaited paper by researchers from a pioneering group of US university medical schools including Harvard, suggests that controlling inflammatory response in COVID-19 may be as important for treatment as antiviral therapies. This group published a shocking discovery in late 2017 about the lethal effects of cancer treatment, Cytokine Storms, inflammation, and how it can be countered. Parallel research with Rheumatoid Arthritis pioneered in Australia over the last decade supports their findings.

PART 3: This part outlines some of the numerous ways that you can fortify your COVID-19 prevention and management plan.

PART 2: This part provides information on the big threat with COVID-19: uncontrolled inflammation

We need to add “Disease Tolerance” to our anti-virus defences. “Tolerating” a virus can involve “quieting immune attacks against pathogens and even providing nutrients to the invaders”(1) The danger with COVID-19 is pneumonia, the immune system’s inflammatory overreaction, and pre-existing condition vulnerability and treatment conflicts. 90% of flu deaths are the aged in part because they lose their ability to turn off an inflammatory response.(1a) Known as Cytokine Storms, they are killing COVID-19 patients who cannot absorb the little oxygen available.(1b, 1c, 2a) Ongoing round-the-clock use of a Pulse Oximeter is essential if you have any symptoms. (2b, 2c)

The horrifying Australian bushfires hide a potentially much greater calamity than what we are witnessing: that is one involving our health; and even more so, that of our children. The good news is that there are steps you can take to reduce the health damage.