Zak Kirkup: what I've learnt from my brush with COVID

Zak Kirkup Published April 5, 2022 at 6.29am (AWST)

health

Masks? Check. Sanitiser? Check. RATS? Check. COVID? ... check.

I was as best prepared as I could be for the impending arrival of the 'rona, and yet it still wasn't enough.

Like every illness, we'll all experience COVID-19 differently.

I would like to tell you that as someone who is triple vaccinated, works out every day and is relatively healthy that my symptoms were mild.

Truth is they were, until I ended up at hospital at 4am with some 'complications'.

As I laid there with ECG leads all over my chest in my sealed off glass cubicle I was in awe of just how impressive WA Health was.

Yamatji man and former WA Liberal leader Zak Kirkup.

An emergency department COVID-positive patient isn't easy to manage, especially at scale.

The whole process was like a well-oiled machine and everything just worked.

It gave me such a sense of pride in our state to see our nurses and doctors at their best whilst we get hit with the worst pandemic we've ever seen.

"This is just Omicron" they say, "it's not as bad as the others".

If that is true, then we have a lot to be thankful for in Australia.

Like or loathe him, Prime Minister Scott Morrison made the decision to cut our country off from the rest of the world very early on.

I remember it when he announced we were stopping flights to China and I thought that was a risky move.

Yet it was his decision, and that of WA Premier Mark McGowan's which followed suit, which saved us from the very worst variants COVID-19 had to offer.

I don't say that as some sycophantic Lib but as a grateful (West) Australian and it's something we should all reflect on.

It is not a given that we have good decision makers in high office.

How bad it could have been if we had leaders like former US President Donald Trump who, even after contracting COVID during his campaign, didn't reorientate and take the virus more seriously.

As the world becomes increasingly divided or worse, at war, I've found that the virus has made us a lot closer in Australia.

At the start we checked in with our neighbours, we were all in this together.

Now that WA is going through what the east experienced some time ago, I've found we haven't lost that spirit of mate-ship at all.

I've had people who I've never met (shout out to Rhys at Acknowledge This) reach out and offer to help, let alone the daily messages and calls from friends and family to make sure I was still okay.

COVID has had a significant impact on us all, and what I realised having gone through it, is that we're lucky to live here.

With all our faults and with the many things that need to change, as I laid there in a hospital bed wondering what was in store for me, I couldn't have been happier to call Australia home.