Covid-19 In Australia

Covid-19 was first confirmed in Australia in January 2020. The outbreak has been managed as a health emergency. Over the past 8 months many parts of the country have been in various stages of lock down with business closing and many people losing their jobs. The government introduced income supplements to keep people in work and raised the pension for those seeking employment.

Our MPS/ML families worked closely with their treating clinicians to manage health needs and continuity of ERT treatments. Hospital appointments were managed through separate access and screening areas to reduce infection risk.
One of the biggest challenges was to have children home from school and a reduce workforce of carers and support for families, but to their credit everyone really banded together to support and problem solve. Our Disability sector was challenged but PPE became available quite quicky and many tools were provided to train the sector on hygiene, physical distancing and use of PPE. eventually mandatory masks were enforced in Victoria.
The MPS Society held some informal Zoom catch ups to help facilitate shared experience and produced an MPS and Covid -19 information sheet for our community.

Where I live in Melbourne we are coming out of our second wave where we experienced a 3 month full lockdown and we have managed to reduce our covid-19 cases down to single digits. Industry and business are looking to resource big projects to reduce employment. We hope some of this funding flows into the health and research sectors.

Vanessa Ede-Scott
Operations Manager MPS & related diseases society Australia