Dr Norman Swan, Physician and Journalist
People are always wanting to know how can I protect my elderly parents or my grandparents? Well, this depends how much circulating virus there is in your community. Some say it’s in Australia, there’s very little. Which case, you can probably relax a little bit when you’re visiting your elderly parents or grandparents. But in New South Wales and Victoria, when there’s virus circulating, you can’t take too many precautions.
But, here’s an important thing. You gotta treat your elderly parents or your grandparents like autonomous adults. They can make decisions for themselves. You don’t need to make decisions for them.
But, to be smart, if you’ve got any symptoms at all, if your kids will get any symptoms, you’ve gotta go straight away and get tested and not visit until you know that you’re COVID-19 negative and even if you’ve got symptoms and it’s COVID-19 negative, it could be another virus and you don’t wanna pass that on.
If there’s any doubt at all and there’s COVID-19 in the area, but there aren’t government restrictions in place, you should wear masks and your grandparents or elderly parents should wear masks as well. You know, just keep your distance.
But, if there’s no virus circulating and there’s many states and territories in New South Wales where there is virtually no virus circulating, you can relax a little bit. But, you know, it could arrive at any time, so you’ve just gotta remember how to be careful.
