David Penberthy: Coronavirus belongs alongside the cold and using a car or swimming

The only people who genuinely have anything to be alarmed about are those of you who still aren’t vaccinated, writes David Penberthy.

There are a lot of new words and terms that have been popularised over the past 18 months that we would all be happy never to hear again.

Iso. Contact tracing. Check-in. Social distancing. Mask mandates. Virus shedding. Undosed, single-dosed, double-dosed … all of us now fully dosed with buzzwords, acronyms and cliches as we become armchair epidemiologists while negotiating our way through a pandemic.

One word that I heard early in the outbreak, and which has stayed with me, is “catastrophise”. It’s a cool word, and while it only found mainstream voice in the pandemic, it has always been sitting there on hand to describe those with the capacity to react hysterically and regard a half-full glass as 50 per cent empty.

In global terms we have veritably coasted through this pandemic. And, even though our borders are now open, our internationally high vaccination rate, smaller population, low-density living, hygienic standards and smart, first-world measures such as check-in technology and contact tracing mean we are unlikely to see any kind of deadly mass outbreak in coming weeks.

Passengers leave the First flight into Adelaide from Melbourne after the borders reopened. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

Despite that truth, I heard and read plenty of comments from the catastrophists in the lead-up to November 23. Hazarding a guess, based on the proportion of texts we get on the radio and the letters in this fine journal, I’d reckon about a quarter of us can’t understand why we are opening up at all, and why Premier Steven Marshall can’t do a Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan and remain closed off for several more months. In the most paranoid of cases, some people even seem to think we can stay shut indefinitely and become some sort of self-reliant commune devoid of any contact with the outside world.

We have got all the shiraz, I guess. There are worse ways to get through the end of civilisation.

The majority view holds that we can’t go on like this forever, and that with the vaccination rate now close to 80 per cent and set to reach 90 per cent before Christmas, it’s time to get on with living life again. Even if that brings with it the risk of illness, and even death.

To the catastrophists, I would say that this puts the coronavirus where it rightfully should be – alongside everything from the common cold and using a car to swimming as we do each summer in the breeding ground of the Great White Shark – as a calculable risk.

As we approach the coming weeks with our borders now open, we should apply real thought to how we discuss the coming Covid-19 cases with calmness and proportionality.

We have seen precedents throughout this pandemic for how people can end up drawing all sorts of mad conclusions on the basis of breathless catastrophising. I would include some of the media coverage of the pandemic in making that observation.

The best example of that was the silliness over the AstraZeneca vaccine, which more than anything fuelled the vaccine hesitancy that has slowly and largely evaporated as people work out what’s really at stake here, and that the vaccine side-effect risks are vastly outweighed by the danger of Covid infection.

Yet six months ago, three things conspired to create unnecessary hesitancy – the conservative and inconsistent rulings by immunisation watchdog ATAGI, the hysterical pronouncements of former Queensland chief health officer Janette Young, and media beat-ups which falsely inflated the tiny number of deaths as some harbinger of doom for anyone considering a jab.

Even the manner in which actual Covid cases have been reported are over-the-top. The raw daily case numbers out of Victoria and NSW are completely devoid of nuance and fail to reflect the reality that almost every vaccinated person who is on that list will get better. And in many cases will not even feel especially sick at all.

Even the use of daily stock market-style tickers across the news websites has a catastrophist quality. Indeed, if you were looking for an old-school tabloid headline to describe what’s happened in South Australia during the past year, it’s this: NONE DEAD IN SA Covid HORROR.

We need to keep a sense of perspective. Planning our radio show this week, we made a pact with ourselves not to treat every inevitable case as some major news story, and not even to seek an interview unless the case numbers move so sharply or the cases are so uniquely alarming that they require special scrutiny.

It is amazing when you think back to the deadly flu season a few years back. Most people didn’t even regard it as a major issue of conversation. And the media did not regard it as a story until the death rate became so pronounced that it jerked us out of our slumber.

That, I guess, is the novelty that comes with a novel virus.

My final point would be this.

It is science that has made the risk of the coming weeks both manageable and calculable – science in the form of vaccination. And the only people who genuinely have anything to be alarmed about are those of you who still aren’t vaccinated.

From here on in, not only will you be denied anything entertaining to do, you will be in more danger than you were on the few occasions you can actually leave the house to take part in social activities. Or if you are still employed in a job that does not require vaccines. You will also be posing more danger to those around you, especially the immunocompromised, by thumbing your nose at science, increasing your risk of getting sick and unnecessarily clogging our public hospitals.

The numbers interstate and overseas tell us now that the only people who really have anything to fear are those who either haven’t gotten around it, or have vanished down their own mad rabbit hole and are still saying no. For the rest of us, life has to go on. It is a good thing that it has just started again, with all the many risks that life inevitably entails.