David Penberthy: Keep calm and carry on … amid all the COVID-19 confusion
In one day the NBA cancelled its season, the US banned Europe flights and Tom Hanks tested positive. What we, and the rest of the world, look like in six weeks’ time is anyone’s guess, writes David Penberthy.
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Much has been made of how we have been acting like a bunch of headless chooks in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, principally through the comic vehicle of stockpiling toilet paper.
While I have been puzzled by it myself, insecure behaviour is both forgivable and explicable when you consider the unnerving nature of the health and economic threat, and the capacity of those in charge to reassure us that everything is going to be OK.
To put this in perspective, as I sat down yesterday morning to get my thoughts together for this column, three spectacular news items broke simultaneously – the NBA cancelled the remainder of the American basketball season four-fifths of the way through, Donald Trump announced a month-long ban on flights from Europe, and actor Tom Hanks revealed he had tested positive for COVID-19.
Process that. I’m off to buy more toilet paper.
The health threat from the coronavirus seems easier to comprehend, and much less scary, than its economic impact. This is because there have been such divergent views on what should, or shouldn’t happen when it comes to our response – whether we should fly anywhere or fly nowhere, whether businesses should close or stay open, whether sporting events should continue as always, be held without spectators, or scrapped all together, whether we should keep going about our business, or lock ourselves indoors for a fortnight.
The federated nature of Australia has provided plenty of scope for confusion as to what we should or shouldn’t be doing amid all this uncertainty.
In the space of a week we have heard NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian make the inadvertently irresponsible admission that the state was stockpiling medicines, which rather than reassuring people only engendered panic, we have heard Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews casually muse that at some point all the schools in his state would probably have to close, meanwhile here in SA, our Premier Steven Marshall has maintained a more level-headed approach and tried to avoid any dramatic overstatement.
It was heartening that earlier this week he said he still intended to travel to the United States to promote SA businesses and investment, arguing we cannot shut up shop by overreacting, even though following Donald Trump’s nuclear COVID-19 response yesterday the Premier said the trip was now cancelled anyway.
Getting a consistent line from those in power across our federation has not been limited to politics.
Even our peak professional health body the Australian Medical Association was not immune, pardon the pun, with its WA president making the claim on Tuesday that “tens of thousands” of Western Australians would be hospitalised due to the virus, only to be slapped down by his national president for wild speculation.
Amid all this, the Prime Minister’s address to the nation was welcome on Thursday night, but seriously belated.
Even with the announcement of this week’s stimulus package, it has felt as if there’s been a leadership vacuum amid this crisis.
Perhaps it has been because the story has been moving so fast, that our federal government wanted to know the full picture before it could say anything particularly decisive.
But it seems strange that the Government could scramble to produce advertisements spruiking its bushfire response to defuse a political problem over its performance, yet there has been no advertising about the specifics of this virus, what its symptoms are, when you should worry or when you don’t need to worry, meaning that many people have felt confused and scared by the nature of the threat.
The worst feature of this story in my mind has been some of the more blasé and blithe remarks surrounding those who are affected.
I really don’t see how anyone can shrug their shoulders and say coronavirus is “only” a problem if you happen to be old.
That is as a pretty serious problem if you are old, or have older parents, and a keen interest in whether they live or die.
Annoying too are all these half-arsed comparisons with the road toll, or other forms of the flu.
The prospect of hundreds, indeed thousands of people dying is appalling, and the fact that they’ve lived pretty long and happy lives should not be regarded as a cheery bonus.
This point is a particularly strong one here in South Australia, where we have proportionally the oldest Australian population.
On the local front, the much-maligned SA Health has had something of a personal best in terms of its response to this challenge.
While in Sydney people are dying not from the virus but from old age while waiting on hold to find out where they can be tested, the process here has been streamlined through the RAH, Flinders and Lyell Mac, and particularly with the hugely innovative use of drive-through testing at the old Repat.
Amid all the anxiety, the most reassuring things I have read have been a long string of emails from a long-lost mate, Adelaide man Simon Carter, with whom I studied at Adelaide Uni. We had lost touch years ago, and Simon happily popped upon my inbox six weeks ago saying a very welcome gidday – gidday from Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus, where he has been working for several years as a geophysicist at a local university.
Long story short – he, his wife and their seven-year-old daughter have spent much of the past six weeks cooped up in their apartment, but they’re fine.
They were all crawling up the walls for a while, but they have managed to get out and get food, and the virus itself has now abated in the Wubei province, with the rate of new infections this week at its lowest point since the virus broke out, and businesses now going back to work.
Life is returning to normal there. It feels like it’s about to get a whole lot less normal here.
What we, and the rest of the world, looks like in six weeks’ time is anyone’s guess. Hopefully we look like the Carter family in Wuhan.