Peta Credlin: Vaccinations won’t eliminate Covid, we must learn to live with it

Overseas experience shows that vaccinations will not eradicate Covid, so it’s time for Australia to work out how to learn to live with it. What do you think? Take our poll.

Sydney and Melbourne have always been competitive, but as well as the contest over which is the most liveable city or which has the best night-life and culture, there’s been the rival approach to managing Covid for the past 18 months — or at least there was until yesterday.

With the forced shutdown of the NSW construction industry, the compulsory closure of most retail and the “ring of steel” around southwest Sydney, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has started to morph into her southern counterpart who has always revelled in commanding that almost everything stop.

The usually bustling Sydney Harbour foreshore is all but deserted as Sydneysiders lock down. Picture: NCA NewsWire

NSW locked down Sydney on June 25 after 12 new cases that day, 92 cases in total, and 13 days after the first case was detected.

Victoria locked down the whole state after 12 new cases last Thursday, just 18 cases in total, and just two days after the first case was detected.

As was obvious from Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ media conference, he regards Covid as a “bushfire” to be extinguished instantly, and the harder and faster you lock down the better. By contrast, for at least the first 10 days of the current outbreak, the NSW government thought its tracing system could round it up.

But it seems the constant media howling for more restrictions and the consistently careful — to the point of being paranoid — “health advice” has finally got to Berejiklian too, and Sydney is now facing an indefinite lockdown much like Melbourne’s 112-day ordeal last year.

If five days turns out to be all Victoria needs to eliminate the virus (fat chance of that, I fear), there’s no doubt that Andrews will be crowing and the lockdown advocates will claim vindication.

Still, it’s hard not to prefer a state that, at least once, appreciated there’s more to life than just staying Covid-free to one that thinks that nothing is too extreme if it eliminates this one virus.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian waited before locking down in NSW. Picture: NCA NewsWire

At least Berejiklian never blamed Victoria for its Crossroads outbreak in July last year and didn’t lock down the state despite new infections then hitting 20 a day.

Likewise, she only locked down part of Sydney rather than the whole state in response to the northern beaches outbreak last Christmas.

By contrast, Andrews dripped blame on NSW and, like the Queensland Premier who likes to trade barbs with Berejiklian, he joined in the pile-on. As if any premier on his fifth lockdown can claim any moral superiority (although he will, just watch him).
The pity is that Berejiklian seems, finally, to have succumbed to the general virus panic.

While Covid undoubtedly has heavy costs, in terms of sickness and death, eliminating it has costs too, which aren’t necessarily less substantial just because they can’t so readily be boiled down to a daily drum beat of “cases” and “hospitalisations”.

The economic loss from locking down a city the size of Melbourne or Sydney is about a billion dollars per city, per week.

Then there’s the cost of the cash compensation (and government debt now headed into the trillions) for businesses forced to close and workers forced to stay home.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is much quicker to lock down his state. Picture: NCA NewsWire

After five lockdowns, business in Victoria is on its knees; people are broken, and hope has gone for so many. Then there’s the mental health cost to the children whose school is disrupted, the parents and business owners with much higher stress levels, and everyone who can’t plan anything from holidays to birthdays, weddings to visits to sick and dying loved ones, because everything can be up-ended at a moment’s notice.

In my experience, from the start of the pandemic, people with spacious homes, secure jobs and the ability to work online have been far readier to accept lockdowns than people in crowded houses with casual jobs, who have to go out to be paid.

And don’t forget that all the lockdown decision-makers and most of the decision-urgers have secure taxpayer-funded jobs. Indeed, Andrews just picked up an $11,000 pay rise to take him to $452,000. Queensland’s chief health officer Dr Jeanette Young is on a package of $622,000, with the other medicos not far off.

All of this raises the question of how many cases of Covid, and ultimately how many deaths from it, we are ready to accept.

Plainly, as things stand, the NSW government is prepared to accept a few local outbreaks and to try to manage them without immediately ordering a lockdown, while the Victorian government is not.

But what about after vaccination? Australian officialdom’s current attitude — reflected in the PM’s four-phase road map to normality — is that we can end lockdowns, ditch masks, reopen domestic and international borders, and scrap quarantine once nearly all adults are vaccinated. The Victorian Premier has even said that lockdowns could end once everyone has had just the chance to be vaccinated, it all depends on the Doherty Institute’s expert advice on the vaccination level needed for us to reopen “safely”. And that’s the further challenge.

In the UK, where nearly 90 per cent of adults have had at least one jab and over two-thirds have had two jabs, the current seven-day average of daily new cases is 35,000, with an average of 33 deaths – with 63 deaths last Thursday.

Despite this, and with some forecasts suggesting that new cases could reach 100,000 a day with 100 deaths, Britain is dropping nearly all restrictions on Monday.

Because vaccination has led to a 90 per cent reduction in Covid hospitalisations and deaths, there’s been a collective conclusion that Covid now has to be lived with, like the standard seasonal flu.

Yet here in Australia, on Friday, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt was clear: “I would not think that 60 deaths on a single day is acceptable.”

Adjusting for population, a relatively restriction-free and near-fully vaccinated Australia could expect, based on the UK figures, an average of 13,000 new daily cases and 12 daily Covid deaths. That doesn’t augur well for Australia opening up.

During the last heavy flu season, South Australia reportedly had 37 flu deaths on a single day. Yet if Hunt’s intuition is right — and don’t forget the PM, too, has suggested that no Covid deaths should be “countenanced” — even vaccination rates at UK levels won’t be enough for a normal life in this country.

Rather than listening obsessively to expert health advice, which differs from state to state anyway, maybe what we really need is a much deeper conversation about the extent to which we should stop living in order to prevent dying — given that eventually death awaits us all.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm