PM avoids turning coronavirus into a political circus

For once, Australia seems to have found a rational middle ground between full-on public health emergency and a flat-footed nil response when it comes to the coronavirus, writes James Morrow.

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Well, that escalated quickly.

Not even a dozen weeks since reports first started filtering out of China about some sort of mystery disease, and the world – or at least its share markets – are melting down over coronavirus.

Northern Italy is off-limits, the Saudis have banned pilgrims from Mecca and there’s even a very large question mark hanging over the Tokyo Olympics.

Oh, and Scott Morrison has just activated plans for a pandemic emergency response.

Australians would be forgiven for thinking that the country is in the midst of a series of Old Testament-style disasters: first drought and bushfires, then the novel coronavirus, with only a brief, light plague of baboons in the inner-west for comic relief.

The International Olympic Committee is ‘committed’ to holding the 2020 Games in Tokyo as planned despite the widening new coronavirus outbreak, the body's president has pledged. Picture: AFP

Coronavirus is the latest – and potentially most serious – blow to our complacent modern view that once we set a course for something, nothing can knock us off our track.

On any measure, the Prime Minister has taken the right course here.

His response – which comes as the number of cases outside China outstrips those inside – puts the nation at least a step ahead of the feckless, pandering World Health Organisation, while avoiding more draconian cancellations and lockdowns.

In the cold calculus of politics, it not only acts as a circuit breaker on Morrison’s lead-from-behind management of the summer’s bushfires but also gives him the cover he needs to push back the promised surplus for a year as he spends to prop up the tourism and education sectors.

And for once, Australia seems to have found a sensible middle ground between full-on public health emergency (presumably because our public health boffins haven’t yet figured out a way to implement a coronavirus tax) and a flat-footed nil response.

Australia's Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton is encouraging Australians to keep eating out at Chinese restaurants as they have seen a drop in customers since the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Picture: AAP

This is in contrast to the United States where, like everything else, coronavirus has become yet another political circus.

Overnight Thursday local time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (remember her? She’s the one who theatrically tore up her copy of Trump’s State of Union) demanded that an as yet uninvented vaccine not leave Americans dependent on “Big Pharma” – presumably hoping that Dave cooks up something that does the trick in his garage instead.

The New York Times continued its unbroken record of blaming every stubbed toe and burnt dinner on you know who, running an op-ed Friday under the headline, “Let’s Call It Trumpvirus: If you’re feeling awful, you know who to blame’’.

And commentators on some of the more deranged anti-Trump networks have practically been willing coronavirus to bring on the zombie apocalypse, if only to help their cause in November.

And help the Democrats it well might: Not because of the threat of mass deaths, but a tanking economy.

Citizens line up to buy face masks in Hong Kong, despite medical experts' advice that most people who aren't sick don't need to wear them. Picture: AP

Lately the only threats to Trump’s re-election have been an unmanageable foreign policy crisis leading to war, or an economy that hits the skids.

With the US share market tanking (this week the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded an astonishing one-day loss of 4.42 per cent) and concerns that China’s continued growth and ability to feed the global supply chain are under threat, the latter becomes more of a possibility.

And economic shocks can lead to political ones.

The leading candidate to run against Trump in November is the superannuated democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, whose platform of high taxes and even nationalisation of large parts of the economy, would turn the US into a North American Venezuela. What that would do to the world economy is hard to fathom.

Indeed even though it is 20 times deadlier than the average seasonal flu, which kills about 0.1 per cent of those stricken, it’s the economic costs that could prove more dangerous in the long run.

The number of new cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus in China has declined in recent days, but infections in other countries have gathered pace. Picture: AFP

Even if just 10 per cent of Australians were to catch it, that would by rough calculations take out around 50,000 Australians – making coronavirus two and a half times more deadly than coronary heart disease, which is our leading cause of death.

By comparison, according to the Australian War Memorial more than 60,000 Australians were killed in the first world war.

That said during the Spanish flu epidemic a century ago, the bug became less virulent as it spread. It tended more to weaken its victims, making them more susceptible to other things like pneumonia – which was much more of a potential death sentence in those pre-antibiotic times.

In any case, it all may turn out to be nothing, and eventually warmer weather in the northern hemisphere will take out the novel coronavirus just as it does each year’s seasonal flu.

But, just in case it doesn’t, if you see me pushing two trolleys through Costco loaded with tinned tuna and toilet paper, come say hi. But keep your distance.