Andrew Bolt: Isolation could kill more than the virus
A growing realisation of the horrendous costs of these stay-home bans — both financial and mental — is finally forcing our leaders to ease up. Let’s not keep paying a moment too long, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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On Friday came the tipping point in this catastrophic virus panic. Fay Rendoth died.
At first, her death got the standard media treatment: “Another death was reported at Sydney’s Newmarch House aged care facility, bringing the nation’s fatalities to 98.”
But within hours, that story changed. Rendoth, a 92-year-old great-grandmother, had tested positive to the virus three weeks earlier but recovered.
Her granddaughter said that what may have finally killed her, two days before Mother’s Day, was the loneliness under these stay-home laws.
“She didn’t recover from the isolation,” she said. “It was heartbreaking to not be able to sit by her side in her final days.”
This comes just days after Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre warned we could get 15 times more suicides caused by the virus panic than the nearly 100 deaths caused by the virus itself.
This growing realisation of the horrendous costs of these stay-home bans — both financial and mental — is what is finally forcing our leaders to ease up.
But don’t thank them: why have they waited until now to talk of relaxing the bans, when the level of new infections today is about as low as it was already three weeks ago?
So what’s changed in those three weeks, apart from more businesses going bust, more Australians losing their jobs, and more people falling into despair?
Yet in NSW, Premier Gladys Berejiklian says she still won’t start relaxing some restrictions until Friday. The most hardline Premier, Victoria’s Daniel Andrews, is waiting until today to say just what freedom he will allow in the state that banned even golf and visits to mum for Mother’s Day.
Worse, the changes they and other premiers are announcing are too little to make much difference, and will be dragged out over three months.
Sure, restaurants can reopen, but with only 10 patrons at a time. Who can afford to bring back cooks and waiters, plus turn on the electricity and gas, for just 10 diners?
Why can’t they — and the pubs that must stay shut — have as many patrons as they can fit, but under the social distancing rules we already see at Bunnings?
We’ve paid a shocking price for overreacting to this virus we were told would kill at least 50,000 of us. Let’s not keep paying a moment too long.