James Campbell: Depressing reality behind state of emergency extension

Why would the Andrews government want to send the message that normality won’t be returning this year? The answer is simple and depressing: because it won’t.

The most extraordinary thing – almost – about Daniel Andrews’s bid to keep Victoria’s state of emergency going for another nine months was the casual way he announced it.

If you only read the headline of the press release revealing the move – “MORE VICTORIANS SET TO RETURN TO WORK” – and its first four paragraphs, you’d have had no idea the government was going to extend the state of emergency until December.

The government argues the extension is necessary to continue hotel, border and mask-wearing regimes.

Leaving aside for a minute the fact that these problems be dealt with under separate legislation, the question we should be asking is why nine months?

Why would the government want to send the message that normality won’t be returning this year? The answer is simple and depressing: because it won’t.

But what about the vaccine?

Isn’t it going to be the magic bullet that will allow us to put this horrible experience behind us and allow us back on the plane to Bali?

The answer depressingly, is sadly not. According to a paper released this week by Public Health England, the so-called Kent variant might reduce the effectiveness of the present crop of vaccines.

Very few Australians have gained immunity through infection. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Andrew Henshaw

Which isn’t to say vaccines can’t be engineered to combat the variant – the boffins seem confident they can – it’s that the virus is showing it can evolve quickly and we are faced with the prospect of an ongoing game of whack-a-mole with each more contagious version that emerges.

Indeed the Kent variant we have been talking about is already old news.

Earlier this week the UK government began a testing blitz of 80,000 residents of areas that have been shown to be full of the Brazilian and South African variants.

Through its advanced vaccination program and the sad fact that so many people have caught the coronavirus, the UK was on track to be the first country in the world to achieve something close to herd immunity.

These variants threaten that for two reasons: firstly because they weaken the effectiveness of the existing vaccines, but secondly because they threaten to reinfect people who have already had the virus once.

Australia of course has luckily had almost no cases of coronavirus.

The downside of that success is hardly anyone here has gained immunity through infection, meaning we are totally in the hands of the vaccine to achieve any sort of normality.

The good news is that while the vaccines we have so far are nowhere near 100 per cent effective at stopping people getting coronavirus — and there is no real data yet on how effective they are stopping people spreading it — the vaccinated people who do catch it are far less likely to get very sick.

This is important for two reasons, firstly and most obviously, because the sicker you get, the more likely you are to die, but also because there seems to be a relationship between how sick you get initially and how likely you are to suffer from what people are calling ‘long COVID,’ the lingering and in some cases permanent damage to organs caused by the virus.

If we’re not prepared to live with that then the borders will need to stay shut.

If we are prepared to live with it – in other words junking the current elimination strategy – we are still going to have to live with much of the coercion that we have grown so accustomed to, as authorities fight localised outbreaks of whatever new variants nature throws at us.

It would be nice if the government could level with people about this instead of ramming through draconian bills with no notice.

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