Patrick Carlyon: Survival guide to riding the next Covid wave

Omicron is coming but Victorians need not tremble in fear. Here’s how we can survive the next round of Covid-19.

Rushing out to buy toilet paper is so 2020. Picture: AFP

Here we go again, only this time – if you believe the doom merchants who moonlight as state premiers – it’s worse.

Omicron is coming like a “tidal wave”, as Britain’s Boris Johnson puts it. NSW may have 25,000 cases a day by January. Victoria, inevitably, won’t be far behind.

Best we be ready. Here’s an updated survival guide for Covid-19 (2022 edition).

Don’t rush out for toilet paper: How 2020. You may be filmed mugging a sweet old lady for the last roll, then poorly navigating a wobbly trolley’s 64kg mountain of Sorbent between parked cars. Better your kids improvise than see their parent act like this.

Do rush out for red wine: You can never have too much.

Masks and check-ins are rather bothersome, but they’re better than lockdowns. Picture: David Geraghty

Don’t bother with numbers that don’t matter: It may be that the equivalent of one in every four people at a grand final will be infected every day in Victoria soon enough. But how many of them will even know?

Do bother with numbers that do: How many people has Omicron killed so far? At last count, one. That’s a one in 7.753 billion chance of dying, which is even less likely than the Poms winning all four of the remaining Ashes Tests.

Don’t panic: We have interstate premiers to do that on our behalf, whether we want them to or not.

Do go interstate: Just factor in the need for a permission note, written in crayon, for Miss Annastacia (Queensland) or Mr Marshall (South Australia). But don’t cite the need to farewell a terminally-ill family member. You’ll never get in if you do, and you may receive a detention.

The once cottage industry of Covid catastrophising is bigger than crypto currency. Picture: Luis Ascui

Don’t sweat the small stuff: Masks and check-ins are rather bothersome, but they’re better than lockdowns and that unfortunate tendency to treat personal hygiene as an optional extra.

Do sweat the big stuff: There can be no more lockdowns. No matter what. Resistance is not futile.

Don’t celebrate Christmas: If you don’t enjoy the company of your unvaccinated cousins who bang on about the vaccination “experiment”.

Do celebrate Christmas: If you want to spend time with interstate loved ones who may as well have been living on the moon for much of 2021.

Don’t listen to the doom merchants: Has anyone wondered if some epidemiologists will be sad when the threat passes, given the world will once again ignore them? Some parts of the AMA, too, which predicted hospital meltdowns in scenes modelled on Italy, New York and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, should be accorded the same respect as a professional horse racing tipster who drives a 1991 Nissan Pintara.

Don’t go out for dinner before the Ashes are over if you are Australia’s Test captain. Picture: AFP

Do listen to the experts who say what you want to hear: Projecting the best, instead of fearing the worst, used to steer nations through wars, natural disasters and depressions. Not anymore. The once cottage industry of Covid catastrophising is bigger than crypto currency. Like Galileo, infectious diseases expert Pet­er Collignon has bucked the orthodoxy – and declared that Omicron may be no worse than Delta. Unlike Galileo, he need not recant.

Don’t go out for dinner until the Ashes are over if you are Australia’s Test captain: Not unless you take Joe Root, Stuart Broad and James Anderson with you.

Do rumble about kneejerk responses: More than 850 people thrown into quarantine because they partied at the wrong nightclubs? Australian states accepting fewer outsiders than North Korea? Just two reasons why the chapter title of history’s take on the local response to the virus will read: “WTF?”

Don’t fret about being a close contact: Be patient. We’ll all get a turn.

Do get jabbed again, like now: “Fully vaccinated” no longer means fully vaccinated. If you must wait five months for a booster, unlike three months elsewhere, blame health authorities who put safety assessment ahead of safety.

Don’t wait for six months to get the booster jab. Picture: Getty Images

Don’t need elective surgery: The wait will be longer than getting a booster shot.

Do accept that the virus will linger: As someone wisely pointed out, we are “victims of our good fortune”. The virus has not been foisted on us as it has in other parts, where “living with the virus” is more than a mindset. Don’t tremble at home because your fear of the threat is bigger than the threat itself.

Don’t ignore the lessons of history: Humanity has beaten every pandemic throughout time. We’ll beat this one, too, no matter how many state premiers prefer we do not.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist