Covid Chicken Littles in politics and media lack sense of proportion

WA Premier Mark McGowan is a COVID Chicken Little who faces a state election on March 13. Picture: Getty Images

A sense of proportion used to be the hallmark of serious journalism.

It came from the judgment of experienced editors and news editors who had learned over decades how to weigh up events. The sub-editors’ table in newspapers played an important role as did experienced executive producers in television and radio. Reporters were young and keen but newsroom checks and balances ensured they could not write everything as a national catastrophe.

Reporting of COVID-19 shows how de-skilling of newsrooms has changed all that. Proportionality is thrown out for sensationalism in a quest for clicks on news websites and “likes” on social media.

Left-wing journalists on Twitter, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, praise every lockdown by Labor state premiers no matter how tiny each outbreak. Coalition leaders are portrayed as bumblers prepared to risk the nation’s health to please big business.

This in a country that has had only 28,730 cases and 909 deaths in a year, and last week had only one case nationally in intensive care.

The expert many journalists count on to provide proportionate responses is the Australian National University’s Professor Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at Canberra Hospital. Reflecting on Queensland’s decision to lock down Brisbane for three days at the start of January he asked the question more journalists should by now be asking in their own states: is Queensland worried its contact tracing system is not up to scratch?

We learned during Melbourne’s mid-year second wave that Victoria’s system was not. But journalists prepared to ask tough questions of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews were hounded by the baying dogs of Twitter. Yet guess what: Andrews sent his contact tracers to NSW to learn how to do it properly.

News can be shaped by who a journalist decides to interview. Too often during the coverage of the coronavirus, it has been the various state-based chief medical officers with a parochial political job to do, or virus doomsayers such as the Kirby Institute’s professor Raina MacIntyre and former federal Labor health adviser on AIDS, Bill Bowtell.

When the ABC or the Nine newspapers go to these two you know they are looking for extreme lockdown views. For both, no economic price is too high to pay for elimination of the virus. Yet elimination has never been the national strategy, which is one of suppression.

Professor Collignon pointed to problems with Brisbane’s three-day lockdown from January 8. Three days is problematic because the virus takes between five and 14 days to infect its host, Collignon told The Australian on January 11. The only reason he could see for such a short lockdown over what was then a single case was lack of trust in the state’s contact tracing.

More virus populism was to come. Mark McGowan, the Labor Premier of Western Australia, said on January 11 that NSW was letting the country down and needed to eliminate the virus. Like Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk, McGowan is a COVID Chicken Little. He faces a state election on March 13.

These Labor premiers and their media barrackers are pulling on both sides of the same rope. Like federal ALP leader Anthony Albanese, they criticise Prime Minister Scott Morrison for taking too long to bring overseas Australian travellers home. Yet they have squibbed responsibility for much of the quarantining of their own returning overseas travellers.

The virus that leaked from hotel quarantine into Sydney’s northern beaches last month, and the western Sydney Berala cluster, may well have come from returning travellers quarantining in Sydney before heading home to WA, Queensland or Victoria.

The vast bulk of the international quarantine load has been borne by Sydney. It has had far more success than Melbourne, which abandoned returning overseas traveller flights from late June until December 7 after security guard breaches in its hotels.

The Australian Financial Review published a piece by government editor Tom Burton on January 11 that encapsulated the parochial populist position on state of-origin virus politics under the headline “NSW virus strategy holds the country hostage”. Really? NSW has done the heavy lifting on quarantine while suppressing the outbreak from Victoria at Sydney’s Crossroads Hotel in July and August, and the two latest Sydney clusters.

WA’s “virus secessionists” should consider the gross state product numbers. Despite all WA’s mining revenue, NSW is 33 per cent of the national economy, generating $625bn of economic activity last financial year. WA is 15 per cent, Queensland 18 and Victoria 23. Keeping Sydney open is in the national interest and the AFR knows it.

Media “virus hyping” in a country with almost no virus is not just politics. It’s also a quest for audience. ABC health reporter Norman Swan won a Walkley Award last year for his Coronacast podcast series, even though he confidently predicted early in the pandemic that 150,000 Australians would die of COVID-19.

Medical research shows most people who catch COVID-19 recover well. The virus is most dangerous to the elderly and people with co-morbidities, especially heart and respiratory disease, and diabetes. The average age of all COVID deaths here by August was 83, compared with an overall average life expectancy of 81.

A study reported by the BBC in October showed the average age of COVID deaths in Scotland at 79 for men and 84 for women, compared with overall average life expectancy of 77.1 (men) and 81.1 (women).

The most at-risk group is aged-care residents. In Australia, 678 of 909 deaths have been in aged care. In the US, 100,000 have died in aged care and as of last July in Britain 53 per cent of all the coronavirus deaths had occurred in aged care.

The case fatality rate of COVID-19 has been over-estimated. On January 19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in US updated a study that estimated the actual number of Americans who have had the disease is 83.1 million compared with diagnosed infections of 25 million. A study of international infection data by Australian National University scientists, published mid-November, estimated global case numbers then at 800 million, more than 10 times the number of reported cases globally at the time.

This means the virus is much less deadly than feared a year ago, but beware those who say it is no worse than flu. Two studies, one in the British Medical Journal and another in the Journal of the American Medical Association comparing COVID-19 deaths with influenza deaths the previous year, make it clear that even for people in the 25-44 age group, COVID-19 is much more deadly than flu.

Politics explains much of the local media’s focus on the US, which does not have the highest COVID-19 death rate. As The Independent in London reported last week that honour goes to the UK, followed by the Czech Republic. The US is 13th although its 400,000 death toll is the highest overall total because of its large population.

Look at the coronavirus proportionately. The toll from the Spanish flu of 1919-20 was between 10 and 50 times what it is for COVID-19 in a world without international flights and a quarter of today’s population.