You can call it letting it rip. Or you could call it living with reality. Take your pick. The Omicron variant is clearly so infectious and so highly transmissible, it is a fool’s errand to try to prevent its spread by border closures and lockdowns.
Australians are shuffling through supermarkets in scenes reminiscent of the former Soviet Union circa 1980. Supply lines are collapsing as warehouse workers, forklift drivers, truck drivers and shelf stackers are off work either struck down by Omicron or forced to isolate under close contact rules.
It is worth remembering that the Omicron variant was first identified in South Africa’s Gauteng Province on November 9, 2021. It had yet to be ascribed a letter of the Greek alphabet. That would happen on November 26 as World Health Organisation authorities flipped past the 13th letter, Nu (as it might be misunderstood as an entirely new virus rather than a new variant) and the 14th, Xi (as it might cause a bit of embarrassment to a certain general secretary of a certain communist party) before settling on the 15th, Omicron.
The Omicron variant has only just celebrated its second month of existence. In that short space of time, it has travelled around the world and back again, causing havoc wherever it goes.
Two republics and a kingdom
By my reckoning only three jurisdictions have a Zero Covid policy — the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the state of Western Australia, sometimes called the Kingdom of Westralia.
We might also throw New Zealand where the Ardern government has closed the borders with the only permitted entrants having to endure a sort of Kafkaesque descent into bureaucratic hell marked with multiple PCR tests, statutory declarations and finally something obliquely called the MIQ or mandatory quarantine.
China may have low cases of Omicron, but it also has a city of 13 million people, Jian, in lockdown. Quarantine of local residents is strictly enforced. Hong Kong is shut down at night. As with China, entrants to Hong Kong must enter into quarantine for a 14-day period. Hong Kong creates an estimated 20 per cent to China’s GDP. Quarantine rules are starting to see businesses in the financial sector move to Singapore and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific.
Closing the borders has been a doddle for the DPRK, having all but done so since 1953. Hard borders then have become virtually impassable now, but it has come at a terrible cost. 90 per cent of the country’s imports come from China and this has declined by 80 per cent. In June 2021, The DPRK leader, Kim Jong-un took a break from the endless propaganda to tell a Korean Worker’s Party meeting that the “people’s food situation is now getting tense.”
Last month, South Korea’s intelligence services reported that Kim had ordered all North Koreans to devote every effort to farming, and to secure “every grain” of rice. Most, if not all, foreign aid and UN workers have left the country, effectively shutting down any humanitarian response.
In an early tilt at the title for the most bizarre story of 2022, a slimmed down Kim Jong-un announced last week that his father, Kim Jong-il invented the burrito. Readers may recall Jong-un’s dad was a hell of a golfer. Played it just the once, walked off the course a healthy 38 under par with some 11 holes-in-one, including a memorable condor or double albatross on a par five. Big hitter, the Dear Leader.
But Jong-il’s culinary prowess has largely gone unknown until now. The story told by North Korea’s pro-government news agency, Rodong Sinmun goes that Kim Jong-il invented the burrito in 2011, preferring to call it a “wheat wrap.” Jong-il died shortly afterwards of a heart attack, possibly because of his invention.
Photographic evidence of the provenance of the tortilla-filled snack was offered with selected North Korean citizens, presumably high-ranking members of the Korean Workers’ Party, sons, daughters and siblings of senior North Koran military figures etc, shown chowing down from a food truck in Pyongyang fit to burst with burritos.
North Korea’s Zero Covid
As Taco Bell considers its response, North Korea arguably stands as the most successful adoptee of Zero Covid policy. There have been no recorded no deaths or no cases of Covid in the Land of the Burrito. This may or may not be true but what we can discern from the snippets of reliable information coming from the one true hermit kingdom is that Covid has had little effect on the population while slamming the borders shut have contributed to economic misery and the threat of famine.
Almost all the DPRK’s 26 million people remain unvaccinated with a trickle of the PRC’s Sinovac coming in and being doled out to Jong-un and a handful of his favourites.
Australia’s hermit kingdom
Western Australia and WA Labor’s anointed ‘state dad’, Mark McGowan should be taking note. Australia’s own hermit kingdom has just over a thousand Covid cases stand compared to New South Wales’ half a million. Western Australia continues to thrive economically. It was the only state in the Commonwealth not to go into a pandemic driven recession. That’s the good news and has created a sense of comfort in isolation.
But that isolation has led, in part, to a slow vaccination take up with the state running around ten per cent below the vaccination rates in eastern states and that delay will impact on booster shots to provide enhanced protection against Omicron.
If McGowan stays true to his word, WA will start opening up in February, once the state’s reaches the mark of 90 per cent aged 16 or older fully vaccinated.
Omicron is coming to Western Australia. There is no stopping it. Zero Covid policy merely delays it, kicks it down the road. Worse, it promises to extend the peak period of infection and transmissibility across the entire country, prolonging supply breakdowns and causing more economic harm than is necessary. The state of Western Australia and its dad is about to discover that Zero Covid under the Omicron variant is a dangerous fantasy.
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