The worry warts and nanny-state aficionados who now dictate the terms of our pandemic pandemonium have given us a long list of instructions. Do not eat bats or pangolins, avoid churches, weddings and funerals, shun crowds, stay away from choirs and do not, under any circumstances, dance or sing. If you must exercise or walk the dog, wear a mask, stay home, limit visitors and ensure you do not touch pizza boxes or attempt to mark a football.
This should keep you infection-free but, just to be sure, stay clear of returning travellers, Victorians and Wuhan lab workers. If you cannot resist conjugal relations, be sure to wear a mask (if it is not on, it is not on) and remember, always, to stock up on toilet paper.
The politicians and health officers have forced a curfew on Victorians, blocked NSW residents from skipping across the Tweed to Queensland hospitals and made Tasmanians glad, for a change, that everybody has forgotten about them. In South Australia, chief health officer Nicola Spurrier has told spectators going to Saturday’s AFL clash at Adelaide Oval to duck and avoid the ball if it comes flying over the fence.
Convinced that people cannot think for themselves, these busy bureaucrats are eager to think for us. Certainly, most of the premiers have been happy to outsource their cognitive functions, ceding responsibility to their health officers and looking to get plaudits for “keeping people safe” at the same time they refuse to assume responsibility for the decisions.
“We don’t choose to go into lockdown, there is no choice,” Victorian Acting Premier James Merlino said on Thursday, referring to medical advice on how to “run this variant into the ground”. Seldom has anyone lived up to the “acting” descriptor so literally.
The deference to medical advisers has been troubling from the start of this pandemic. Politicians have hidden behind their health officers, used them as human shields, and have been sucked down a path of virus elimination because, surprise, surprise, the sole focus of the health officers has been to reduce infections.
Not for the chief health officers the difficult compromises between public welfare and public livelihoods. Not for them striking the balance between a functioning society and one that is infection-free.
When your only key performance indicator is reducing infections, I guess that is the outcome that will trump all others. Why would you jeopardise that outcome by considering other imperatives such as school outcomes, economic sustainability, social engagement and personal solvency?
The incompetence, authoritarianism, single-mindedness and cowardice of these premiers and their health chiefs have been palpable for at least a year. Some of us have railed against it repeatedly but most have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps Spurrier’s embarrassing exhortation for Adelaide Oval spectators to avoid touching the football could become something of a turning point. Her reckless statewide lockdown last November, based on absurd and erroneous conclusions about a pizza box, should have exposed her and Premier Steven Marshall, but it did not. We can only hope the footy farce will do the job.
Spurrier’s inanity is emblematic of how the pandemic response in this country has reached comedic levels. The politicians and bureaucrats, and much of the media, have been fuelling hysteria and have lost touch with their aims.
Crushing Covid-19 infection has become the only end, for its own sake. It does not seem to matter who is vaccinated or whether anyone gets sick; the aim is to prevent infections. Any infection – even a young person, an asymptomatic person or a vaccinated person – is used to create alarm and is framed as a political loss.
A single infection on a cargo ship becomes a lead story for radio and television bulletins; an infected person visiting NSW creates the same media hysteria; cities with two million residents have been locked down for days because of just one case. Journalists seldom seem to ask or care whether anyone actually has fallen ill.
Across our population of 25 million people there has not been one fatal community transmission this year – not a single death in almost six months.
Just over a year ago, when we shut down to prepare for the pandemic, our governments tripled the number of critical care beds nationally to more than 7000 to ensure we would not be overwhelmed. This week, with Victoria locked down, one of those beds was used for a couple of days.
At the time of writing there were 20 people infected with Covid-19 in hospitals across Australia. None was in critical care.
Not only was every one of those more than 7000 critical care beds available but many other hospital beds were empty too because elective surgery was put on hold in Victoria in response to the state’s modest outbreak. Even at the height of Victoria’s “second wave” outbreak last year, fewer than 50 ICU beds were used on any given day.
So, at the worst moment in this nation’s pandemic history, Victoria had 20 spare ICU beds for each one it used. Nationally we had an extra 150 beds on standby for every bed that was used. Right now, we are not using any.
Yet I am old enough to remember when our state and federal leaders were telling us we needed to “flatten the curve” to ensure our health system was not overwhelmed by coronavirus cases.
We have not protected our healthcare system so much as sidelined it.
There are echoes here of Yes Minister, when principal private secretary Bernard Woolley advised Jim Hacker: “You asked me to find out about that alleged empty hospital in North London; well in fact there are only 342 administrative staff at the new St Edwards hospital, the other 170 are porters, cleaners, laundry workers, gardeners, cooks and so forth.”
“And how many medical staff?” asks the minister. “Oh, none of them.”
Australia has more than 7000 Covid-19 beds but no patients.
This is not to argue against building up this reserve capacity. But clearly our closed international borders, hotel quarantine and domestic outbreak management have been so ruthless that we have not needed even a small fraction of it. We have been far more successful than we dared to believe. Yet 18 months into the pandemic we still have chief health officers and premiers talking about the virus as a “beast”. They exaggerate its virulence and characterise it as something akin to Ebola to justify their unnecessary lockdowns, cruel border closures and undeclared elimination strategies.
And in Melbourne, as we speak, more than five million people are being locked down to prevent a lockdown. No, seriously.
Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton said on Wednesday: “We don’t want to be in a situation where we’ve got significant outbreaks in schools, more transmission in the community and needing to make a choice about a longer period of lockdown.” He was announcing the extension of a lockdown and justifying it as necessary to avoid an extended lockdown.
What Sutton and Merlino are really saying is that even with the elderly protected by vaccines, community practices against infection well established and hospitals well resourced to deal with any outbreaks, they are not prepared to tolerate any Covid-19 infections. Some Victorians may wonder why they bothered getting vaccinated because their government is determined to ensure they never encounter the virus anyway.
The Victorians extended Melbourne’s lockdown this week largely because they had decided two people caught Covid-19 just by “brushing past” an infected person. Then these cases were exposed as “false positives” and the people of Melbourne were left to weather the consequences of lockdown regardless.
We have not improved our approach during the past year, we have regressed. Only NSW has determined to live with the disease; the other states remain in costly denial.
The premiers and their alarmist health officers can hold court in front of the cameras as often as they like, talking about beastly viruses and ducking footies, but the whole country can see how the most populous state has dealt with the bulk of the hotel quarantine load and a succession of outbreaks with the lightest touch on its citizens. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her chief health officer Kerry Chant make the rest of them look like jumpy, damaging, grandstanding amateurs.
More Coverage
Read related topics:Coronavirus
Join the conversation
War will end when Israel’s foes stop attacking it
Hamas began hostilities on October 7 when it invaded southern Israel and began slaughtering and kidnapping Israelis. Only an evil or foolish leader would start a war. But nations are entitled to defend themselves against attack.
Read more
Two enemies, two paths – and one deadly objective
Iran relies on violence to achieve its goal of destroying Israel and its people, while the Palestinian threat is more subtle.
Read more