We can’t be resigned to fate, we must reclaim our future

Every day in this self-induced coma is killing someone’s future. We must find hope in action if we are to wake from it.

We need to consider thorough and innovative ways to ring-fence and protect the vulnerable from infection while the rest of society gets back to work. Picture: Santi Palacios

The pace of change, most of it bad, is hard to comprehend, difficult to navigate and virtually impossible to manage. Yet in this frenetic medical, social and economic disaster, many people are idle and ­isolated.

We are caught in a social maelstrom but stuck in personal trauma. This much is not new — individuals have always been consumed by global events — but the speed and complexity of what is transpiring is unprecedented, as is the need to withdraw rather than draw strength from one another.

Scott Morrison calls it the “new normal” — but should reconsider. It is always wise to under-promise and over-deliver, but we don’t need resignation, we need to be resolute about getting out of this as quickly as possible.

This is the first serious world crisis created and exacerbated by our jet-fuelled and digital age of globalisation. These same factors will help solve it as we share data, research, drugs and equipment — but they will also never operate in the same unrestrained fashion again.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be a dampener on globalisation and multilateralism; it will accelerate the revival of nation-state sovereignty that was already evident in Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump and the success of Morrison. It will also weaken the nature of centre-right governments; locking in big government responses, higher taxes and interventionist ­approaches for election cycles to come. Supply chains, free-trade agreements and world trade rules will have to be revisited to bolster national self-reliance in a range of areas, as we decide to pay a premium for self-sufficiency. At the same time, we will realise our ­direct interest in trying to ensure foreign regimes, such as the ­authoritarian Chinese communists, abide by global norms of transparency, accountability and responsibility — because we can pay a price for their mistakes.

First, we need to get through a pandemic that threatens our health, cohesion and economic wellbeing. It has acted as a magnifying glass on our national vulnerabilities. You might have closed a business you established years ago, laying off workers who are your trusted friends, while wondering whether you will ever open again. All the while your partner might be trying to work from home while managing children doing online home schooling.

Your sporting and social contacts will have ended, you are keeping physically distant from your friends and cannot travel to visit your parents who are vulnerable. You are living in a city without traffic, where thousands have queued to register with Centrelink and where being able to buy toilet paper is seen as a life victory.

People arriving from overseas are forced into a fortnight’s quarantine, cruise ships are blocked from docking, medicos board them at sea to provide assistance, hospitals ramp up capacity, state borders are blocked and police warn people not to sit in parks. The government that just subsidised six million private sector salaries for six months has provided free childcare for all-comers.

On television you see a field hospital erected in New York’s Central Park, military vehicles clear coffins from Italian hospitals and the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, running his country via Skype, while ill, in isolation at Downing Street.

You need to draw breath and plan your next steps but every day there is another development. Difficulties we never contemplated are on us fast. As one business figure put it, we are living in dog years. We need to discern clarity about a way forward. Instead of ­resigning ourselves to six months of job-destroying, business-busting, education-shredding, society-sapping and soul-destroying shutdown, we need to focus on how we can start our march back to normality.

There has been too much grandstanding and nitpicking as governments have struggled to ­respond. A lot of people with permanent public sector salaries and/or no experience in running anything were overly eager to shut everything down to prevent the spread of the virus.

Balance, proportionality and sustainability have been the key factors for governments and, ­despite overreach in enforcement and rhetoric, they have marshalled us into a pretty good position. We have suppressed infections and controlled the spread, so far.

We need to focus sharply on how we can recover and reanimate from this, and begin planning. This is vital because businesses, small and large, and families, rich and poor, are being pushed to the brink. Spending almost every hour of the past month absorbing information from policymakers, scientists, practitioners, educators and other experts, I am convinced we should not allow ourselves to be captive to events. Let me list some areas for hope.

We need to get more kids back to school to redress an over-reaction. The advice from the Chief Medical Officer has always been that having kids at school is best for them and society — but teachers’ unions and state governments have been overly eager to empty our schools.

So if our rate of new infections remains flattened, we must ­encourage children to get back to school next term, to return to some sense of normality. The virus is not a serious threat to children, vulnerable teachers can be catered for and if there is any evidence of breakouts, we can close schools quickly — on the bright side, schools now are well prepared to deliver home-based learning.

The drug hydroxychloroquine, used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is proving extremely effective in preventing COVID-19 patients from developing life-threatening lung infections. Family practitioner Vladimir Zelenko has treated more than 600 ­patients with the drug in New York in recent weeks and reports excellent results at a cost of $US20 ($33) per five-day treatment — Zelenko says only four patients have needed hospitalisation.

The New York Times has reported a Chinese study where ­fevers broke earlier in 31 corona­virus patients treated with ­hydroxychloroquine and none developed serious symptoms, while four patients in the control group went on to suffer complications. Health Minister Greg Hunt has bolstered supplies of this drug for treatment of hospitalised coronavirus patients. Supplies of the drug are stretched in Australia because, as the Australian Pharmaceutical Society has confirmed, doctors and dentists have been prescribing the drug for themselves and family in case of infection.

Antibody testing through finger pinpricks will be a cheap and quick form of testing that will revolutionise how we check workforces and vulnerable groups. Governments and industries need to consider how this can be used to protect workforces and customers, and help restart enterprises.

Larisa Labzin, of the University of Queensland, wrote about this in The Conversation: “It will largely depend on being able to say who is safe from contracting the coronavirus … and who still needs to stay out of harm’s way. A blood test … would be a crucial aid.” It is not far off. As Deborah Cornwall has reported in this newspaper, biomedical company Cellmid is already rolling out the rapid diagnostic test that chief executive Maria Halasz says can identify COVID-19 antibodies within two to four days of infection.

These developments should help us refocus our attention on who is vulnerable in this pandemic — it is almost exclusively the elderly and those with existing health problems. We need to consider thorough and innovative ways to ring-fence and protect the vulnerable from infection while the rest of society gets back to work — this will be complex and expensive but nowhere near as costly or disruptive as the self-induced coma we are enduring now.

While we must be prepared for six months of pain and misery, we cannot be resigned to it. We need to be as energetic and innovative as possible to shorten this period, because every day of sclerosis is killing someone’s future.