We underestimate this lunatic circus at our peril

A long queue of cars pictured at the Bondi Beach drive-through Covid testing site this week. Testing for travel has put enormous strain on pathology services. Picture: Damian Shaw

One of my friends has helped look after his dementia-afflicted father-in-law throughout the pandemic, helping him cut through the lantana of bureaucracy that poisons our every contact with medical officialdom in these magical times.

To facilitate his caring role he carries the old boy’s vaccine certificate, which came in handy when a few of us went for a drink last month, including one who’d forgotten his phone. Nobody on the door seemed bothered that according to the paperwork the fit-looking bloke in front of them was in fact an 83-year-old resident of a nursing home.

We should have screamed and pointed at him, like the last scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but we didn’t. We went in and had a beer, because we all, like everyone else in the bar, and pretty well everyone else in the country, were fully vaccinated.

Sure, we might still be able to catch the Covid from anyone, and pass it on just as easily, but I reason it’s not going to hurt much because – and this seems to be the intellec­tual stumbling block causing the simple-minded to lose their footing – the vaccines apparently stop you getting any sicker than you did in the before times, from olden-days colds and flu.

It used to be a sign of a robust work ethic to drag yourself into the office, hoping someone senior would spot the sachets of Lemsip on your desk, notice how gamely you were battling your symptoms and suggest you head home until you felt better. What crazy, runny-nosed daredevils we were.

Have we completely abandoned logic in this country? If not, will someone help me understand why, after spending billions of dollars and causing extreme inconvenience to literally every person in Australia with convoluted compliance regulations and brutal, state-sanctioned coercion, our Covid vaccination program has failed to deliver us the benefits we were promised?

Vaccines should have been sufficient to calm our fears. That’s why we were assured that once we hit fantastic, world-beating levels of vaccination, our stolen freedoms would be restored. Yet here we are, with hundreds of thousands of Australians queuing for hours to comply with the nonsensical strictures of that clown car of idiots who can’t grasp the concept of “living with Covid” they so enthusiastically espoused just moments ago.

If not tolerance of a growth in infections, what does that gormless platitude mean?

After more than 50 million tests (99.5 per cent of them negative) at a cost of $10bn, we seem as terrified as when the pandemic sky started falling in almost two years ago.

This time it’s different, though. Most people, I suspect, are not frightened of contracting the virus but of ending up in an airport motel with a couple of kids determined to kill each other and an angry partner who “said all along that going to visit your stupid parents was a mistake”, because one of the party failed a mandatory PCR examination.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk: what happened to “living with Covid?”.

And that’s thanks entirely to the continuing incompetence of our leaders, who seem capable of nothing but amplifying and distributing fear and panic, and erecting mindless obstacles to the common sense they claim to employ. We cancel our holidays, interstate and overseas trips, to avoid being ensnared in some over-promoted lunatic’s simulacrum of safety.

Look at cruise lines, which have turned and twisted like sideshow contortionists to develop the most stringent rules on sea or land to placate their many fearful, elderly passengers.

Careful to the point of absurdity, they’re still not paranoid enough for our safety tsars, who have, with no supporting evidence and uniquely among the world’s cruising nations, effectively cancelled an industry that directly employs 20,000 Australians, even as their own ill-conceived and worse-executed protocols seed infection and contemptuous disobedience into civil society.

It’s wryly amusing (as long as you’re not one of those whose holidays and family reunions have been smashed) but not surprising that we’ve reached this new level of absurdity.

The unutterably feckless management of the pandemic should have left us in no doubt that lifting restrictions would prove every bit as challenging as imposing them, and the halfwits in charge haven’t disappointed us.

They’ve thrown their hands up in defeat and abandoned their easily circumvented contact-tracing procedures, instead outsourcing the role to the most frightened among us.

I have had calls from soon-to-be-former friends informing me they had seen someone a couple of weeks ago who later discovered they had the virus (asymptomatic, of course), presumably making me a casual contact twice removed (I’m not entirely au fait with the genealogy).

The preposterous rules (sit near an asymptomatic infected person for 14 minutes and it’s casual; a minute more and it’s close: this virus floats through the air at a very leisurely pace) have caused people to swap the queues at David Jones for the much longer ones at testing stations, which, remarkably, were not prepared for the totally predictable sudden rush.

It’s impossible to prove, but is there a slim chance the case numbers are increasing so rapidly because so many people are forced, unnecessarily, to be tested before travelling to visit loved ones?

Is it possible that there are, and have been for the past 20-odd months, hundreds of thousands of asymptomatic infections among vaccinated and heretics alike, who otherwise would never have dreamed of being tested?

Again we have senior politicians and medical fruitcakes fanning the flames rather than dousing them. Even as the NSW Premier showed some old-fashioned Liberal backbone, his Health Minister was predicting 25,000 cases a day next month; then new modelling this week topped that with an admirably ambitious 200,000.

They quote case numbers in the northern hemisphere as though they’re about to hit us here: 80,000 a day in Britain, coming to a beach near you soon. Let’s ignore the fact the British winter – dark and freezing, with icy winds and sideways slashing rain, miserable, unhealthy people huddled in damp rooms (and those are the lucky ones) – is like nothing we endure in Australia.

The World Health Organisation’s Tedros Babyjesus, or whatever he’s called, joins the pollies to urge caution in its usual abundance: “Surely we have learned by now that we underestimate this virus at our peril,” he warned a WHO media briefing last week.

Really? Underestimate, you say? We’ve just fined a Sydney teenager $12,500 for not wearing a mask in a Byron Bay taxi. There are men still in prison for sneaking into the AFL grand final. I defy Teddy to name anyone in authority who has done anything but wet themselves in cartwheels of panicked over-reaction.

The backflips and tumbling come so fast they’re mesmerising. It’s like watching Simone Biles do her floor exercises after a couple of pipes of crystal meth. This week’s winner on the highlights reel was the ACT, where mask-wearing was reintroduced, presumably to pretend to protect the three or four Canberrans who remain to be vaccinated.

I won’t question masks’ efficacy, save to quote Colin Axon, a scientist who advises the British government’s SAGE committee on airborne transmission of the virus. He calls them “comfort blankets”, explaining that medical experts, with their “cartoonish” view of how particles travel, are “unable to comprehend” just how minuscule the virus is. “A Covid particle is roughly 100 nanometres,” he says.

“Material gaps in blue surgical masks”, although invisible to the naked eye, “are up to 1000 times that size; cloth-mask gaps can be 500,000 times that size”.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has some good, old-fashioned Liberal backbone.

Aerosols in the wearer’s breath “escape masks and render them ineffective”, he adds, likening virus particles’ passage through the material to firing marbles at builders’ scaffolding: “Some might hit a pole and rebound, but most will fly through.” But if it makes you feel secure, please keep pulling the grubby rags out of your pocket and popping them on as you head into Woolies.

We in the media should bear a great deal of the blame, and shame, for enabling our leaders’ relentless fearmongering. Apart from reporting their nonsense, which we are sadly obliged to do, editorialising, often by very junior reporters who haven’t seen a lot of the world, creeps into what should be straightforward news items.

It’s allowed to remain there by senior editors who celebrate a momentary spike in circulation or page views while their reputation sinks in the outside world. I suspect many readers would prefer to be given the case numbers (not that they tell us anything, unlike numbers of hospitalised and in ICU) without the hyperventilating adjectives. Just report the figures, if you must; we’ll decide for ourselves if they’re “shocking”, “terrifying” or “astonishing”.

So much of our politicians’ and bureaucrats’ bluster and ignorance has gone unquestioned by a compliant media pack that it’s hard not to suspect they will be given an easy ride on the way to next year’s federal election.

Let’s hope the journalists don’t feel obliged to take them quite so seriously again, pampering their inflated egos and hanging on their vapid promises; for by applying the same degree of scientific rigour that has informed recent public-service directions, I’ve concluded they’re all just a bit thick.

Never mind, after a couple more variants (our new measure of time passing) we’ll have the opportunity to exchange them for a different bunch of cretins.

Forget them for now, and enjoy a wary, merry Christmas.