Enough! Can we please just get on with living
Covid should be background noise by now, but politicians and media persist in scaremongering.
Imagine a virus so virulent that it could turn the hardest fiscal conservative into a bleeding-heart spendthrift. This pernicious disease might transform an open borders compassionista into an anti-immigration isolationist or convince radical green left activists to endorse a jackboot approach to street protesters.
Perhaps this bug would disrupt synapses so badly that a clever and robust nation would be reduced to a dysfunctional collection of frightened nanny states. It might infect our media, ending their adversarial ways and having them, instead, join the political class in mutually beneficial campaigns of fear and hysteria.
Such a virus does exist, of course. In this country, Covid-19 has messed with our minds and our politics far more than our respiratory systems.
Sure, we did well, largely keeping the disease away from our shores, and suppressing it until we obtained vaccines. But even if you do not think we over-egged the threat last year, it is impossible to deny the over-reaction in the second half of this year.
There is a minuscule risk to the majority, the vulnerable were vaccinated long ago, broader vaccinations now stretch to 90 per cent of the eligible population, and treatments are vastly improved. Yet so many do not want to surrender a sense of crisis.
What are we waiting for – a formal surrender from the virus? Or perhaps a government guarantee that when we shuffle off this mortal coil it will be from dementia, pneumonia, cancer, influenza, or heart disease – anything but Covid-19?
The pandemic should be background noise to us now. Yet we hear of little else – Delta strain, Omicron variant, vaccination rates, children infected, and borders blocked.
Hysteria stops people from thinking. They say and do very silly things.
In the Barossa Valley, boomer patrons at a music event were warned not to dance, and to keep to their own picnic rugs, lest they spread the virus along with the milk of human kindness. Organisers switched the dancing music to mid-afternoon and flipped the warm-up music till late at night, to lower the temptation to tango.
At 10pm, health department officials ordered all bin lids to be flipped open and left open because some worry wart was concerned by all the hands touching bid lid handles. You simply cannot be too careful with Covid.
At various times over the past 18 months it has been illegal to dance or sing in most states, and drinking alcohol while standing has been illegal. If this news ever found its way to Kabul, the Taliban would have been impressed.
They would have been less amused that for a time in Queensland it was illegal to dance at a wedding but perfectly lawful to cross the road and engage in group sex at a brothel.
In Sydney, brothel patrons were fined for not wearing appropriate protection – face masks!
If it’s not on, it’s not on.
How politicians and chief medical officers have kept straight faces while telling us to duck footballs, beware of pizza boxes, sit down to drink, stay away from the beach, or wear masks while walking alone in the park is beyond me. It turns out that hypochondria and nanny state tendencies run at least as deep in our national psyche as anti-authoritarian larrikinism.
The Jolly Swagman did not jump into the billabong after all. He went into isolation and applied for Legal Aid.
Nearly two years into this pandemic, the irrational fearmongering remains strong. For many, the panic about a new variant – the 13th variant – has not been tempered by evidence this strain is less harmful to our health than earlier strains, including Delta.
We are dealing with a disease that has a case fatality rate of 0.01 per cent in Australia for anyone under the age of 60 – and that is after more than a year without vaccines. But media and politicians such as Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk deliberately stoke fears about unvaccinated children. Unvaccinated they might well be. But at risk they are not. Yet, animated by the Omicron variant, shock jocks and television news bulletins are back to sensationalist reports of single infections – single infections of people with no symptoms. This repeats the idiocy early last year when a Sydney Morning Herald article warned of a new Covid strain being particularly worrisome because it produced no detectable symptoms – imagine a virus so dangerous that it does not make you sick.
Children are still missing school because of isolated infections, even though the virus will not harm them, and all their teachers and most of their parents are vaccinated. In South Australia, healthy adults who are vaccinated and have tested negative are isolating for seven days lest they later test positive to a disease highly unlikely to harm them even if they were unvaccinated.
After all we have been through, all we have learned, an unsustainable zero-Covid mentality prevails. And it does enormous damage – socially, economically, and to our liberty.
In Perth, they lose an Ashes test match because they would rather “keep safe” from a disease for which all of the travelling parties have been vaccinated. The only people whose safety has been enhanced are the English batsmen, spared two innings on a bouncy Perth wicket.
We should not forget that all the while, in Perth, two Melbourne men remain in prison serving time for the heinous crime of crossing state borders to watch the Demons win the AFL grand final.
As a nation, we are about as relaxed and comfortable as a health bureaucrat in a mosh pit.
Should we be in awe of the new-found patience and selflessness of the young, or despair at their compliance and self-harm? They have the least to fear from the virus and the most to lose from draconian responses, yet in the main they are not marching in the streets.
Have they been cowed by years of global warming propaganda, conditioning them to existential anxiety, programming them to abandon scepticism, and priming them unquestioningly to take instructions from “experts”? Perhaps schools, universities and media have failed to inform them that pandemic models have proven to be just as alarmist and disconnected from reality as the climate change models.
I am old enough to remember the young taking to the streets to demand rights and freedoms, opposing conscription, condemning wars, or demanding the right to live their own sexuality.
These past two years, the young have huddled at home, masks on and sanitiser at hand, while receiving welfare and tut-tutting others protesting for basic liberty.
Try to imagine the threat Covid-19 in any of its current or future variants poses to healthy people in their teens, 20s or 30s. Boredom is deadlier.
Yet they comply. They defend the massive government intrusions that forbid them from mingling, dancing or revealing their faces. They “Stand with Dan” and celebrate a bizarre Covid esprit de corps.
Are they so considerate that they are prepared to disrupt their lives, jeopardise their studies and careers, and cauterise their love lives, to ensure they will not carry the virus home to parents or grandparents? Are the young of today willing to sacrifice two years or more of their prime – and wear the burden of paying back unprecedented levels of government debt – so they can help to protect the elderly, who happen to be vaccinated anyway?
No doubt some selflessness is at play. Surely all of us have been desperate for vaccines to be developed and applied to our parents and other vulnerable people.
But the miracle of 2021 is that this has happened, already – so what are we waiting for?
The disease will be with us for years, perhaps forever. Just another endemic disease that will do damage to some but can be managed with ongoing vigilance rather than overblown interventions.
People suffer, waiting for knee replacements or other “elective” surgery, while we blow billions of dollars on endless Covid testing and retesting. Governments impose endless restrictions on frightened populations.
This week, the Queensland Premier became the Donald Rumsfeld of pandemic management when she cited a version of his “unknown unknowns” to justify her Omicron paranoia. “It is very worrying about what we do not know about this variant,” Palaszczuk said. “The fact that countries have closed their borders indicates to me it is far more serious than Delta,” she continued.
Best keep the Sunshine State closed off forever. You never know what might turn up.
It is starting to dawn on me that what we are seeing is the inevitable conclusion of the big government model. We now demand that governments provide defence, law and order, healthcare, education, retirement income, workers compensation, broadband, disability care, unemployment benefits, social housing, mental health support, public broadcasting, child care, in vitro fertilisation, abortion, euthanasia, suicide prevention, parental leave, domestic violence leave, dining vouchers, border passes, and lord knows what else.
We also want them to control the climate of the planet and improve the weather patterns on our continent.
So why would we not expect governments, also, to ensure that we live forever?
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