Hysteria feeds herd mentality in horror zombie satire

For hermit kingdoms like WA and SA, it’s been easy to slap on unnecessary lockdowns and pretend they have quelled outbreaks. But the reckoning will come.

Any day, one of these premiers will propose that the unvaccinated wear a badge on their chest or a tattoo on their forehead, and the zombies will applaud it.

The 2004 British cult movie Shaun of the Dead has often been reviewed as no more than a darkly humorous zombie film that is good for a few laughs. But I took a little more from it, seeing it as biting satire about the zombie-like mundanity of city or suburban life where the daily grind leads to an unimaginative and conformist existence that, in this case, was only up-ended by the arrival of real zombies, forcing the mundane heroes to break from the pack and think for themselves.

Perhaps I read too much into it, but increasingly during the pandemic it has felt like we are living through Shaun of the Dead moments where so many are treating coronavirus with mass hysteria and submission. Since arriving from Wuhan it has infected the minds of many people who have never had the virus in their veins.

The paranoia is amplified by fearmongering politicians and sensationalist media so that swathes of people stumble along in horror accepting instructions from premiers and health officials.

Instead of demanding politicians justify what overbearing threat is worth keeping our basic rights from us each and every day, people plea for gifts from premiers who might throw a morsel of our own freedom as a reward for compliance. What have we become?

Hysterical media generates alarm and demands ever more draconian restrictions, and politicians patronise populations with promises of permission to walk in the park. Like zombies, we accept this is the way of the world – Australians all let us rejoice in our dream of being Covid free, we’ve JobKeeper’s wealth for all, and we’re inert with insanity.

For clarity: this is a dangerous disease; vaccines are our lifeline that we are fortunate to have available in record time; and before they arrived this disease was a dire and horrible threat to elderly Australians and other vulnerable cohorts. The world would be a decidedly better place without Covid-19, but it has been clear for more than 18 months that we have no choice in the matter – we have to live with it, as we do with cancer, cholera and heart disease.

Australia’s early closure of international borders and implementation of hotel quarantine gave us a remarkable opportunity to bunker down, largely quelling the virus until vaccines turned up.

We now face the disease with protection.

We also know it poses only a minuscule threat to young healthy adults and children, and a slight risk for the middle-aged while it is a deadly peril for unvaccinated people over 70. If you had to deal with a deadly disease, you would take this one over something like the Spanish flu that decimated young and old alike.

Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan this week said NSW was being reckless with a “let it rip” attitude.

The average age of Covid fatalities in Australia is higher than our average life expectancy. More than 740 of our 989 Covid-19 deaths have been aged over 80, more than 914 (or 92 per cent) have been over 70. These facts are not callous – they are just facts – and we should be grateful for the sake of our young. Only one death with Covid has been recorded in someone under 20 and we know that tragic teenage loss was attributable to pneumococcal meningitis.

With this reassuring reality and vaccines aplenty we have a pathway back to normality within our grasp. But state leaders are reluctant, frozen in the face of possible culpability created by their own zero-Covid grandstanding.

Like zombies we hide at home behind the curtains, skulk outside wearing useless masks, look askance when someone clears their throat and huddle around the television to watch leaders dramatise daily statistics, admonish us or sometimes thank us for compliance. News bulletins lead with reports of elderly people dying in nursing homes from respiratory infections, a practice that could have filled every news bulletin every year if we had implemented it before Covid.

The only 80-year-old’s death that was newsworthy this week was Charlie Watts – and, no, this is not about a lack of empathy. Rather, the passing of the elderly is a sad event for families that should be respected rather than used for macabre media fodder.

The latest attempts to generate fear around the infection of children are reprehensible.

Numbers of infections are one thing, but the hospitalisations are running below 2 per cent for kids and in NSW not one child under 12 has ended up in ICU.

Labor senator Kristina Keneally turned the dial to 11 by declaring the daughter of her colleague Katy Gallagher was “desperately ill” from her Covid-19 infection. Gallagher made no such claim, her office telling reporters her daughter was “on the mend” and “recovering slowly”.

Aside from grubby politics, it is hard to fathom anyone wanting to unnecessarily frighten children and their parents. My children have been comforted throughout this pandemic with constant factual reassurances they have little to fear but they should be concerned about others, and thankfully this calm attitude has been reinforced by their school.

None of us wants our children infected with anything, and a Covid-19 diagnosis would create understandable anguish, but a rational assessment of known risks and data would tell us that, without a vaccination for either, our kids face a lower threat from Covid-19 than they do from regular influenza that routinely creates serious illness for the young as well as the old.

All too often, official media conferences and media have failed to report reassuring facts, preferring fear. They either ignore or fail to notice that over the course of the pandemic NSW and Victoria have had an almost identical number of infections (more than 21,000) but Victoria has had 820 deaths compared to 133 in NSW – the difference being because most of NSW’s infections have occurred this year and Victoria’s were last year sans vaccines.

As vaccination rates increase across the country the promise of ever lower hospitalisation and mortality rates is great. Yet alarm dominates and when you point out the promising reality the zombies turn, notice your pulse, and horde in your direction.

SA Premier Steven Marshall and friends. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

This country lost more than 1000 people to the flu in 2017 and again in 2019 and in coming weeks the national Covid-19 death toll is likely to top 1000 after about 19 months of infections. Again, all deaths are sad, but this is an incredibly modest toll for a country of 25 million people facing a global pandemic that created great trauma elsewhere in the first troublesome year without vaccines.

We are brilliantly placed to open up with high vaccination rates and perhaps lose no more people to Covid-19 in coming years than we might lose to the flu.

Every day we waste getting back to that situation is another day a child misses crucial schooling, a teenager is morose for lack of socialisation, a young adult’s formative experiences are delayed, a business’s viability is further strained, a patient’s cancer screening is forestalled, or another billion dollars of government assistance is borrowed.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan this week said NSW was being reckless with a “let it rip” attitude. He said this while 8.5 million people were locked down, many banned from their jobs, schools were closed, and people were being fined for straying too far from home or not wearing masks.

For hermit kingdoms such as WA, South Australia and Tasmania, surrounded by desert and water, with few international arrivals and little urban density, it has been the easiest play to remain Covid free, slapping on unnecessary lockdowns and pretending they quelled outbreaks. But the reckoning will come because they have set up ridiculous expectations of zero Covid that cannot be sustained. Every future infection will cause them political pain.

Which is why I argued on Sky News more than a fortnight ago that we “might soon have two Australias; NSW living with Covid and the rest with hard borders locked in paranoia”.

I suggested Prime Minister Scott Morrison needed to prevent this happening by declaring that “once any state hits 70 per cent vaccination they never get another cent for lockdowns”, and it has been encouraging to see him and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg go down that path this week.

But the pace is too slow and the resistance in SA – facing an election in March – and WA will be strong. What chance their borders will be open to NSW or Victoria?

A scene from the 2004 film 'Shaun of the Dead'.

We have companies and governments pushing for mandatory vaccinations to protect the inoculated against any risk of infection from someone who carries the very virus they are vaccinated against. To quote a famous disrupter, please explain?

Creating incentives for the vaccinated is one thing, as is mandating the jab in critical areas such as health care, aged care and even aviation. But what is the point of treating the unvaccinated as lepers when the rest of us are vaccinated? What do I care if an unvaccinated person sits next to me on the train? Is not this the eventuality for which we got the jab?

My vaccine protects me from the worst effects of the virus and I can pick it up from a vaccinated person, or pass it on myself. The communal goal of high vaccination rates makes sense but beyond fulfilling that, what should the vaccinated fear from the unvaccinated?

In SA, the government has ordered people approved by permit to enter the state, even those who are fully vaccinated, to carry out two weeks’ home quarantine, and they are instructed to display a sign on their accommodation designating their isolation status.

Any day, one of these premiers will propose that the unvaccinated wear a badge on their chest or a tattoo on their forehead, and the zombies will applaud it.