Power-hungry premiers know that we’ll never eliminate Covid
It might be best for the country if the NSW lockdown fails.
It might be best for the country if the NSW lockdown fails, if it doesn’t reach the unrealistic and unsustainable goal of zero community transmissions.
Maybe the only way to convince our over-zealous politicians that they must learn to live with Covid-19 is for them to confront a situation where they cannot eliminate it, no matter what pain they impose on their communities.
Containing the virus, protecting the vulnerable, slowing the spread of infections, managing the health consequences and ensuring our health system is not overrun, these were supposed to be the aims from the start. And now, thanks to the vaccines, we must be either painfully close to adopting that approach, or already in a position to start.
Getting in the way, is politics. Most Covid-19 infections now pose a greater threat to public freedoms and economic activity than they do to public health.
In a social media video early this week, West Australian Premier Mark McGowan used the theme music from 2001 A Space Odyssey over an image of himself removing a black face mask, dramatically revealing his smug dial. The post signalled the end of WA’s mask mandate, but it also unmasked the narcissism of our power-crazed premiers.
Later in the week, with Melbourne’s cluster still in single figures, McGowan slammed his border shut on Victorians. Passengers on a plane that left Melbourne hours before the border closure, landing 15 minutes after it was shut, were offered the choice of a rock or a hard place – returning directly to Melbourne or enduring 14 days quarantine.
This has happened before and is typical of the callousness of the “zero Covid” crowd. Still, those who headed back east heard the Victorian Premier declare the next day that “you only get one chance” for a lockdown to eliminate the virus: Daniel Andrews must have been oblivious to the paradox of a single chance exercised against a fifth lockdown.
The best he could do was attempt to blame his premature elimination strategy on the failure of his northern neighbour, Gladys Berejiklian, the premier who has gone closest to running a sensible Covid-19 strategy. Her terrific record has been ruined by an extended lockdown.
The responsibility is hers, of course, but we can see how with all the other states running a zero Covid strategy, Scott Morrison getting sucked down that vortex, borders being slammed shut, and hysterical media alarming the public, Berejiklian felt compelled to follow suit.
She locked Greater Sydney down, even though it faced a situation a long way short of the “last resort” the Prime Minister had announced as the new standard.
The “last resort” edict is already redundant given Berejiklian’s lockdown and Andrews’ latest imposition on 6.5 million people after only 18 cases. It is lamentable that the PM threw the premiers the horrible concession of halving the number of Australians who can return from overseas to get them to agree to the “last resort” principle.
Given the way they have thumbed their noses at their side of that agreement, Morrison should immediately increase overseas return numbers to the previous level.
To witness what our governments are doing to us is almost incomprehensible. Political leaders love to put their stamp on a crisis, talk up threats and assume the role of protector as they seize additional powers. We understand that. But urged on by sensationalist media, encouraged by a public they have deliberately frightened, and unconstrained by opposition alternatives, they have convinced themselves that any infection is a blow against their standing, and that the only metric on which to measure their performance is the number of infections.
All the while, somewhere in the recesses of their minds must be a clutch of rational neurons that appreciate the virus will always be with us.
It is unlikely to ever go away, no matter how many times Andrews seizes his “one chance” to eliminate Covid-19 with lockdowns.
As the experts warned from the start, the virus has become endemic and the goal must be to work out how to live with it. The reality of our preparedness to do this is encouraging, even though the political and media debate suggests the opposite.
Because governments of both persuasions have been pursuing zero Covid, and timid oppositions of both persuasions have not been prepared to oppose it, most media have accepted those parameters and barracked for zero Covid too, no matter its impracticality.
Instead of encouraging debate and probing alternatives, most journalists join politicians in trying to scare the public into following instructions.
They highlight rare cases of sick young people to create a fear that the virus is lethal to everyone, regardless of age. This is alarmist and deceptive.
In NSW, the case fatality rate throughout the pandemic for people under 50 years of age is, wait for it … zero. In fact, there has been only one death under 60, so the case fatality rate for people in their 50s is 0.1 per cent. This is despite the fact young adults make up the vast bulk of infections.
The Delta variant is more contagious but less deadly than the original strain, which should be terrific news for all of us but turns out to be terrible news because it means infection numbers grow more quickly and politicians feel the need to prove themselves by quashing outbreaks. Little of this good news is reflected in the daily press conferences, political debates and media coverage – the pantomime of panic has no room for reassuring facts.
In the current NSW outbreak, 87 per cent of those infected are unvaccinated, and only 4 per cent are fully vaccinated. Again, this is comforting news because we know our most vulnerable are vaccinated; and on the rare occasions the vaccinated are infected, they are unlikely to fall ill.
More than 77 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths in Australia have been aged care patients. Most others were elderly, and three quarters of all people who have died had comorbidities. All deaths are sad and, like everyone else last year, I was terribly worried about protecting the elderly.
But now we are in a much better situation; everyone in aged care already has been offered the jab, not all have taken it up, but more than 90 per cent have been vaccinated. That is brilliant news – even if the virus ran amok now, it would not sweep through aged care homes like it did last year.
Furthermore, 75 per cent of all people over 70 have now had at least their first jab, which gives considerable protection. This is a tremendous position to be in.
Will two jabs for the over-70s be better? Sure. But given the recommendation is for a maximum of 12 weeks between jabs, we are less than three months away from having the overwhelming majority of the over-70s fully vaccinated. We might never get a rate much higher than that because some people baulk at vaccines, and we should not let them hold us back.
More than half of the over-50s have had a jab. Again, it will be better when most adults are fully vaccinated, but we are in an enviable place.
This promising status is seldom spoken about in optimistic terms, which tells us more about politics than public health. Labor, Greens, the ABC and other anti-Coalition voices are focused on catastrophising the vaccine rollout to damage Morrison and his government.
This is not to argue the rollout should not have been more efficient; clearly, the government has mishandled the AstraZeneca warnings and, with the benefit of hindsight, should have done more to access other vaccines earlier. But talking down our levels of protection, exaggerating our risks, and chasing an unattainable zero Covid goal does not help – it only leads us to lockdowns.
The premiers blame their lockdowns on Morrison’s rollout problems, so he spends whatever it takes to keep everyone cashed up while normality is suspended, and on it goes. Alarmingly, even Berejiklian has raised a threshold of 80 per cent vaccination before making lockdowns redundant, and Andrews has talked about getting “everyone” vaccinated – these are ridiculously high thresholds.
We need to debate and decide the right level and set it as a public target. Professor Peter Collignon suggests that getting those second jabs for the over-70s and more of the over-50s might mean we could be more relaxed and kiss goodbye to further lockdowns by the middle of spring.
Still, the blunt instrument of draconian and debilitating lockdowns should not be the first choice until then. Given the highly vulnerable are largely protected, everything from localised lockdowns to travel restrictions and broader social distancing rules need to be used to slow the spread first. Last resort should mean last resort.
Instead of debating these parameters, we get nitpicking and politicking over who is responsible for the latest virus leak or public shaming for someone not wearing a mask. Many journalists demand more lockdowns, faster and harder, and they invite more rules from government about how to live our lives.
It is as though we have learned nothing in a year of better treatments, astonishing vaccine success, and isolationist harm. We are behaving as though it is July 2020.
This bears no resemblance to the Australia I have known – rather than show resilience, we demand that governments protect us from all risk, at any cost, because we refuse to face reality. And we hand the massive bill for all this to our children.
This time last year we could only dream of being in this position, yet we sheepishly refuse to take advantage of our good work and good fortune. From this point on, there can be no doubt the cure will be worse than the disease.
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