Save the Covid triumphalism — we’ve been lucky

When we succeed, we tend to think it’s mainly owing to our effort and skill rather than to chance or factors entirely beyond our control.

A nurse prepares the Pfizer/BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine in a hospital in Glasgow, Scotland. Picture: AFP

One year on from the first coronavirus infection in Australia, we have done a remarkable — almost world-beating — job at containing the virus, it seems. COVID-19 deaths are among the lowest per capita in the world, cases have slowed to barely a trickle.

Epidemiologist Tony Blakely forecast 134,000 would die without lockdown. In May economists Richard Holden and Bruce Preston assumed about 225,000, almost 1 per cent of the population, would have died without our tough response. So far only 909 have died from or with COVID-19.

Indeed, total respiratory deaths in Australia were lower in 2020 than 2019, according to the ABS’s latest figures, which is an extraordinary achievement amid a deadly respiratory pandemic.

“Through the actions of everyday Australians, we have successfully prevented a third wave of infections, a rare achievement given the significant increase in global cases,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said last week, echoing the relentless triumphalism about our “response”.

In reality, we’ve been lucky. We have far less control over the virus than we think.

In the 1970s American psychologist Ellen Langer coined the term “illusion of control” to describe our misplaced sense of agency over our lives. When we succeed, we tend to think it’s mainly owing to our effort and skill rather than to chance or factors entirely beyond our control.

The pandemic has illustrated how deeply ingrained and pervasive the illusion is writ large.

In reporting and analysis of the pandemic every outcome is ascribed variously to the genius or sins of government. Deaths and case counts are compared across nations with wildly different geographies, climates, populations, legal frameworks and starting points, with differences ascribed to “how they handled the virus”.

Chance, which governs so much in life, doesn’t rate a mention.

In April last year Time magazine lauded Greece’s “success” at controlling the virus in contrast to the failure of Turkey, which had only locked down the over-65s.

“Experts say both the stringency of those measures, and the way Greeks have largely abided by them, have been key to Greece avoiding the worst ravages of the global pandemic,” Time said.

Deaths have since surged to about 5600, despite, presumably, the same quality of government restrictions and the same level of vigilance in complying with them. Greece now has 84 per cent more deaths per capita than Turkey.

“Czech Republic has lifesaving COVID-19 lesson for America: Wear a face mask,” blasted a headline in USA Today at about the same time. The Czechs, too, through their supposed wisdom, had managed to keep COVID-19 deaths to about 140, a tiny fraction of those in France, Britain and Sweden, by forcing people to wear masks.

Fast-forward a few months, though, and more than 15,000 Czechs have died of COVID-19, 50 per cent more than Sweden on a per capita basis — a country that is routinely attacked for not shutting businesses and forcing its citizens to wear masks.

Advocates of lockdowns through most of 2020 insisted Sweden could only be compared with Norway and Denmark, which each had endured fewer deaths from COVID. As Denmark “loses control” of the virus, Finland, with very few deaths, is now the favoured comparator.

We’re told contact testing and tracing are the gold standard to fighting COVID-19, yet Japan, with among the lowest death rates in the world, has conducted fewer tests per capita than Rwanda. For every one million Japanese, just over 50,000 have had a test, compared with 490,000 per million in Australia. Low levels of Japanese deaths from COVID are typically attributed to their “cleanliness” — yes, all 130 million of them.

It should be clear by now the virus doesn’t care much about policies.

The New York Times recommended “double masking” last week, for that little bit of extra safety. Whether you wear one or two masks, whether passengers on flights from Adelaide to Brisbane “mask up” when they enter NSW airspace, as required by law, isn’t material.

Dr Martin Lally, a New Zealand economist who has analysed the cost of “saving lives” from COVID in New Zealand and Australia, said he couldn’t find a statistical relationship between the stringency of a government’s measures and outcomes. Rather, a country’s population density and how many days had elapsed between its first death and Europe’s first death — in France on February 15 — had a much stronger relationship.

Dr Lally also noticed that island nations such as Iceland, Australia, Cyprus and various Caribbean countries had much lower death rates, regardless of their policies.

The idea that Queensland’s health response has been any better than France’s, or Victorians are more innately health-conscious than the French, is absurd.

About 15,000 Australians — often young adults — died from Spanish flu a century ago, which, while shockingly high, was the second-lowest death rate in the world after Uruguay. Was that because Australia was a remote island, or because Australians and their health officials are consistently brilliant, across the ages, at fighting viruses?

We want to believe our actions make a big difference, but that doesn’t make it true. Unfortunately, many of those actions are very costly for certain industries and businesses, and have required public borrowing on the scale of a world war.

On this Australia Day, let’s celebrate our remoteness, which for now, it seems, has protected us from millions of deaths abroad.