The escalating sense of fear around the coronavirus crisis partly reflects the rising number of cases in Australia and dramatic decisions taken by other governments around the world. But it also reflects a struggle by our own government to reassure Australians it knows what it is doing.
Until late last week, the Morrison government had responded relatively effectively to the crisis with well-balanced health measures and a substantial stimulus package that embraced exactly the kind of fiscal policy the Coalition had been decrying for years.
On Friday, however, the government began to lose control, first with Morrison’s mishandled post-COAG media conference and then, over the weekend, in a disastrous interview by the chief medical officer (and incoming Health Department secretary) Brendan Murphy and Health Minister Greg Hunt.
The repeated instances of mixed messages over basic questions even had Malcolm Turnbull publicly criticising the government.
There are two separate problems bedevilling the government’s response. One is that, for all the talk of “flattening the curve”, the strategy behind the government’s response isn’t being explained effectively.
Why, many in the media were wondering on Friday, isn’t the ban on gatherings of more than 500 people being implemented immediately, rather than on Monday? Conspiracy theories circulated on Twitter about Hillsong, and Morrison’s own professed eagerness to go to the footy didn’t help.
As Hunt explained yesterday, the ban had been brought forward ahead of when the government’s health advisers recommended it be introduced. But for many in the media, and for many public health figures, that’s not good enough — it should have been imposed immediately, along with a suite of other draconian measures.
This is worth teasing out, because it points to some unpalatable truths of a kind we might have to swallow more of as this crisis worsens. Policymakers have an array of options for responding to the crisis. What measures they land on will reflect multiple considerations.
Saving lives and preventing illness is the primary goal, but there are a range of other considerations as well — relative efficacy, health sector resourcing, economic and social impacts and an awareness that this crisis will likely last for months.
Locking down the whole country, or major cities, Italian-style, is an option, but one that would plunge the country into an even deeper recession that it already faces, causing a big rise in unemployment and an array of potentially systemic problems such as widespread mortgage defaults and ensuing damage to the financial system.
From a public health perspective, such outcomes are less important than the lives that would be saved via less transmission, and a health system better able to cope with lower numbers of infected. But policymakers and political leaders don’t have the luxury of viewing things purely from a public health perspective — they have to weigh up multiple factors.
It’s easy for epidemiologists and academics to issue warnings of disaster and demand lockdowns, and even easier for journalists to share them, but politicians like Scott Morrison don’t have the luxury of being able to act purely to achieve one goal.
And if that sounds like its putting economic considerations ahead of, or even on the same level as, saving lives, remember we do that every single day whenever we allocate finite resources to different ends — we could spend more money on health, or on safer infrastructure, or on better social services, but choose to direct it to other ends we also believe are important. It’s why there’s an official valuation of a human life for policy development purposes. This crisis only provides a starker demonstration of that basic challenge of policymaking.
But none of that is being communicated either by politicians or by the senior health official. The politicians are insistent that they are relying on the advice of experts; the experts are insistent the politicians are doing what they are telling them. But this leaves both exposed when the media demand certainty and the implementation of more rigorous measures advocated by public health experts outside the policymaking process.
The fault isn’t entirely the media’s: when the chief medical officer gives a major television interview and is unable to say clearly whether people should stop shaking hands or going to the movies, it undermines the credibility of the government. Greg Hunt trying to blame journalists — Scott Morrison was blaming panic buying on media misreporting this morning as well — also doesn’t help.
The second problem relates more to the nature of this government.
Any government would struggle to balance the challenge of dealing with complexity at a time when the public and the media are demanding simplicity and certainty. But it’s particularly problematic for a government that, for the entire time since Scott Morrison became prime minister, has been focused only on the political and not on policy.
As PM, Morrison hasn’t been interested in any significant policy problem — not wage stagnation, or the slump in business investment, not the productivity crisis, nor the collapse in trust in government, and certainly not key policy problems like climate change or energy. His focus has only been on political threats and opportunities.
Faced now with a series of diabolical policy challenges, Morrison and the government he leads — including a public service that has been systematically bullied, abused and ignored by the Coalition — must now flex long-disused policy muscles and switch out of political mode to actual leadership.
It’s clearly been a struggle. Morrison couldn’t surrender his carefully confected suburban dad persona for a single moment to acknowledge a major crisis on Friday, when he insisted he’d be going to the footy until Peter Dutton’s positive test prompted him to abandon the idea because it might be “misrepresented” (?). His declaration yesterday that we’d get through this if “Australians keep being Australian” may as well have been a yell of “Aussie Aussie Aussie”.
It certainly didn’t dispel the lingering fear that Morrison isn’t up to it, that there’s nothing behind that ever-present smirk, that the confected persona hides emptiness. But Australia desperately needs Morrison to succeed in this.
With respect to mortgages, given that banks can borrow money that is practically free, they should be able to freeze endangered mortgages for six months without doing serious damage to their financial situation.
A household that is running on empty by payday needs all the help it can get if the wage earners – or their employers – have to go into shutdown.
“the confected persona hides emptiness”
Scottie has proven himself to be political hologram, just like Sun King Donald.
Morrison is not losing control, he`s never been in control, Rupert Murdoch is and always has been controlling this government since he sacked Turnbull he assumed total leadership helped by the shock jocks on radio 2GB and other complicit commercial media, this is Murdochs government and if Scomo `s polling drops Murdoch will replace his with his much-preferred Peter Dutton, this government is just a policy vacuum, all Scomoever does is announce he`s doing something as if an announcement will fix the problem but all ways in the future much like his bullshit surplus if smirking would fix problems Australia would be a world leader.
And hopefully the housing price bubble can be quarantined/immunized and a permanent freezing out of a fair roof over your head section of the population, can fix the problem ?
Again, unbloodybelieveable, if it wasn’t for the record of demonstrated incompetence by Mor…on and this government (now roping in Murphy :- conflicting “measures” that are changing by the day = “chasing a bolted horse on a moonless night”?). To be putting commerce before the public welfare, whatever happened to erring on the side of caution?
Then there’s the incurious media, to the point of complicity (why wasn’t Coal-ition publicist and press secretary Viellaris on Insiders, in the presence of such “our very good Health Minister” Hunt?), why aren’t they asking questions about this virus? Like :-
1) At what stage is Covus19 actually communicable – that we can be treated as guinea pigs at the coal face?
2) If people presented last week for testing, got the “all clear”, went out and mixed with carriers after, couldn’t they be presenting this week as carriers themselves?
3) Those crowds at the likes of the football and for tickets to the Grand Prix, was there a carrier of two amongst them?
4) Why is it more contagious today (when crows of 500 are “discouraged”) than yesterday (when crowds of more than 500 were all right)?
5) Why isn’t this virus stalking and “catching a lift”, on public transport, to work, schools, and anywhere else where people are congregating today?
6) “Typhoid Mary” was loner – how long did it take the “authorities” to track her down – how many of them are out here now?
crows of 500
Those crows are everywhere!
Who’s counting ….. besides Mr Jones?
Steady Klewso, steady.
This virus has actually been out and about since a gas conference in Singapore, in November 2019 where it was shared around like a plate of savories.
The British man who ended up being called the Super spreader , went skiing in France and gave it to about 5 people there, a couple in London(?) then his doctor and nurse in Brighton. He only went into isolation when threatened with incarceration. And so this infection has been in the UK since then, and at the time hadn’t been identified.
The Seattle delegate to the gas conference went home and shared it, the unknown virus there.
Now, Boris is doing an unethical experiment with the population of the UK and I believe that Trump is doing the same in the US.
Why?
I think that both narcissists can see no problem with having a whole swathe of vulnerable people die, and if they are not tested for COVID19 before their death certificates are issued they will not be counted as a fatality from COVID19.
I watched the Insiders on Sunday, and, I think that attempting to explain how statistical and epidemiological modelling works is probably, too hard for a 10 minute slot even though David Speers did a good interview.
Why did Brendan Murphy shake hands? He knew his hands were clean and so he wasn’t sharing Cold 19 and after shaking hands, prior to go on the program, he did not touch his face and probably he washed his hands again.
Greg Hunt is facile and shallow, an archetypal politician, he was not properly across his information and thus muddying the waters rather than clarifying anything.
Yes, Klewso we are part of a big experiment, which currently is working.
We are/ have isolated anyone coming from overseas, because the US and UK are letting the virus rip through their population, and it seemed to be one of the biggest vectors.
In NSW alone, there had been 21.000 tests performed for 177 positives.
Did you read about an Australian skiing group who contracted COVID19 in Aspen?
The panic of at least one of the group blaming contaminated surfaces and the previous person staying there? I would have also refused to be tested in the US for COVID19 because their testing is much less accurate than the one Australia is using. The rest of the procedure of isolation was sensible.
I am sure that they were tested as soon as they got back and most likely wore masks or scarves over their faces to minimize possibly infecting anyone else, on the plane.
Basically, if we can control the rate of infection whilst shielding the vulnerable, then Australia’s health system which is one of the best in the world, won’t have to go down the path of choosing who gets a ventilator or even ECMO (Heart and Lung Bypass) on the basis of age., such as Italy.
As for the bastards that think, just let COVID19 rip, they surely should not be considered or given an ICU bed.
As for the completely extremely irresponsible who used raw numbers out of China and Iran to extrapolate out to a mortality rate of 3% or higher to panic the toilet paper purchases.
Who in their right mind would go,” a third world heath system, an expensive testing kit, of course they are only going to test the people with symptoms and give them a bed and so, the figures of confirmed cases and deaths rates” simple calculation, not. There has been no testing to determine the percentage of the population who are asymptomatic with 19 as well.
When you have that number and then you can determine the actual mortality rate for a 3rd world health system, not ours.
And so, Klewso shake hands if you wish, don;t touch your face before, you wash your hands again.
Typhoid Mary was asymptomatic and a carrier, there is not proven carrier states.
Sorry about the tickets!
Is “symptomatic” all that relevant here? Some people are showing different symptoms to others across the spectrum – and have been since before it was first diagnosed.
Eg. :- “(last week) If the son and heir came home from school with the sniffles (kissed Granma on the way through the door, and grabbed himself a black pudding for an afternoon snack : as per usual), what would the family have done? If he didn’t get worse overnight -> put him on the “antibodies” train the next morning and packed him off to St Edmund of East Anglia Primary for another daily dose of childhood resistance…..?” …. Far be it from me to label him “Corona Pugsley”, but some people…..?
I was due to go to a concert by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night, but it was cancelled Saturday afternoon. All WASO concerts are cancelled to the end of April.
I notice that tickets for ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ are still on sale for next week in Melbourne (at least I get to the point where I put in my credit card details).
I’m going to a film this afternoon, but usually there are fewer than 10 patrons at the sessions I attend.
The British government’s strategy appears to be letting the infection rip, and isolating only the vulnerable elderly and sick. CORVID-19 has a very low to negligible mortality rate in most of the population, and as a result herd immunity would develop fairly quickly causing the infection to burn out after infecting up to 70% of the population, and without causing stress on the health system or the economic downturn due to a lockdown.
Hopefully, they’re right.
Do we know whether we can develop immunity?
A couple of pieces in the Guardian from folk who should know what’s what say that Brit.Gov. strategy is flawed. They suggest that “herd immunity ” is do-able via vaccines rather than viruses.
Probability of overwhelming health services as a result of “let it rip” approach is another concern.
The main flaw in the Limey herd immunity ‘strategy’, MAC, is the proponents, such as the Health Secretary (the Hunt equivalent) and the CMO (the Murphy equivalent) are talking through their hats.
This became plain when the ‘Chief Immunologist’ wrote to the ‘messengers’, and said this;
“In a letter to the Health Secretary, Sir Patrick and Professor Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical officer, the British Society for Immunology (BSI) warned there could be “severe consequences” of infecting large numbers of people when knowledge of the virus was still so limited. “We don’t yet know if this novel virus will induce long-term immunity in those affected as other related viruses do not,” said Arne Akbar, the society president. “Therefore it would be prudent to prevent infection in the first place.”
To reiterate; “….other RELATED viruses DO NOT”.
You’d think the CMO might know about virus ‘TYPES’, and flippin’ well ask……ooh, say, an IMMUNOLOGIST!!
The idea is so bad it is the plot of a South Park episode. We’re dealing with people with less medical knowledge than animators.
> The British government’s strategy appears to be letting the infection rip, and isolating only the vulnerable elderly and sick.
> …
> COVID-19 has a very low to negligible mortality rate in most of the population
That at least may be true, however (according to a Tweet thread I have seen by a Vancouver doctor) it doesn’t mean NO mortality for younger ones. Dr “Older than he looks” talked of death to twenty something year olds with no co-morbitities or obvious conditions.
> Hopefully, they’re right.
They might be, but here is why I think not, and flattening the curve is important. It appears 80% of the population who get it will be ok. Symptoms will vary from “a cough and a bit of a fever” to “don’t require oxygen & will take 4 weeks to fully recover”.
About 13% to 15% will need oxygen, some just with nasal prongs, others with face masks or HFNP, etc
The rest need critical care, with tubes, drugs, the works.
The UK has maybe 64,000,000 population. So assuming 1/2 the population catches COVID-19 very quickly, and my stats were 10 times too pessimistic because most of them were younger, there will be a demand for about of 640,000 beds that have at least oxygen delivery but many needing much more.
Now there are about 142,000 NHS hospital beds in the UK, so something’s got to give. Remember some % of medical staff will be sick, unavailable, or needed for other stuff. Other patients will fill some beds.
So what are they going to do? Triage is such an innocent word for something so ugly. Where will they set the age bar for something so messed up? Will it be 80, or will it slide right on down to 55? Boris won’t like that.
I don’t agree, Bernard. Most of the enforcement response must be operationalised at the state and territory levels. The federal government just needs to coordinate responses, handle borders, prime the economy as best it can and get its act together to deliver a coherent message — but the health control is principally with the jurisdictions.
Today, the three adjacent SE jurisdictions (NSW, Vic and ACT) declared emergency powers, about three to four weeks ahead of when they’ll absolutely need them (i.e. when the infection rate has doubled and redoubled to thousands of reported cases.) That will give them the ability to quarantine buildings, blocks, suburbs, checkpoint highways and so on — which is precisely the regionally-targeted approach to work best for a spread-out, regionalised country like Australia where 63% of the population is located in only 15 cities.
If applied early, it’ll be lower cost and more effective than simply throwing economic stimulus at a problem that won’t go away.
At the moment (and if its reporting can be believed), China has managed to curb its outbreak at (presently) under 90,000 reported cases, with a population of 1.4 billion.
If Australia with its population of 26 million, hits 100,000 cases then we’d be doing 53 times worse than China. If even ten percent of those cases were serious then that’d be 10,000 beds out of the 100,000 beds we have nationally…
In other words, at 100,000 cases, our medical system would be well and truly over-run.
But SARS-Cov-2 doubles its infection at about every six days, which without effective intervention, would see 100,000 reported cases in Australia by early May.
The current health response is the right one. For that matter, the border management is probably right too.
The economic response seems okay — it’s just the messaging that’s questionable.
That’s poor spin, not loss of control. And it’s recoverable provided that multijurisdictional health enforcement gets its act together.
I think he is just tying it all together with his narrative that the government is really bad and not doing enough across various areas. I tend to agree with that broad point.
But I don’t think the response as a whole is awful either. Always room for improvement in hindsight, and there are arguments one could make about the adequacy of the stimulus, but we aren’t overrun with infections. A basically adequate job, so far.
With ample examples of crap responses to the crisis around the world I just can’t get too mad about it.
Not that it should be beyond criticism, of course, a little perspective helps though. At least we aren’t Indonesia, their leaders were banking on God protecting them. We have problems like whether the stimulus will work well enough, panic buyers, Tom Hanks going nuts with his Vegemite, and so on.
Draco wrote: I think he is just tying it all together with his narrative that the government is really bad and not doing enough across various areas. I tend to agree with that broad point.
I don’t love the current government either, Draco, but there’s no sense in which you expect a bunch of lawyers, accountants and student politicians turned career salespeople to actually be good at handling a pandemic crisis. When would they have educated and trained to do so?
That capacity must be designed, developed and tested within the Australian health sector itself. If it is (and it was, more than ten years ago), all we need is for our politicians to fund it, handle the key messaging, smooth any speed-bumps, minimise the grand-standing and rock-chucking and get the hell out of the way.
Whatever other incompetence it has evidenced, the present government seems to be rapidly coming to terms with the need to do that, and that’s really all I ask of it on this matter.
For journalists though, I would ask that they do some real epidemiological research before they start firing off their politically-biased fearmongering, because their messaging is just as much at fault.
Bernard’s a great researcher, but I believe he made the same mistake David Spears did on Insiders last Sunday: asking superficial questions and firing off kneejerk remarks before he understood the problem.
For context (and not specifically related to your comments, Draco) here’s the problem as best I understand it…
At baseline transmission rates, a single patient on average may infect around 2 to 2.8 other people. Allowing for incubation times (still being worked out), that produces a contagion doubling rate of about six days.
That still doesn’t sound like much and in the early weeks it’s not. But like compound interest, it starts to gallop over time. If we had 250 infections last week then without intervention we’d have over 100,000 by early May. By late June, without changing how we act, the number of new infections would be more than the total population of Australia — i.e, everyone who could have been exposed and infected by then, would have been.
For comparison, the last global pandemic was the ‘Spanish’ flu in 1918. Then, an estimated 40% of Australians contracted it, and some 15,000 died of it — and that was with a national population of 5 million. Infection and mortality rates are different with each pandemic, but the economic and social impact of that flu was huge — it nearly tore an already war-weakened nation apart.
But infection numbers and mortality don’t tell the whole story. Our health system has a limited capacity, and not a lot of ability to handle a big, bursty overflow at national scale. If the serious infection rate exceeds that capacity then medical professionals will have the horrible task of choosing who’ll get the beds and oxygen and who’ll be left to die today while the virus does whatever it wants elsewhere.
Our public health system works, but we don’t want to load it like that. So all we can do is slow down the doubling rate by whatever means, extinguish it in such locations as we can, keep operating the economy as best we can, and buy time until we have vaccines.
Yet until we have test-kits at scale, we can’t know who is actually infected, so we have to infer it from symptoms and contact. it’s not precise, but it’s still better than we’ve had in the past because at least we can test and we understand better how viruses work.
And until we have vaccines we also can’t pre-emptively douse infections — we have to work by creating fire-breaks between hot-spots and let them burn out.
But the economy itself is a social energy system the virus attacks. If you don’t defend the economy, the virus can cripple it. However, if you do respond to the virus, that can also hamper the economy. So you have to use an adaptive strategy: changing behaviour locally and over time to maximise bang for buck: minimising the harm while maximising your ability to function and recover.
That’s imprecise and constantly changing; it’s why you don’t necessarily get consistent messaging right away on hand-shaking, restaurants, theatres and so on.
But since this virus seems mainly transmitted through contact (as opposed through food, water, waste etc..) the most important control is how many people contact one another, and how intimate they get.
That requires accurate, near real-time infection data, national coordination and adaptive modelling that takes into account logistical issues like test-kits, hospital beds, personnel,medicines; health intelligence like demographics, population movements, infections, mortality, morbidity; and economic information like sectoral business activity and employment rates.
This is work that can only be done by a multidisciplinary team of epidemiologists, representatives of hospitals, GPs, economists and so on… and it needs to be done adaptively, consistently and nationally across all jurisdictions, and in coordination internationally so that what is done locally doesn’t undermine or become undermined by what is being done internationally.
Our politicians have no a priori expertise on this. They just need to handle the communications, monitor the economy, coordinate internationally and otherwise get out of the way. They have a role to play on the timing and implementation of key decisions, but on day to day stuff they’re more passengers than pilots, and they need the humility to acknowledge it (at least privately) while they maintain the population’s confidence and take responsibility for the stuff they can actually do.
So now is a good time to set aside political ideologies and listen to coordinated expert advice. It took some weeks, but a federal government who normally likes to bully the public sector and defy international pressure now seems to have woken up and started listening.
Meanwhile we need our journalists to move past commenting on manner and political impact, and get to the policy meat: pandemics are something of a biological civil war where everyone is a potential combatant, everyone a potential victim, and the enemy is within any or all of us. We need to be clear-eyed, kind, adaptive, honest, stop whining and dig in.
Ruv, If there’s one thing the conservatives really excel at its making silk purses out of sows ears, how much do you want for yours its a ripper.
I understand you’re being sarcastic, Braddybear, and recognise that there might be some good ideas around I don’t know about, but can’t really respond until you offer a constructive suggestion.
(And by constructive, I mean I’m looking for something new, actionable, problem-specific, testable and not simply whining or recycled doctrine.)
Do you have something? If so please fire away.
I feel some sympathy for Murphy. He is an advisor to pollies who make decisions. He was deliberately sat with his ‘chief’ pollie. Do you really expect him to make statements that have not had the tick from the chief pollie? They should have had separate appearances if you must have them both. Murphy on general stuff, Chief pollie on decision’s and poor advice communications. Murphy’s not responsible for that, pollies are. And, Speers should have prewarned on what his lines of questioning was going to be about. To try and have ‘ got-ya’ moments on an issue like this is not just silly it’s dangerous. All Speers achieved was to help undermine Murphy. Why? That’s crazy.
If you want to be a volunteer human shield, don’t let your insurance company know about your hobbies.
Agreed. This was an opportunity to get information out there, even if the exact picture is still being worked out in a rapidly-changing situation. Murphy’s response was to some degree understandable given the rapidly changing picture, and he has to be careful what he says. The “gotcha” smart-arsery of the questioning was self-indulgent and added no useful information.
Murphy started it by insisting on shaking hands on arrival for the interview. Then felt he had to justify it by saying it was ok. After being exposed by POV, an hour or later it was not ok. Murphy has lost me, a patsy for lnp.
The CMO was ripped into line when he appeared on T.V and stated that “events of more than 500 should be cancelled” at the same time as Scomo was on T.V saying there was no need to panic and he was going to the footy on friday, of course the CMO didn`t know about Scomo`s SingSong Church hosting a 10,000person fund raiser,(tax free of course) on the Saturday, it made scomo look like the fool he is so the CMO was quickly brought into line and suitably muzzled( Circa 1939 Nazi Germany) this proved Goebbels favourite saying ” if you repeat the lie often enough it becomes the truth ” I bet Scomo has a well-worn copy of Mein Kamph on his bookshelf.