Well there is some upside to the clear fact that COVID-19 is returning across the Western world, and that is that it is steadily, relentlessly hammering down our illusion that we have beaten this, or even come close.
We were always going to have to face this full on, and better sooner than later.
Across Europe, areas that believed themselves to have gotten through it are now re-entering lockdown. Belgium, which has played a useful role as the most honest tallier of coronavirus deaths (its numbers are sky high because it actually counts everyone who died from it, rather than excluding the very old and the untreated) is now going into very-hard lockdown, limiting people’s personal contacts to five, and in-supermarket shopping to 30 minutes.
Italy, Spain — all are starting to reflare. In the UK and the US, it might be very difficult to spot a reflaring until it is, well, virulent, because the first part of the first wave was never really tackled.
Other governments may now quite possibly envy those countries’ chaotic insouciance, as it has trained their populace to accept rapid death on a vast scale and regard any mitigation of it as a triumph. But the downside of that is the potential for a genuine tsunami of a second wave if the virus does not confer immunity.
But there is an equal and opposite problem with an early lockdown, and a collective and concerted response to it.
For it comes with the illusion that the virus can readily be defeated, simply because we want it to go away. It restores the hubristic belief that there is some necessary relationship between our desires and nature’s actions. We have only really had that belief since the invention of antibiotics and the defeat of polio.
The era when your teenage child could die from a cold contracted while walking home in the rain, or a twitch in the leg was the start of what would end in an iron lung, is still within living memory.
At its worst, this has created a sort of magical thinking, especially among the knowledge class, in which the can-do spirit of the ’80s and ’90s social movement era has been repurposed to defeat the virus (because, to echo Peter Cook, it had such great success in abolishing the global nuclear arsenal).
If we hand-make enough masks, yell at enough Karens, we’ll win.
No we won’t. The virus has already won. We’re playing defence and loss-minimisation now.
We need to look that clear in the eye if we are not to lapse into an irrationality symmetrical with the whacko right. We need to remind ourselves what the lockdown was for: not to defeat the virus, but simply to prevent the sort of US-style event that is on a par with that other US contribution to world culture — the unstoppable tyre fire.
We did stop that, and we have consequently set a hugely exacting standard for success, one we will not meet. We were always going to have to have a strategy to come out of lockdown — and Melbourne’s lockdown and the coming Sydney lockdown aren’t it. They’re just another stopgap. They deepen the magical thinking, tempting us to believe that one more will do the trick.
How can the virus be so indifferent to our desires? We now have a group of public health professionals and economists advocating for eradication. But none of the articles of this type that I’ve seen seem willing to explain the maths of this, or what they mean by eradication, which is never zero cases.
In the absence of that I worry both that such professionals are not thinking through the real social practicalities of extended lockdown, harder lockdown, etc, and factoring that in; and/or that they themselves are caught up in social policy magical thinking, which underplays the complexities of directing social life, a position strengthened by the endemic arrogance of the medical profession.
If you’ve got a case for eradication, make it — but we need the figures.
The next stage of magical thinking is full-on superstition, in which the mere mention that the virus will not be easily defeated becomes occasion for abuse. That appears to have occurred with reaction to the appearance of economist Gigi Foster on Q&A last night. Foster advocates opening up the country on a cost-benefit model.
Well, I’d prefer to hear an epidemiologist rather than an economist on that argument, but the suggestion that such a viewpoint not be heard, and that it is dangerous to do so, is aggressively stupid.
It’s a notion of words as viruses, and the non-elite public as a mass ready to be infected. We need more debate of these matters, not less. Indeed, there is no reason why the left-right divide should fall along the lockdown/non-lockdown divide.
Initially, it did, because the chaotic ideological right rolled over their anti-science position on climate to include all of medical science. But that was simply a nuisance — one continued by Josh Frydenberg’s desperate (or distracting) Thatcher-Reagan necromancy.
Now we have to face the question of what we do next. A post-lockdown strategy doesn’t mean an open up, let people die so bars can reopen idea. In fact, it demands more radical ideas for social reconstruction — in work hours, economic structures, urban processes, education — than does the deep-freeze of new lockdowns.
But I cannot see any way of proceeding now other than a sustained, detailed, widely-involved debate as to whether eradication is possible in Australia, the absolute minimum it would involve, and wide soundings and samplings about whether we want to do that.
Until we have that discussion, and commit as a nation to a sustained strategy, we are still prevaricating, hoping for a miracle, and praying to old gods of a dead politics, who have gone as silent as the grave.
Which at least clarifies the mind. I told you there was an upside.
With the current federal government in charge “a sustained, detailed, widely-involved debate” is out of the question. Morrison’s every action in every area has been toward secrecy. Those who aren’t his mates will never be given a voice in any discussion, even in the unlikely event of a discussion occurring. Commercial in confidence, the national interest, cabinet privacy, Gina Rinehart’s security expenses, all barriers to voters’ sharing in any decisions that might be under discussion by the powerful. We’re in rthe dark, and only the media are in a position to change that. But the media won’t do a thing.
If we are to have such a discussion as Guy suggests, then I think it also needs to be broadened beyond the current pandemic to take into consideration the strong possibility of future viral contagions that may be even more deadly than what we are now seeing. While it might be going a bit too far to describe pandemics as the ‘new normal’, I think there have been enough instances over the past two decades that we have to acknowledge them as a recurring part of modern life.
I fear there will be strong resistance to such an examination. It seems pretty obvious that globalisation, with its associated movement of vast numbers of people and huge volumes of trade goods, is a fundamental enabler of the rapid spread of viral infections. Any strategy for dealing with future pandemics would therefore call into question our continued commitment to the globalisation that underlies current neoliberal economic practices and their associated social and political power structures.
However; it’s quite clear that the primary aim of our political masters is to return to ‘business as usual’ as soon as possible. Good luck seeing any fundamental social changes being implemented, then.
Guy is, of course, right in the purest terms. We can only eradicate up until a point. That point is a viable vaccination or time for this virus to burn itself out. I think he is mistaking eradication of everything everywhere with eradication in Australia. To do that would require our borders to be shut. That is possible but only if we have a federal gov who stops people at the border. They have shown they aren’t too good at agreeing to that.
We can’t ‘eradicate’ the virus in Australia; we could only ‘eliminate’ it, if it were possible. Eradication means it is gone, gone from the world for ever, and that will only be possible with a vaccine that provides permanent immunity. At present, that looks very unlikely.
The virus seems to be a highly efficient multiplier. How do you imagine it might “burn itself out”, short of having no more potential hosts available.
For God’s sake Rundle, get a grip. Focus on the real crisis, man. Someone’s sending horrid texts to poor Leigh Sales’s Twitter account, and apparently her block button is broken! Virus shmirus, economic ruin shmuin…won’t somebody please think of the poor Soft-Pap-Prog-Left Taxpayer-Funded Information Classes!!
The Humanity! O the Humanity!
“Disrespecting the office of PM”? ….. As charged by SKY Smith?
Imagine a “Go Sharkies” coquettish Sales hectoring Morrison (let alone Howard and Turnbull) : the way she did Rudd or Gillard as PM?
It took a while for her to wake up to Abbott – after giggling along with him as Opposition leader, slagging off Rudd and Gillard in turn.
Anyone who ever did the hippie trail to India (ie, not flying in) noticed as they left Europe that social distancing became the norm, stricter the further one travelled east, ending inevitably with the caste system.
The medical sledgehammers of the late 20thC even had an impact on those centuries of restricted flesh-to-flesh contact though only the beguiled aspirant middle class and above seemed, momentarily , to have bought the poke.
To date there is no sign, from antibody studies and serum cultivation, that a vaccine is likely – C19 just is not that sort of virus.
It’s small wonder that this plague has occurred but interesting that the long warned of vitiation of effect due to the abuse of antibiotics, mostly, but not only, in factory farming of animals was also a one way ticket to the good old days when an impacted tooth or scratch whilst gardening could kill.
Economic collapse aside (that’s a joyride ahead for the young) there’s never been a better time to be old.
Agni – Sorry but “social distancing” as being advocated at the moment was never my experience when I did the hippy trail – LON-KTM Overland by bus three times.
I saw and experienced crowded markets, buses, trains, footpaths, cars – the lot. If you mean the wealthy were able to avoid mixing with the great unwashed apart from master-servant relationships then yes I would agree but I wouldn’t call that social distancing. And that doesn’t apply only to Asia, nor to any specific period of history.