Yesterday’s headlines paint a story that badly needs an edit. Just take these examples, from across New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland:
- “NSW confirms 35 new cases of coronavirus”
- “Seven new cases — but it’s good news”
- “Overseas arrivals slashed”
- “Spotlight on illegal party linked to COVID cases”
- “Next few days ‘absolutely critical'”
Where are the people? The patients? Those “suffering from COVID”?
It seems, at both the federal and state level — and across all states — that those with COVID-19 are now simply “cases”; numbers that make up a daily tally. We have “cases” that are, locally and internationally, acquired. “Cases” of both the alpha and delta strain. But what about the people? Those suffering this insidious disease that is locking us in our homes and creating a formidable spike in the mental health of our children?
Queensland has 47 “active cases”, but it’s all “good news” — according to the premier — because tracers have assigned them to clusters.
The same goes for NSW because, of the 35 new “locally acquired cases” reported yesterday, 33 were linked to a known cluster and 20 were household contacts.
But aren’t they also people? Some of them dreadfully sick? Aren’t they the victims of this cruel monster?
“The total number of cases in NSW since the beginning of the pandemic is 5790,” NSW Health reported yesterday. And 58,373 tests were conducted in the past 24 hours. Yippee. But doesn’t that mean the families and friends of 5790 people — in that state alone — have had to confront an awful reality in the past 12 months?
And yet we reduce them to “cases”. They are not. They are elderly men and women, in aged care facilities, where workers have not yet been vaccinated. Workers, colleagues were told yesterday, who have now been carried from their homes to a hospital. Pubic servants and accountants, tradespeople and students and retired mums and dads and nans and pops.
And yet our elected leaders can only talk about tallies and cases and clusters and shutdowns, borders and arrivals, vaccines and tests. When did this remarkable lack of empathy become the centrepiece of daily COVID briefings? When did we stop wondering about those hundreds of Australians, lying in a bed, fighting off a disease that has killed millions and millions and millions.
When did we stop caring?
Away from those daily political tallies, every “case” brings immeasurable heartbreak. Businesses are closing. Mortgages are slipping. Homelessness is escalating. Suicide rates, among children, are mind-numbing. Doctors’ waiting lists are full. Psychologists’ books are closed. Coping with loneliness has become an attribute we don’t all boast.
Our politicians need to see every case they talk about as a person, living with COVID and the fear and uncertainty it brings.
We need to know the effect of people wearing hazmat suits through aged care homes, the suffering of those lying in a hospital bed today, and the impact on our children as they get ready to return to school.
We need to talk about people, not cases. Like the 47 people in Queensland today, with COVID. All of them are in hospital. Thankfully, none at the moment are in ICU.
We need to talk about the nurses caring for them, and the families unable to visit them. We need to know what this ruthless virus rips from their bodies. And that will drive vaccine rates higher than any of the daily lectern politicking on display this week.
Data is crucial in the fight against a disease like COVID, and everything from sewage surveillance detection information to building-linked COVID clusters are helping us stay ahead in this 2021 fight. But in the tsunami of facts and figures, we shouldn’t lose sight of those at the centre of it.
“But what about the people?” writes Madonna King, begging for more simple stories of suffering folk.
I’m not at all convinced we need more simple stories of suffering folk. There is far too much of this generally, whether it’s caused by covid, flood, fire, drought or anything else. ABC radio news is swarming with such interviews. The experiences described do not change – how much can you say about, for example, your home being flooded? The clichéd phrases used stay the same. The praise for the medics, the volunteers and the emergency crews, the pain for what is lost, on and on it goes. It’s endlessly repetitive. Many of the interviews could be recycled year after year after year without anyone noticing. It’s totally predictable, lazy and uninformative and it is no substitute for some real investigation and analysis that would give some insight into how our own decisions, the decisions of various organisation and agencies, and those of our state and federal governments have affected the situation, for good or ill.
I’m not saying this because I lack sympathy for the suffering people. I say it because instead of endless hand-wringing I’d prefer to see an informed public that would have some idea why they are suffering and what can be done about it. Starting from there, we might even see our so-called democracy doing something useful for a change.
Absolutely agree. The first news website I look at every day is the ABC, and more often than not the lead story is some would-be heart-wrenching tale of the suffering of some poor man, woman, child or family.
I don’t bother to read them any more.
Think you have touched on something else that has become central to commercial now public broadcasting has been compelled to follow, aka ‘ambulance chasing’ (especially ABC News 24).
It’s using PR techniques focusing upon and encouraging the triggering of emotions but avoiding rational holistic analysis of issues for understanding e.g. showing the govt. and/or lack of policies in a negative light; as Lynton Crosby said it’s about hearts not heads to win elections.
agree – I mean, how dumb do you have to be to NOT get that “cases are people” and people are suffering? – I doubt there’s anyone outside the LNP who are that stupid – instead of writing (lazy and uninformative) misery porn, journalists need to focus on the ministerial and structural failings that got us, and are keeping us, in the poo
But I’m guessing you agree with economic “flat-earther” Gigi Foster who claims lockdowns “hurt the economy and peoples’ mental health”? She forgot to look at the US with its ineffective lockdowns …leading to covid deaths > 600,000. See my link to the Ross Gittins article, above.
Empathy does not exist in the LNP. This is why the PM had to get empathy training. Sadly the empathy training has proved to be a failure. You cannot teach empathy to ghouls. This is what the pandemic has taught us.
When did we stop caring? ….. When did we go to work for Murdoch to pour out partisan, one-sided, one-eyed Limited News Party propaganda, playing politics rather than empathy?
… Which “news” outlet still operates like that – and when will we get a piece condemning that sort of behaviour and it’s effect on the broader community/society?
Madonna wrote: in the tsunami of facts and figures, we shouldn’t lose sight of those at the centre of it.
Except you have no evidence that this is so, while there’s plenty of evidence that it isn’t.
For example, nobody is stopping you writing a human interest story about someone with long Covid, or who lost someone tragically.
So why advocate writing such a piece? Why not just write one instead?
In the UK you’d have some 128,000 tragic deaths to choose from. In the US, you’d have nearly as many deaths to Covid as the US lost soldiers to the civil war.
Yet Australia doesn’t have such vast swathes of mortal misery for you to plunder to meet your deadlines.
Why not?
Could it be that handling outbreaks based on data is spawned by compassion, not in competition with compassion? That the epidemiologists who have worked tirelessly since January last year, and the virologists working on mRNA vaccines for over a decade, and the Chief Health Officers grinding their teeth over the prospect of 18 year-olds dying to a suboptimal Covid vaccine while not being highly exposed to Covid risk have no problem managing data and compassion together?
In a once-in-a-century global catastrophe rapidly reducing the bad is good. Having enough bed capacity to give people the best medical care is good. Giving the public the data to make informed and sensible personal choices is good.
It’s good both civically and individually, it’s historically fair journalism to report it so, and it’s only your historical ignorance of the scope and scale of similar catastrophes leading you to believe otherwise.
If you want to see why then please read for comparison, Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. (2017) In Australia, that pandemic was a civic and economic disaster as well as a medical nightmare and an endlessly repeating personal tragedy. For some countries it killed ten times as many people as WWII.
Apparently the problem here is that because you can’t personally handle data, you don’t have low-hanging misery to write about, and so in miffed arrogance you’ve alleged that people who can handle data, lack compassion.
How obnoxious.
Why not educate yourself to handle data better so you can see more of the national interest stories behind the numbers? Or at least acknowledge that the weakness is not society’s so much as yours.
Bullsh*t Madonna. Epidemiologists refer to case numbers for the reason exemplified by the 2020 Courier-Mail articles ‘outing’ individuals who allegedly breached lockdown restrictions: you get maximum cooperation from the general public if those who do ‘unusual things’ are not identified and demonised. Part of that process is referring to ‘cases’ rather than naming individuals. It’s nothing to do with contempt.