(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

It’s March 2022. More than 80% of Australian adults have been vaccinated. We’re nearly 180 days into the process of lightening restrictions, which began in NSW in October when that state reached 70%. State by state, the restrictions that hampered businesses and workers are being removed. The international border is to be reopened soon. Case numbers have surged to more than 300,000 since Gladys Berejiklian announced reopening in NSW, but that’s translated into fewer than 9000 hospital admissions and 2000 cases in ICUs nationwide, far less than capacity.

Fewer than 1500 people have, tragically, died throughout the period, two-thirds of them unvaccinated. But only about 25,000 are absent from the workforce because they’re infected or isolating. As Scott Morrison prepares to go to another election, he sees a nation that has forgotten his initial stumbles around the vaccination rollout and which is preparing to gratefully reelect him.

That’s the scenario Morrison is hoping for, and which he thinks the Doherty Institute’s modelling has handed him — even in its updated form, which is based on the likelihood that a reopening will occur with massive case numbers courtesy of Berejiklian’s catastrophic failures in NSW, and even assuming contact tracers struggle to keep up with the virus.

There’s another scenario, however.

It’s March 2022. More than 80% of Australians have been vaccinated. Morrison faces an election within two months. But the NSW premier Dominic Perrottet, still new in the job after Berejiklian “succumbed” to pressure and resigned in December, calls and tells him he has no alternative but to lock down his state. More than 100,000 people have had to be hospitalised since October as more than 2.5 million people have contracted the virus. His contact tracers are hopelessly overwhelmed and have been since November. More than 8000 people across the state have died. The strain on the NSW hospital system is unbearable, and the diversion of medical resources to battling COVID is leading to a spike in deaths from other causes.

That’s what might unfold in NSW if the national modelling by a team of academics led by University of Western Australia’s Zoë Hyde is correct, on a pro rata basis.

Alternatively, there’s the scenario modelled by the Grattan Institute in July. Reopening when 70% of the population is vaccinated sees the nation’s ICUs overwhelmed about 100 days after reopening, with the total ICU cases eventually exceeding 200,000 off the back of 8 million infections. Inside five months, more than 10,000 people have died. Eventually more than 15,000 die. Nearly 17% of those deaths — or 2500 — are people who are fully vaccinated.

This political game unfolding between risk-averse Labor premiers and Berejiklian and Morrison, who have given up trying to suppress COVID, has very real stakes. If the Doherty Institute is right, “only” 1500-odd people will die when we reopen with 70% vaccinations — a figure just three to four times higher than the death toll from seasonal flu. If other, gloomier predictions are correct, hospitals will be overwhelmed and the death toll will run into the tens of thousands.

Morrison is anxious to get the community to “shift focus” from his bungling and think about emerging from lockdown. But his breezy optimism — and that of press gallery spruikers — is at odds with the day-to-day reality of state leaders who run hospitals and police forces and are held accountable by voters for public health. What premier will sit by and adhere to the national reopening plan if the hospital system is overwhelmed, or deaths reach 30 to 40 a day? Remember that a sizeable proportion of these deaths will be of vaccinated people. It’s also clear, as a result of the Delta strain, that the coming wave of deaths won’t be confined to the elderly. Even the optimistic scenarios of the Doherty Institute modelling suggest nearly 100 people under 40 will die.

The political challenge is even greater on borders than on lockdowns. Why premiers like Mark McGowan, or Annastacia Palaszczuk, or Peter Gutwein, if they have zero cases, would reopen their borders to other states and welcome the chances of thousands dying and their hospitals being overwhelmed as a result of infections from outside the state isn’t at all clear. Between a premier saying he or she doesn’t want thousands of deaths and crammed ICUs and a prime minister insisting that they allow that to happen as part of some “national plan”, who do you think voters will back? There are plenty in the press gallery who seem to think they’ll be queueing up behind Morrison.

Things might be different if people could trust Morrison and Berejiklian. But both have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted, they always put politics ahead of the public interest, and they will refuse to ever be held accountable for their failings. Would you put your life, or that of your family, in the hands of such people? That’s the real question behind all the spin flying at the moment.