(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Dogs are capable of telling deliberate acts of unkindness from accidental ones, a new study shows. We took some dogs along to a Dan Andrews press conference to try and work out what the hell was going on.

“Rohuhraarfgrrrrwoof,” they said, so that was no bloody use, and we remain clueless as to whether our distinct national and state response is a rational and sustained reaction to a present danger, or some sinister experiment in human control like the protestors say.

To tell you the truth I would not be dismayed to learn that the Victorian experience is some sort of experiment into how much people can take of this sort of life, in preparation for something worse. At least this would make it some meaningful sort of experience. Victoria may well turn out to be the last hold-out in the world of large-scale polities (no, NZ, you don’t count) trying for virus elimination — the communist Albania of COVID. 

What is wearing many down — those who did support the TaliDan government through last year’s long lockdown — is the feeling that there is no meaning to these more recent episodes. We’re out of ideas; we’re waiting for the federal government’s total failure on the matter of vaccine and that’s about it. It would actually be good to know there’s a room somewhere in Treasury (very symbolically a bunker at ground level) where the worst possibilities are being gamed out, and a plan being put into sealed, bright coloured envelopes. 

There are presumably plans for large-scale nuclear war, and have been for decades. Is there a plan for a pandemic with a higher death rate? Something along the lines of 10% or more? Something highly possible but not civilisation ending? A 10% rate would be less than Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which had a 35% mortality rate, but also had a very low R0 number — about 0.5 — which ensured that it never spread far beyond hospitals and its initial exposure sites (camel stations; it was initially known as “camel flu”).

With 10% or 20% mortality, spread more evenly among the population and a level of virulence equal to COVID-19, we would presumably have to suspend private commercial food distribution and resort to mass food parcels, distributed contactlessly and headed by the military using the major commercial warehouses as depots. The same, in a more targeted way, with medication. There would have to be forced population movements as we essentially “re-village” our large cities — moving hundreds of thousands out of bands of the city and thus creating separated villages within the sprawl. 

Civilian travel between such zones would have to be prevented. Essential farms and factories would have to become work/life zones that workers don’t leave for the duration. We could actually survive all this, and I presume such a plan would cover biological warfare as well (which is one reason why it may well exist in a file somewhere).

The need for it would be cultural as much as practical. With a higher death rate, reaching towards young adults, teenagers and children, our post-religious, materialist culture would come under extraordinary stress and the question for many with losses would be whether it was worth going on.

You see why I started with the joke about the doggies now?

These mordant meditations are occasioned by the sudden appearance of the COVID-19 Mu variant. It’s a measure of our era that if Delta variant sounded like a bad Canadian sci-fi movie, Mu variant sounds like the knock-off sequel. Mu is currently spreading through Colombia and into South America, constituting about 1% of cases detected from a standing start and, haha, you’re still not thinking in exponential terms, are you? (Seven steps from 1% to dominance: 1%, 2%, 4%, 8%, 16%, 32%, 64% — also the maximum number of times you can fold any sheet of paper, no matter how large.) 

The Mu variant’s distinctiveness is an accumulated series of mutations in the “spike” protein of COVID-19 — the little suckers reaching out from the spherical body in all those creepy illustrations. These appear to have supercharged the virus’ ability to spread, both against naturally acquired immunity and against vaccines themselves, and to restore the virus’ baseline lethality rates even against those who have been vaccinated. 

That, of course, is still only 0.5% to 1% overall. But not for the aged, the Indigenous as a whole, or the chronically ill. As research notes, Mu’s vaccine-busting capacity threatens to reopen vaccine-assisted herd immunity to mass infection. So around we would go again.

And this, we must remind ourselves, is all a rehearsal, and… OK, a horse goes into a bar and the bartender says why the long face and the horse says because I have intestinal worms due to shortage of ivermectin caused by offbrand usage…