Extract from ABC News
Analysis
There were so many fires to put out this week, yet never has it felt quite so much like no-one was holding the hose.
Instead, the gushing and unrelenting surge of new cases, new statistics, new targets and timetables, whiplash-inducing changes of policy position and rhetoric, curled and whipped back on itself, drenching us in a sense of apparent helplessness about either extinguishing or even controlling the virus, but failing to hose down increasing despair and anger in the public that the powers that be have things under control.
Exhausted state leaders and health officials emerge each day to report on what is happening on the ground. They almost all have different approaches now to dealing with the pandemic, and even to dealing with what is perhaps even more important in terms of people's demands on them: an explanation of how actions correlate with outcomes.
At one end
of the spectrum, the virus has jumped the fence into the regions in
NSW, and the Berejiklian Government's attempts to have differentiated
responses to different levels of contagion seems to not only not be
working, but to be leaving people more confused about all the changing
health advice.
There appears no clear answer to what can be done to stop the virus spreading when we are told it is spreading because it has taken hold among the essential workers who keep the place moving.
At the other end of the spectrum is Victoria, which has gone for the full snap lockdown of the state in the face of unexplained cases in Melbourne, with thousands of potential close contacts, seasoned by the bitter experience of all the lockdowns that have gone before.
An out-of-control firehose in Canberra
Meanwhile in Canberra, the Prime Minister appeared at press conferences through the week, and faced questions in Parliament.
From the first press conference, we gleaned that we should be seeking to have 70 to 80 per cent of the community vaccinated, and that the federal government now preaches that short, sharp lockdowns are the new gold standard approach for minimising the economic cost of COVID.
Spot the out-of-control firehose lashing its way through those assertions.
There was quite a lot of commentary about how effective those vaccination target numbers actually are, given they only related to 70 or 80 per cent of people over 16, not the whole population.
But the broader point, of course, is that 70 or 80 per cent of the population literally can't get vaccinated at the moment, even if they wanted to, because we don't have enough vaccine.
The community faces daily onslaughts of pleas from politicians and chief health officers to get vaccinated, then find they can't.
There has been much flurrying and scurrying around, with the federal and NSW governments in particular re-routing and re-prioritising where vaccines are being sent as outbreaks get worse and new priorities are set.
Can anyone honestly say they know who the priority groups are now, given how essential workers (variously defined), teachers, students about to sit the HSC and people in different geographic locations have all been mentioned as targets, only to find that the people who were, as a result, now facing delays in getting vaccinated were now being confronted by fresh outbreaks of the virus in their areas?
And
on the Morrison Government's second revelation: that Treasury modelling
showed short, sharp lockdowns were the least costly to the economy...
Well, just as well there hasn't been any gaslighting of the whole
lockdown idea that might have undermined lockdowns in the past, and that
there is such a coherent structure to the set of policy measures in
place to help the economy deal with such lockdowns, or even lockdowns
that aren't short and sharp.
So, remind us: what are we trying to do here again?
Is it possible that we're still trying to reach "zero-COVID"? That target seems to have morphed slowly and reluctantly into "living with COVID", though what that actually means is also unclear.
If we step away from what our politicians say (or are trying not to say) about this Road to Nowhere, epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely told the ABC's 7.30 on Thursday — the black day in which outbreaks seemed to be spreading wildly into regional NSW, there was alarm at the thousands of close contacts of cases in south-east Queensland; and Victoria went into a snap lockdown:
"This is a different game now. Delta is really changing the rule book. In Sydney and NSW, it looks unlikely that we're going to get back to zero transmission any time soon and probably never. We will actually rather bridge over to when the vaccine coverage is high enough to get some control in September, October, maybe even November and keep the numbers low."
So, Blakely went on, "it is a different ball park ... what we've got to try to do outside of NSW is get on top of this and try and deal with any other outbreaks and get through to October, November when the vaccine coverage is high enough to at least relax at that point.
"It's going to be a challenging couple of months, unfortunately, for most of Australia."
What it seems to boil down to is that, with 70 or 80 per cent of the population vaccinated — or whatever other large number you choose — we are aiming for a position where our hospitals are not overwhelmed, the economy is semi-functional, and the infectiousness of most of the population is reduced, but not eliminated, to a point where new contagions are more manageable.
Delta has changed everything
It is true that the Delta variant has changed everything and our leaders have to keep changing with it.
It is not so much that we expect them to be able to tell us what is going to happen next, but that they can demonstrate some sense of anticipation, that they can reassure us that they are thinking ahead to cover all the possibilities.
Just as we have moved on last year from being told we didn't have to wear masks, just wash our hands, the obligations being put on everyone continue to morph, whether they be obligations imposed by government, or just by each other.
Donald Trump's COVID nemesis Dr Anthony Fauci spoke this week of where public health policy was heading in the United States, which is facing an increased surge in cases, despite its significant achievement in reaching just the sort of vaccination rates we only aspire to at this point. Part of the problem is vaccine hesitancy, part of it is political: most of the cases in the US are in Florida and Texas.
Fauci says the next answer is in mandating vaccinations in workplace settings and elsewhere.
Just like with vaccine passports, this is an issue around which our political leaders are still tip-toeing.
There are legal issues associated with it. But there is also little setting out of the terms of the discussion we need to have. Someone needs to grab and hold the hose.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
No comments:
Post a Comment