A friend told me this week that he has now developed the habit of turning on the TV news each night about 10 minutes after it starts. That way, he said, he skips all the dreary statistics on the latest Covid outbreaks.
I can’t say I blame him. The bombs that fell on London during the Blitz sustained the steely resolve of the population to battle on, but modern Australians don’t seem quite so well equipped to cope with the invisible bombardment of the coronavirus. The fact that so few of us in this country have been infected – we know the virus by reputation, but rarely by direct encounter – does tax the willingness to keep up the precautions being urged on us daily.
Which is why the latest outbreaks in Sydney and Melbourne are proving so hard to contain. The lockdown measures in Sydney are the strictest seen in that state this year, but community transmission continues unabated. Part of this must be that people are simply sick of wearing the straitjackets that the measures entail. Some are calculating that they can break the rules and still have a reasonably good chance they won’t pass on the virus and they won’t be caught.
Britain is taking an entirely different approach. As of this week, it is stripping away most covid restrictions and leaving individuals to make their own decisions on how to protect themselves.
Opinion polling by the Australia Institute this week suggests that state and territory leaders are achieving high approval ratings for their handling of the coronavirus, while Scott Morrison’s is slumping because of the slow rollout of the vaccines. Two observations can be made about this.
The first is that the Australian Institute is a left-wing think tank which has never been known to publish research helpful to the likes of a Liberal government. No doubt, if the same polling had been conducted six months ago, an entirely different the picture would have resulted – which is probably why the Institute didn’t poll at that time.
The second is that, on any objective test, high public confidence in the handling of the virus by state governments is unwarranted. Overall, they have made a fist of the entire exercise.
From the Ruby Princess fiasco in Sydney to the hotel quarantine outbreak in Melbourne and the bizarre family lockouts in Brisbane, state premiers have acted inconsistently and capriciously. They have largely relied on the advice of their chief health officers, but have often forgotten that such advice is only part of the decision-making matrix.
Taking the British path of opening up would be a substantial risk in Australia right now. But Boris Johnson has signalled that the time may be coming when we need to treat the virus not as an enemy to be defeated at whatever cost, but as a fact of modern life, to be accommodated and managed much like other contagious illnesses.
The troops are weary. A truce may be our only choice.
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