Karl Quinn
With the lifting of most remaining mandates nationally yesterday, Australians are finally able to take personal control of, and individual responsibility for, the way they handle their contact with COVID. Free at last, we are urged to stay home if we’re sick, but no one has any authority to make us do so.
I suppose I should be hailing this as some kind of victory, a liberation from more than 2 1/2 years of sometimes heavy-handed government intervention. But what I’m actually feeling is something between ‘‘meh, whatever’’ and ‘‘is this actually such a good idea?’’
Given these admittedly contradictory feelings, and while it’s nice to be treated as a responsible adult, I’m not sure I totally trust myself, let alone the person next to me, to behave as such without at least some kind of guiding hand to remind us what responsibility looks like in this ever-evolving environment.
The end of compulsory isolation
– a move that could be reversed, as Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly hinted, if circumstances change – feels like a formalising of the slow winding back of measures we’ve experienced over the past few months.
And what’s not to love about that? I’ve certainly enjoyed going to bars and restaurants again, and while I’m still inclined to wear my mask in the cinema I have risked a few cheeky train rides without it. It still makes me nervous, though, when someone near me coughs, and guilty when I do. What I most feel about this moment, though, is frustration that even after all we’ve been through, we’re still not able to be completely honest about the deal with death we’ve collectively made.
Our first COVID fatality was recorded on March 1, 2020. A year later the toll was still under 1000. Despite some major stuff-ups (cruise ships, hotel quarantine, slow vaccine rollout) we were the envy of the world at that point.
Daring to hope the worst was behind us, we began to open up in November 2021. The toll then was around 1700. Now it is almost 15,000. At the winter peak in July and August, 80 people were dying from this disease each day.
On the streets, on talkback radio, in news outlets like this one, we demanded our liberty, and bit by bit we got it. But it has come at a price – more than 1000 deaths a month since last November. Is that the upper limit of what we’ll accept? If not, shouldn’t we be talking as a nation about what is?
It’s a brutal calculus, but we make similar assessments of risk versus reward in all manner of things, such as driving and swimming and skiing and workplace safety. What’s shameful, though, is that we haven’t been mature enough to openly acknowledge the deal we have made about COVID.
‘‘We, the people of Australia, are happy to trade off 1000 deaths a month and as-yet-unknown longterm health effects in exchange for our liberties. Just so long as neither I nor anyone I know or care about is among the dead.’’
Declining case numbers, high vaccination rates and assumed high immunity among the general population are the backdrop against which our liberty has been returned to us.
But let’s not kid ourselves that the pandemic, and the tough choices it presents, is over.