Life on the West Island - How soon we forget

Do you remember the public panic about coronavirus at the end of 2020 when COVID-related deaths on the West Island had reached 909 nationwide? At that point, there had been 28,408 cases diagnosed. After a year of lockdowns, movement restrictions, rushed vaccination programmes and saturation government advertising, by 31 December 2021 362,677 cases had been diagnosed and there had been 2,206 deaths.

At that point, the former federal government and some state premiers were urging that all borders should be reopened and that we should “learn to live with the virus.” Prime Minister Scott Morrison promised that all families would be able to gather for joyous Christmas dinners and that the worst of the pandemic was behind the nation. Instead, hundreds of thousands of West Islanders found themselves in days-long queues for COVID tests and the travel plans of millions were disrupted or cancelled.

Still, egged on by virus denialists and conspiracy theorists, the West Island plunged headlong into pursuit of “freedom,” with restrictions lifted, mass venues reopened and celebration in the media that we were “back to normal.” The result is that the West Island now has one of the highest infection rates in the world, with 8,377,932 cases diagnosed. We rank 55^th in the world for population, but 15^th for COVID infections. So far, almost one in three of our total population has contracted the virus

This week, the national coronavirus death toll exceeded 10,000, with an average of 44 people dying of the disease each day so far this year. 90 other states have lower death rates from coronavirus than the West Island. Today there are over 325,000 active cases across the nation, and overstretched public hospitals have COVID sufferers in 4,000 beds, almost 150 of them in intensive care.

Yet as a nation West Islanders are being told that we are a “post-COVID era.” Much of the mass media seems to agree, but some commentators are alarmed. For instance, journalist Bernard Keane wrote this week:

The current level of deaths per day is far above that during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 — two or three times higher. Yet there isn’t even a mask mandate in most places, let alone restrictions or lockdowns. It’s an astonishing backflip in terms of both political response and media attention. Politicians, journalists, editors and producers have decided that COVID is no longer worth worrying about. But nor is there any widespread public clamour for action.

But the backflip in just a few months is only the most extreme example of just how weird policymakers, the media and we ourselves are about causes of death. Despite rhetoric about how every life has equal value, every life does not have equal value for us. Deaths in residential aged care — and not just from COVID — receive far less attention from politicians and the media because, as Scott Morrison and Greg Hunt put it so callously last year, they are going to die anyway. Indigenous causes of death now receive far more attention from policymakers than they used to, but most of the mainstream media pays less attention to Indigenous deaths than those of white Australians. We have a particularly irrational view of deaths from terrorism, which over the last half-century has killed a tiny fraction of the victims of preventable deaths such as suicide, car accidents, domestic accidents or lifestyle diseases, but received wildly disproportionate funding and completely distorted our legal system to suppress basic rights in a way that has received far less attention than COVID lockdowns did.

Economist Alan Kohler shared some personal experiences and reflected on how complacent we have become as a nation:

My mother and sister both got COVID-19 this week. Mum’s 94 but we’re not too worried: she’s had four vaccine doses and isn’t very sick. My sister is pretty crook, but no worse than a bad cold. Our family is Australia in 2022. This year Australia is getting more COVID than ever and we are dying of it in greater numbers than last year or the year before. But are we worried? Not much.

We are in the midst of another wave of COVID, which is going to get worse before it gets better. Immunity is waning, and it turns out Omicron doesn’t provide much immunity against itself. There’s also a very nasty flu season going on, so hospitals are starting to get overwhelmed again.

Which presents political leaders and health authorities with an awkward problem: There should at least be mask mandates, if not restrictions on public gatherings and even lockdowns, but no one in authority wants to touch them.

Who can blame them? You want to mandate only things that people will actually do, and won’t get you thrown out of office, and there is zero public appetite for any restrictions at all, even though every second person seems to be catching COVID and we’re all just waiting to get it.

The other developing problem is what’s called “long COVID” – symptoms that last well beyond the initial infection. The Bank of England reported recently that about 4.5 per cent of the UK’s population is permanently out of the workforce because of long COVID.

Is any of this front page news on the West Island? Not really. We are obsessed with State of Origin, Nick Kyrgios, interest rates, the price of lettuces and the shortage of tissues on supermarket shelves. That is, until we get long COVID…