Fear and loathing in Brisvegas
The public are starting to grow weary of the Queensland Premier’s scare tactics. By Nick Cater.
The diminishing return from the politics of fear is making life hard for some. The latest preposterous excuse from the Queensland Premier for retaining the right to seal her state’s borders signals growing desperation. A number of surveys last week confirmed that the public mood has shifted away from the fantasy of Covid-zero and toward the reality that this uninvited guest will be staying for a good deal longer.
Tolerance for snap lockdowns and closure of state borders is diminishing. A survey by Compass Polling last week found seven out of 10 Australians want border closures to be nationally co-ordinated rather than allowing states to continue to go it alone. It is the view held by six out of 10 Queenslanders.
Annastacia Palaszczuk, however, refuses to let go of the state-versus-state, mate-versus-mate mentality she has adopted since the start of the pandemic. Her new threshold for business as usual is absurdly unachievable: the immunisation of infants with a vaccine not yet approved for use in children under 12 in a state where adults appear unusually hesitant to receive it themselves.
Queensland is firmly anchored at the bottom of the vaccine table alongside WA. By Friday night, 72.6 per cent of people in NSW had had one jab and 40.3 per cent had had two, compared to just 52.7 per cent and 34.1 per cent in Queensland. It begs the question who should be closing their borders against who.
One premier at least is prepared to have the honest discussion, long overdue, that all leaders will have to get around to eventually. The light at the end of the tunnel means “accepting Covid is part of our lives, accepting that, unfortunately, people will die”, said Gladys Berejiklian on Friday, “but they will be less likely to die if everybody is vaccinated. This is the reality”.
The nature of the Delta variant means the number of active cases may rise higher, even when the stipulated vaccination rates are achieved, judging by the experience of others. Israel may be the promised land for the children of Abraham, but not for the vaccinated. Israel’s vaccination rate has reached 78 per cent of those 12 and over, but there were 1100 new cases per million last week compared to 134 per million in NSW.
The Doherty Institute modelling demonstrates that we can expect better protection with an over-16s vaccination rate of 70 per cent and better still at 80 per cent, but the protection gains grow marginally smaller. Part of the honest conversation premiers such as Palaszczuk are reluctant to have is that the vaccines are somewhat leaky.
How leaky they are is beginning to come clear in the weekly surveillance reports from the UK, which tracks and reports data far better than most. There is enough evidence to be confident that a single dose of AstraZeneca reduces the risk of showing symptoms by 55-70 per cent and the chance of dying by 75-85 per cent. A second dose appears to reduce the odds further, although the evidence is less firm.
The question yet to be answered to the satisfaction of British medical scientists is the likelihood that a vaccinated person will transmit the virus to someone else. Their conclusion, that “little evidence is available at present and results are inconclusive”, is hardly the reassurance for which we might have hoped.
The news from abroad, however, is less grim once we look beyond the raw case numbers. The picture is consistent: in the most vaccinated population, deaths are significantly less common and fewer people are treated in hospital. Covid-19 does, indeed, become more like the flu and even less like Ebola, which is something else the fear-mongering premiers find difficult to talk about. Having spent 18 months trying to scare us witless, they are finding it hard to change tack.
Perhaps they can start by un-fudging the figures, as the NSW government has started to do. Last week, we discovered the actual death toll from Covid-19 is almost certainly lower than the one that has been officially reported. NSW deputy chief health officer Jeremy McNulty acknowledged that dying with Covid-19 is not the same as dying of Covid-19 and that the distinction was now being made in the official count. Since most of those who die are elderly and have multiple comorbidities, it is an important detail when assessing the level of risk.
Coming to terms with coronavirus requires us to wrestle with the question of whether it was ever as bad as we thought it was and if the response was proportionate to the risk. The answer will almost certainly be no. Closing our external borders was demonstrably effective. So, too, was the targeted protection of the elderly, particularly in institutional care. The absence of large outbreaks in nursing homes for nearly a year is the main reason deaths in the latest outbreak are thankfully few.
Lockdowns are much harder to justify given the cost to economic and personal wellbeing, a cost that increases exponentially the longer they continue. The evidence they work is much less firm than we might like to think since there is seldom a reliable control group against which results can be compared. The mounting case numbers in NSW after more than two months of lockdown prove nothing. Some will argue the number of cases would have been higher if not for the lockdown, but that is a conclusion based on supposition, not evidence.
At what vaccination level these lockdowns should end is a political judgment, not one that can be based on science. It requires a level of courage few leaders have been prepared to muster so far in this pandemic. The wiser heads in government, however, will have surely concluded by now what is obvious from the experience abroad; that living with Covid-19 means living with an active threat to health, not just a theoretical risk. They will have concluded, too, that this episode in our national life was made more painful by a lack of preparation and the unresolved tensions in the Constitution that were taken as licence by some premiers to play politics at a time of national crisis. Now the pathway back to normality has been agreed upon, the next item on the agenda should be preparing for the next viral threat.