You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in…
You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a year ahead of the official review report. /1
We began the pandemic with risk management, with caution. The infamous national ‘lockdown’. But this also taught the world something vital about Covid. Who remembers overdispersion? /2
https://t.co/WrFEelUfQL
Australia wiped Covid out. It didn’t just ‘flatten the curve’. It killed Covid stone dead. Complete flatline. It showed that unlike influenza, you didn’t need to restrict spread everywhere. You just needed to jump on outbreaks. ‘Superspreading’ events. /3 https://t.co/5Nsq8uh0ug
Life was pretty normal for much of the first 2 years of the pandemic, for Australians. We weren’t ‘locked down’ much at all, all that white space was normal life. International travel restricted, but we did that for 7 years during WW2 (and hardly anybody did it anyway). /4 https://t.co/hC5oKAPKUj
We’d cracked the Covid code. Take basic precautions to restrict spread of the virus, and jump on any outbreaks. No need to lock everybody up, which fevered imaginations think happened, but simply didn’t. Do what we already did for most serious infectious diseases, forever. /5
And then came end-2021. Led by NSW, with a Premier heavily pressured by libertarian wingnuts in her Cabinet, Australia decided to let Covid rip. We exited pretty normal life, and rushed headlong into the mass infection and death we’d seen in the US and UK. /6
This was the beginning of the public health disaster, the greatest in our history. 2022 was a public health slaughter. 20,000 died. People should be in jail for it. Why did this happen? You don’t need an enquiry. Because public health was stopped. That’s it. /7
By a politics that rejects the whole idea of ‘the public’ itself. Of society. The disciples of Maggie, who’d been dismantling every vestige of the public they could manage, since the 1970s. We were told public health would be replaced with ‘personal responsibility’. /8 https://t.co/nsVqhQIzSj
A public health oxymoron. The next step Australia needed to take was to transfer emergency government control back to the community and businesses, to implement Covid mitigations through already legislated WHS. It never happened. /9
Instead each was on their own. Personal responsibility. Like saying you can fix traffic jams with your individual driving. Outrageous nonsense. WHS law has always been one of the strictest in the country. It’s been AWOL in this pandemic. Unions have been accomplices. /10
Instead we were constantly told the country couldn’t afford government to keep paying the nation to be locked down. Except it wasn’t locked down. And business was already required by law to manage infectious disease threats. Except nobody is enforcing it. They’re freeloading. /11
And that’s where we are today. That’s the review, the end. 12/12