It’s fair dinkum
FOR weeks, I’ve found myself cringing when experts say that the combination of an exponential virus spread and 1 per cent mortality rate is a low-risk scenario.
I don’t consider 1 per cent chance of any potentially fatal activity a low-risk matter.
And yet, this has been a prevailing narrative in our culture for a long time.
The ice epidemic is a good example.
The 2016 National Drug Strategy Household Survey found that 1.6 per cent of Australians had used methamphetamine in the previous year. That’s a lot less than booze (77 per cent) or smokes (14.9 per cent).
But if I was to take that 1.6 per cent and work out how many Australians had used ice I would get 400,000 people. Or more than 200,000 if we exclude kids and the elderly.
I look at that number of active ice users in Australia and I think that’s a big number, not a small one.
Which means it’s a big problem, not a small one.
One of the critical themes spilling out of the COVID-19 outbreak is how we measure and respond to risk.
One 2017 study said that “in any given year, the probability of an influenza pandemic causing nearly 6 million pneumonia and influenza deaths (eight deaths per 10,000 persons) or more globally is 1 per cent”.
If we applied that chance to the calendar hanging on my wall, that would mean one in every 100 years. The Spanish flu was in 1918. That 1 per cent chance has arrived like a marginally late train at Southern Cross station, with the notable exception that the current mortality rate is much, much higher than eight in 10,000 or 0.08 per cent.
Bill Gates was onto it in 2015: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war — not missiles, but microbes.”
As I write from my study, March 23, China’s mortality rate from 75,943 closed cases is 4 per cent.
A Chinese study of Wuhan, the city where it all began, released last week has found the mortality rate there to be 1.4 per cent.
In Italy, where the pandemic has a long way to run before we can calculate the underlying rate, the current mortality rate of active and closed cases is more than 9 per cent.
In Australia, it is just 0.5 per cent, which is likely due to the volume of testing under way and increased detection of cases.
In Indonesia, the rate is 9 per cent, like Italy, from just 514 detected cases in a population of 270 million.
Many, many more people must be found and treated for the death rate to drop around anything like the 1.4 per cent in Wuhan. Indonesia is very worrying. One US state, New York, has 21 times the number of fatalities as Australia.
The dominoes of this pandemic are falling erratically, but predictably as countries awaken to the magnitude of a 1.4 per cent risk.
As Australians lock down and perhaps play down the risk (because it’s below 1 per cent here) there’s an even bigger risk that we will underestimate the global impact of coronavirus on us.
Yes, we are acting earlier than most, even closing our schools in Victoria as the news from every continent gets worse by the hour.
Yes, the shutdowns and economic stimulus packages may well flatten the curve and keep businesses upright for six months or more, buying some time.
But we are global citizens, plugged into the economic fortunes of many other, very sick countries, so believe our Prime Minister Scott Morrison when he tries to prepare us for the tough road ahead.
Don’t risk it on a long shot that she’ll be right.