No time to relax
WE will stuff up the relaxation of lockdown measures. And we will be lucky if that stuff-up doesn’t lead to a significant loss of life from COVID-19 in Australia.
Don’t get me wrong. I want to leave my room like any other Boomer grounded for messing with the ozone layer and poisoning the planet by my very presence.
But I know what humans are like when let out of their cages.
They break the rules, which must be why we have so many of them in the first place. That way we can all break some of them most of the time.
Part of the reason we love breaking rules is because we think they apply to others more than to ourselves.
We weigh the rules, measure their benefit against self-interest and thrill. If everyone is doing it, then the rule doesn’t matter and soon enough we’ll all be on the other side of the thing, looking back at our past selves and shaking our heads at how crazy that was, that we could be so easily tamed.
This time, if we break the rules, we will look back at our past selves and see how crazy we were not to listen to the expert advice.
And we really do need to listen to experts because culturally we are hopeless at comprehending facts or even checking them.
Behold, I present for your enjoyment, the curious case of antibiotic use in a viral epidemic.
An astonishing 92 per cent of Australians don’t know the difference between a viral or bacterial infection. The CSIRO choked on this stat after crunching a survey of 2217 people and the large crash you heard earlier was the sound of me falling off my chair.
This is bad news on so many levels.
There are 700,000 health workers in Australia who should know the difference, or about 4 per cent of the workforce.
I seriously hope they do. Because best case scenario, that means there’s just 700,000 other people in the nation I can trust to know what they’re talking about during the pandemic.
Or every 25th working person. A whopping 13 per cent of people actually think COVID-19 can be treated with antibiotics.
Just like the flu, huh?
Well, yes. Antibiotics won’t work for the flu either.
In fact, drowning our bodies with antibiotics as liberally as sunscreen is setting the world up for the next medical catastrophe tipped to kill 10 million people annually — antibiotic resistance.
A COVID vaccine victory does nothing to forestall the looming disaster of diseases resistant to drug therapy.
Surprisingly, it’s the medicos who prescribe the stuff who struggle to think global and act local.
Most emergency surgeons (80 per cent) will rate antibiotic resistance as a serious global issue but less than half of them — according to a 2018 global survey — think it is a problem in their own hospitals.
This is the recipe for rule breaking.
You take a big stick to a global issue and say how bad it is and how something must be done.
Then, you have a quick look around your legs and see if the problem is “here yet” or “over there”. If it is not “here yet”, then thankfully you still have time and can carry on the way you were, all the time talking earnestly about the problem everywhere else and how lucky we all are to be “over here” in the lucky country.
And so it is with the coronavirus pandemic, which is manifestly worse elsewhere in the world, while “over here” our hunger for shops, pubs and footy will test what tattered self restraint we have left. Peter Judd is editorial newsroom operations manager for News Corp Australia and a former editor of the Geelong Advertiser.