Virus bans defy reason
Our pollies panicked
FOR the first time in my life, I am frightened of my governments. The coronavirus panic has made it irrational and threatening.
Until now I accepted that my freedom has its limits. I can’t do things that risk harm to others – like speed on the roads or keep guns at home.
But those laws aren’t threatening. I see the link between the risk and the laws, and see they also protect me. They are as rational and as clear as a 60km/h speed sign.
But not some of these coronavirus bans. They are mad and random, and there’s no real link between them and the danger they’re supposedly saving us from.
Yesterday a woman told me she wants to lay flowers on her mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, on Sunday week. But she’s scared. Is that allowed now?
She lives in Victoria, and it turns out that not even her own police have been sure.
Some mourners had actually been fined, but police in an official statement said they’d withdraw that punishment if those people had kept a social distance.
“If”. And this fear of visiting cemeteries in a state with just five new infections in three days.
From NSW another example of this arbitrariness – police chasing people off several beaches.
In fact, beaches are about the safest place to be.
A Chinese study of more than 300 virus outbreaks said it “identified only a single outbreak in an outdoor environment”, and William Bryan, science adviser to the US Department of Homeland Security, said research suggested the virus’s half-life was shortened from 18 hours to just two if it was exposed to sunlight.
Besides, look who is actually dying from the coronavirus in NSW. The last four were all people in an aged care home, not swimmers.
A third example, this time from Queensland.
Trevor Watts, the Opposition’s shadow police minister, decided to share drinks with neighbours in a driveway get-together in the street.
Neither Watts, his party’s police spokesman, nor two of his neighbours, both police officers, seemed to know there was a law against what they clearly assumed was – with social distancing – perfectly safe and innocent behaviour.
Wrong. All were fined for being at an illegal gathering, and Watts resigned.
Again, what was the link between the danger and the law?
The drinks were out in the sunshine. It was in a street in Toowoomba, in the Darling Downs where just one person has the virus.
The danger of anyone being infected was as close to zero as you could get.
No, the greater danger now is from our governments and their catastrophic laws, now smashing us into another depression.
I today obey these laws against, say, driving to the beach, not because I respect them but because, like a criminal, I fear the punishment. The government is not my protector but a threat.
Some will complain I’m attacking laws that have made us safe.
Wrong. Some laws did, yes. Imposing quarantines, for instance, and limiting big gatherings.
But governments were panicked by trash modelling into imposing uselessly severe bans as well.
That evidence of that overreaction is clear. For instance, our politicians relied on models predicting between 50,000 and 150,000 Australians would die.
The real death toll so far: 89.
Our governments were warned by health experts that our intensive care beds would be overwhelmed, and so banned elective surgery and spent billions to get 7500 beds.
The number of coronavirus patients in ICU beds: 42.
Governments were also panicked by the models into getting 7500 ventilators.
But patients on ventilators: 27.
Yet our governments are so irrational they still won’t admit that this virus, while dangerous, is not the cataclysm they expected.
Instead they insist we keep their harsh bans for fear of a “second wave” – like we saw in Japan and Singapore, warns
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.
Federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg says the same: “What we’ve seen in both Singapore and in Japan is a second wave of coronavirus cases.”
Just more unreason. You’d think Japan and Singapore must have worse death rates than ours, especially Japan, which has a much older population yet allows restaurants to open and doesn’t ban people from going outside. Yet our death rate per million people (3.4), is more than both Japan’s (3.0) and Singapore’s (2.4).
Taiwan has just 0.3 virus deaths per million people, even though it has none of our stay-home laws or bans on restaurants and shops.
No excuses. Our governments are frightening.