One word sparks year of extreme reactions
JUST over a year ago, on January 10, 2020, a word that was little known outside medical and scientific circles made its first appearance in the paper edition of the Gold Coast Bulletin.
Hidden away on page 16, in a three-line brief, the word “coronavirus” made it to print.
“A preliminary investigation into viral pneumonia illnesses making dozens of people in and around China sick has identified the possible cause as a new type of coronavirus, state media said yesterday,” the report read.
“Chinese authorities did not immediately confirm the report from broadcaster CCTV.
“As of Sunday, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said 59 people in the central Chinese city were being treated for the respiratory illness. Seven were in critical condition, while the rest were stable.”
A year later, we are still living with the effects of the mysterious “pneumonia” first reported in Wuhan.
We have learned a lot in that year — more than just a single word. But there have also been some things that have left your columnist genuinely baffled.
Chief among them is the belief by some that the request to wear a face mask somehow represents an unacceptable assault upon their freedom.
Granted, tyranny can take many forms, but what a strange tool of oppression is 20sq cm of cloth. True autocrats usually make other fashion choices. Jackboots, for example.
While we are beyond lucky that masking up has not been necessary on the Gold Coast, it’s a different story in Sydney and most recently Brisbane.
And how it’s drawing out the crazies.
At a recent raucous protest in Bondi Westfield, an antimasker was heard chanting “I would rather be a human than a slave”. He also roared “you can stick your sanitiser up your arse” at bemused shoppers, suggesting he hadn’t properly read the label.
That particular protester reminded your columnist of Iranian cleric Ayatollah Tabrizian, who is of the view that Western medicine is “un
Islamic” and last year came to prominence by advising followers that coronavirus could be avoided by drenching a cotton ball in violet leaf oil and “applying onto your anus”.
Less colourful members of the Bondi protest group commented that they were marching for their “personal freedom”.
Their personal selfishness, more like. Wearing a mask is not the most comfortable thing ever, but I’m willing to bet it’s a lot less pleasant to be hooked up to a ventilator.
At the other extreme, this column remains befuddled by the actions of some state leaders.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has moved away from closing borders to whole states, now sensibly limiting restrictions to declared hotspots. The snap three-day lockdown of Greater Brisbane over the weekend also looked like a proportionate response to a real threat.
The same cannot be said of Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, who, at time of writing, still has his border
closed to the whole of Queensland because of two cases in Brisbane. So someone from dusty Birdsville faces the same rules as someone who lives 1400km away in Bowen Hills, and distant Cairns is treated no different to Chermside.
When questioned, Mr McGowan, who faces a state election in March, says he is merely following “health advice”. But so are the chief ministers of the NT and the ACT, and the premiers of NSW, Victoria, SA and Tasmania — and they aren’t going the same road.
Health advice regarding masks, social
distancing and so on is something we should all be getting on board with though.
It’s far better than the advice issued to the unfortunate residents of Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. Three days after the Bulletin’s first report about the virus, the World Health Organisation, relying on the advice of a genuinely autocratic government, tweeted that there was “no clear evidence of human-tohuman transmission”.
How much we’ve learned.