Let’s not let fatalism rule in our battle against Covid
Ihaven’t written about Covid in a while. That says something. Mostly it says that the tide of public opinion has been flowing one way, towards fewer restrictions and living with the virus.
Urgency had gone out of the debate. Getting Covid for many of us hasn’t been too bad. Daily deaths in double figures are seemingly tolerable — an unimaginable development from a year ago.
There’s not even much pointed disagreement among the political parties. There are minor differences reflecting positions staked out at the beginning of the pandemic, but otherwise, the political heat is being generated by disagreement over different issues.
So our Covid response hasn’t featured in my columns because it didn’t feel like they might make a difference and influence an opinion or two.
That’s somewhat concerning, personally, because it suggests an element of weariness and fatalism that I might have hoped to avoid.
Despite our wish to be done with the virus, Covid hasn’t finished with us yet. The increase in hospitalisations and deaths happening now is worrying.
The health system at this time is clearly struggling to cope, despite the Government’s denials. It will probably get worse.
I feel like we’ve dropped the ball. Having invested so much in our Covid response, accepting the possibility of 5000 deaths a year and who knows how many with long Covid, feels, to me, incredibly disappointing.
I know we couldn’t keep up lockdowns, mandates and restrictions going to the extent we were. And I know we now face variants of Omicron that are more contagious. And I know that nature is a bummer and that we get sick and die. We can’t wish the impossible, so acceptance and getting on with life is a natural, long-term response.
Yet if there’s one thing that was the minimal goal of our struggle against Covid, it was to prevent our hospitals and health system from being overwhelmed. Remember that?
People who are sick need uncompromised care. And our nurses, doctors, and everyone involved in the front line of healthcare don’t deserve to be stressed, burned out, and put in impossible situations.
If our hospitals do become well and truly overwhelmed — as some of the people who work in them fear — then the decisions made previously have been the wrong ones.
You can argue that Labour faced too much pressure and had to bow to public opinion. That’s why there hasn’t been a shift to the red traffic light setting or mandated mask wearing in indoor public spaces.
As unpopular as going back up the restrictions scale may have been, avoiding putting patients and staff through hell in our hospitals should have remained at the front of everyone’s mind.
With the Prime Minister flitting around the world prioritising our foreign policy alignment with Europe and the US, leadership that might have seen us suppress the spread of Omicron variants in the middle of winter has been absent.
If the country’s emergency departments fail to cope, and we face the possibility of people dying in carparks because they couldn’t access the care they needed, then that’s on the Government.
Responsibility rests with them for not showing the leadership in the months previous that could have helped suppress the spread of the Omicron variants.
And it will be on them for not having the political gumption to increase pay for GPs, nurses, doctors and all health workers years ago.
Only when our health professionals are paid comparably to what they can earn in Australia will long-term staffing shortages be addressed. If that means no tax cuts and increasing taxes on wealthy citizens, then those arguments need to be made. Let National and Act argue for the opposite.
Right now, at the bare minimum, mandates around mask wearing indoors should be reintroduced. With accompanying clear messaging that our health system is in crisis.
The Government should immediately take up the Green Party’s call for N95-style masks to be given free to everyone in the country.
There are still things we can do to minimise Covid’s impact that aren’t too much to ask from people — certainly compared with what’s expected now from our health workers.