Indifference rules response

Iread the news of the second Omicron wave hitting NZ while sitting on the chilly, silver shelf of an airport baggage weighing scale. It was 10pm last Saturday and 100 passengers and I were stranded in a closed, deserted airport terminal.

Our flight from Auckland to Queenstown had failed to land because of storms, we’d been redirected to Christchurch, there was no fuel to get us to Auckland, no flights to Queenstown until today, no replacement flights scheduled, no buses and no overnight accommodation. There were mattresses/yoga mats if we wanted to sleep on the floor of the Koru club. Next to me, a pigtailed, pink puffer-jacketed girl was howling through a mouthful of half-masticated gummy worms in a surprisingly articulate summary of the events.

Actually the exhausted, overwhelmed, grumpy kid is a fairly accurate metaphor for the mood of the nation right now after two years of Covid. And it’s why most of us are reacting to the news of the second wave with, well. We’re not really reacting.

This collective general shrug has been described as Covid complacency. Basically, people are over this. So despite the second wave, we intend to keep carrying on with normal life.

Complacency makes us sound like reckless, feckless twits running around revenge-licking doorknobs to make up for the last two years. Though I also think to some extent it’s inevitable.

Last year in the US, they started talking about the concept of the ‘‘boring apocalypse’’. Our stress response to the pandemic has been progressively whittled down over time. The brain was repeatedly exposed to something that terrified it the last few years. Now it has lived through the terror it has acclimatised to it, getting progressively less afraid with every passing day.

As such, now it’s all a bit normal. Boring, even. The fear that made us suit up for the supermarket run like we were removing asbestos has faded. Now, we’re harder to shock. It would take a plague of locusts fire-bombing our Mums’ pilates classes with bubonic plague-infected Molotov cocktails before we really got worried.

(I’m not saying we should be like this, in fact it’s an awful health response. But this is also inevitably how humans adapt to fear.) I t’s compounded by the fact that we’ve got two years of frustration, irritation, and exhaustion to exorcise from our bodies. Having one foot in the media, one stiletto in a nightclub each weekend, I can tell you that people are feeling emotionally wild right now.

Covid gave everyone one of those wake-up-torealise-that-life-is-precious-so-suck-themarrowout-of-it-like-it’s-a-strawberry-milkshake-at-2am realisations. They do not want any form of increased precautions, nor any gathering limits. When I hear experts call for indoor masking, I wince at the thought of enforcing that. People just won’t do it. At this point the gap between official advice and the public appetite has never been wider.

We’ve formed a surreal, societal Venn diagram. There’s professional pressure for increased restrictions on one side. Overwhelming public disinterest on the other. And politicians in the middle are trying to win an election.

So what do you do when someone knows they’re wrong, but they’re not going to change? The problem isn’t ignorance, it’s indifference. And how do you change that? Can you change it at all? The Government certainly won’t, it wants to get re-elected. It all feels like we’re stuck in the terminal, and no-one has any idea where to go from here.