WE’RE NOT OUT THE WOODS YET

The arrival of COVID-19 vaccines mean the pandemic’s end is in sight, but fatigue and complacency still pose a real challenge in the fight against the contagious disease.

You might be reading this magazine for an escape from the heavy topics that have dominated the news cycle for the past year. If you feel like skimming over this page because it’s about the pandemic, we wouldn’t blame you. We’re all experiencing exhaustion in some form or another.

But as the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc, we ought to remind ourselves that we can’t afford to succumb to pandemic fatigue. Overseas, clapping for health workers and impromptu balcony concerts have fallen by the wayside, as social interaction cravings cause people to test gathering limits. Even if there are many people who are still playing by the pandemic rules, the emergence of new, highly contagious COVID-19 variants requires the strictest adherence to restrictions if nations have any chance of flattening the curve.

Fatigue breeds complacency, but so does the apparent absence of threat. Complacency born from the latter is particularly perilous for those of us Down Under who have been relatively unscathed by the coronavirus. It’s something authorities were confronted with in New Zealand over the summer, as the nation’s community outbreak in August faded into distant memory. In late December and early January, the average number of daily COVID-19 tests was about 3,000, well below the NZ Government’s 4,000 tests-a-day target. The Government’s contact tracing app, COVID Tracer, had an average of 522,200 daily scans over December, down from an average of 872,877 in November.

Meanwhile, as Australia grappled with new community clusters from December, the outbreaks were considered a wake-up call, with NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard attributing the resurgence in his state to “an avalanche of complacency”. “We’re in the middle of a worldwide pandemic,” he said. “The Avalon cluster has served as a very timely reminder that there is no room for complacency.” Ask anyone who experienced Melbourne’s three-month lockdown, one of the world’s longest, and no doubt they’ll warn against actions that could lead to further outbreaks.

In the early days of the pandemic, watching toilet paper disappear from the shelves made it seem as though the population was gripped with panic. As the pandemic wore on, complacency revealed itself to be a far bigger threat than such overreactions. Professor Ido Erev, a behavioural scientist and president of the European Association for Decision Making, talked to The New York Times about the danger of complacency back in March 2020.

“Everyone tends to overreact somewhat at the beginning,” he said. “But then, a little experience reverses that sense in most people, and they begin to believe that ‘it won’t happen to me’.” He added that research suggests two problematic trends emerge if you let people decide for themselves how to react: “A majority taking progressively more risks, and a small minority exhibiting panic-like behaviours, buying out supplies.”

So how to combat complacency? Erev’s solution is one that is at odds with the value placed on individualism in American culture, offering insight into the country’s skyrocketing case numbers. “My research highlights the value of rule enforcement, like imposing small fines on people who violate the rules,” Erev says. “Although this kind of policy might violate civil rights, I believe in the context of coronavirus, the benefit is much larger than the cost.”