<
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/february/richard-denniss/nothing-see-here>
"If a pandemic killed 15,000 people and nobody seemed to notice, was it really
a pandemic? In Australia last year, COVID-19 killed more people than lung
cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, car accidents and drowning combined.
And in addition to the 15,000 deaths directly attributed to COVID, the
Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that there were 20,000 more deaths
last year than would usually be expected, largely due to the fact that people
who have had COVID tend to die more quickly of the other diseases they have.
Last year was the first time that average life expectancy has fallen in
Australia since World War Two.
But over summer it is likely more Australians would have seen warnings about
the dangers of drowning in a rip than the dangers of kissing strangers on New
Year’s Eve. As Australia enters its fourth year of living – and dying – with
COVID, our leaders have grown tired of talking about it, and, as a result, the
“silent pandemic”, as Professor Brendan Crabb describes it, shows no sign of
tiring of taking its awful toll.
I don’t want to go back to lockdowns and few, if any, experts are suggesting we
should. Lockdowns were hard on all of us – our communities and our economy –
but they bought us the precious time we needed to develop and roll out the
vaccines that have likely saved hundreds of thousands of Australian lives.
Lockdowns were hard work, but they worked as intended when we had no other
weapons with which to fight.
But despite the fact that our state and federal governments now have a diverse
arsenal with which to fight the virus, most of those weapons lay idle and
decaying from lack of use. Masks only work if people wear them, social
distancing is less effective when indoor air isn’t well filtered and flushed,
tests don’t work if they aren’t taken, and the vaccines that cost so much to
develop don’t work if they aren’t injected into people’s arms."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: February 2, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-78114114
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
