Mission Unaccomplished

(Written Wednesday, October 5.) On Friday September 30, Australia reached an extraordinary new low in pandemic management. At the 'National Cabinet' meeting of Premiers, Chief Ministers and Prime Minister, mandatory 5-day Covid isolation for all but health & aged care workers was scrapped. Commencing October 14, any precautions will be left entirely to the individual - Covid-positive persons will be free to move about the community. Combined with Cabinet's previous decision to abandon mandated masking, this means the virus will deliberately be allowed to spread, unimpeded.

The decision was unanimous - no leader at the table spoke in opposition.

Bizarrely, the government has described dispensing with protections as "getting the balance right". In fact, five day isolation was already inadequate - as research published in The Lancet has highlighted, two-thirds of people are still infectious at that point. A quarter are still infectious at 7 days. Best medical practice would actually have seen an extension of isolation.

Instead we appear to now be following the UK's disastrous "let it rip" approach. The move has been driven by commercial pressure to boost immediate profits, and the desire to save public dollars by removing funding for isolation. Doubtless, political calculation ahead of the Vic & NSW state elections has also played a part.

The National Cabinet announcement came as Australia tipped over 15,000 Covid deaths. More than 80% of those deaths have happened this year.

The Guardian reports there have been three times the number of fatalities in the most disadvantaged areas compared to most advantaged (34% to 10%). Outbreaks are also an ongoing problem in residential aged care, which accounts for 30% of deaths.

Multiple studies confirm that people who contract Covid19 are at higher post-infection risk of heart-attack and stroke. Long-Covid, with its lingering brain-fog, fatigue and variety of other symptoms, is showing up in medical studies in significantly-varying numbers - sometimes as high as 50%, sometimes only 10%. Australian researchers have said the number can fall to 5%, post-vaccination. But even calculating by the lowest estimate, with Australia now having had 10.2 million cases, that's over half a million people in slow, costly recovery.

In the most recent week of official figures (the daily summary now having been discontinued), Australia had 38,516 cases - an average of 5502 a day. With the acknowledged reduction in testing, the real figure will be higher.

The disconnect between these numbers and the government response couldn't be greater. Announcing the change last week, Anthony Albanese said the time had come to transition away from emergency measures: "We are changing our position based on changing advice and changing circumstances. There’s not a role for government in running every bit of people’s lives forever. ...This isn’t an ideological thing. This is a practical outcome that was agreed across the board. The flu has existed, and health issues have existed, for a long period of time, and the government hasn’t always stepped in to pay people’s wages while people have health concerns."

There's a lot wrong there. First, Covid isn't anything like the flu. As independent MP and neurologist Monique Ryan pointed out, Covid is much more infectious and lethal (17% increase in national death rate), and flu does not cause chronic illness, late cardiac events, stroke & dementia. Governments exist specifically to provide social structures and protections the individual can not, including health care and disaster response. The familiar "get government outta your life" refrain is a pre-election dog-whistle (appealing directly to the "Freedom" anti-vax/lockdowners in the marginals), being cynically employed to veil a budget saving. And that cutting of Covid-iso leave-payments will force contagious people back to work, so the brief reduction in spending will come at a very high price. The starting point itself is wrong, too - with infections still high, and increased spread being the best way to generate new variants, circumstances have definitely not changed for the better. Vaccine protection substantially fades at 4 - 6 months, and Australia is still down around 70% on third-dose. As for "changing advice" and agreement "across the board", the government has actually refused to make public the health advice it was supposedly guided by, and major bodies of the health sector including the AMA and the nation's health advisory committee, the AHPPC, have stated they were not consulted. On the information currently available, it appears that the only advice sought was that of CHO Paul Kelly - the man previously used as a rubber stamp by the Morrison administration. Kelly's statements on Friday ranged from tepid to evasive to flat-out wrong. It was time to move away from "Covid exceptionalism", he said - this "reasonable approach" signified "proportionate measures" could be taken while transmission was "very low". Dropping isolation would, he predicted, "build resilience". This last translates as, 'you're on your own'.

Victoria's CHO Brett Sutton tweeted: "Sleepwalking into COVID is not a strategy I would recommend. Still much remains uncertain."

Prof Brendan Crabb, CEO of the Burnet Institute, described the events of the day as "disturbing" and the scrapping as "illogical, ill-informed, and distressing", emphasising that "this notion that Covid is like the flu is wildly wrong".

And on Friday morning, AMA President Dr Steve Robson was blunt: "People who are pushing for the isolation periods to be cut are not scientifically literate and are putting the public at risk".

Cue the ever-influential Business Council. In terms oddly identical to the PM's, Jennifer Westacott told the media with confident inaccuracy that "the emergency phase of the pandemic (was) over". She hit all the major talking points - personal responsibility, just like the flu, back to normal, time to move on.

The official number of dead is now 15,228. Medical staff and resources are stretched to breaking. (Ambulance ramping has been disastrous in multiple states, and over a quarter of all Primary Health Care nurses in Australia say they're going to quit.) Paul Kelly has confirmed that Australia has no response-plan in place to deal with the next wave. And dubious Morrison-era secrecy rules continue to obscure the decision-making processes of National Cabinet from the general public.

This commercially-motivated dismantling leaves us without the most basic defences. Masking and iso work. With cases high and testing low, damage from reinfection cumulative, and new variants on the way, we need those defences more than ever. "Personal responsibility" is going to make a lot of people very ill. Some will die. And the real responsibility will lie with the merry misleaders around the table at National Cabinet.

Covid is not over.