Opening Borders Soon
After 2 years of shutting itself off from much of the world, Australia is allegedly going to open its borders to vaccinated international travellers. The feeling we have been getting from both Federal and State levels of governments over here is that they've just about had enough of dealing with the pandemic so they would like to fast forward to the end. I'm a bit sceptical of pundits who are saying omicron is a sign that the Corona Virus is getting less pathogenic and more endemic and this is a good thing. The numbers seem to indicate it can still kill its fair share of people, and let's not kid ourselves there's still the Delta variant out there, even if it is getting squeezed out by Omicron. Sure. Tell the dead that it's just going to be endemic now like the 'flu.
Indeed, that's been one of the comparisons that politicians have trotted out at various points of this pandemic - whether it is more contagious than or less contagious than the 'flu; or whether it is more or less pathogenic. It's hard for most people to contemplate the Spanish 'Flu from 100 years ago but that pandemic lasted 4 years, killed more people than World War I and a century later, can still kill its fair share in any given winer outbreak. We just don't make a fuss over it because the number of people killed by influenza is below a threshold for political action. A pandemic by its very nature places itself well and truly above that threshold. Therefore it seems foolish for politicians to be talking about it as though it should be below the threshold while the disease is out in the community killing its fair share. The numbers are such that if it were an axe murderer on the loose, we'd be sending out a tax force to stop them.
I'm not against opening the borders but it seems like the politicians are doing it because they've just run out of patience. And that doesn't seem to be a good ingredient in decision making during a pandemic that hasn't quite died out. There might be a reason for that ...
Omicron Is Everywhere (But Then Again So Is AIDS)
Up until 26th November 2021, I had managed to avoid the virus entirely. After that date I seemed to get an alert for every location I visited. I talked to a friend up the North Coast in early December who reported that nobody had met anybody with Covid-19 until November 2021, and all of a sudden his neighbourhood was full of people who tested positive to Omicron. People close to me have treated positive to Omicron all of a sudden, and as this burst rolled into January members of my family got it as well. I'm still a Covid cherry for better or worse.
What's weird is that this fucker spread so fast, it has broken through containment lines that used to be solid. It has flooded into Queensland and South Australia, and has even made a beachhead in Western Australia. You can just see the politicians raising their hands in the air, surrendering to this threat because basically they can't stop it spreading. In that sense it is game over for all attempts at physical containment. from here on in, it is up to the citizens to be vaccinated as much as possible and hopefully their immunity pushes the virus out of circulation.
It's hard to figure out how civilisation is going to cope with this ongoing endemic virus. If we reflect back to the other pandemic in our lifetime in AIDS/HIV, it seems like parts of the economy were hit harder than with what AIDS/HIV did. Maybe the mainstream world didn't get to see just how hard the gay community were hit by AIDS/HIV. If it is a once in a generation thing to go through a pandemic, then maybe we can expect another organism in the next 30 years. Of course, there are forecasts that say civilisation will crumble because of global warming by then. It may well do - in which case humanity would be toast because the only way we got through this pandemic was through science and technology, where it be the quick development of the mRNA vaccines, or the expansion of IT that happened just in time for all the white collar jobs to be worked from home.