“What I witnessed yesterday has left a terrifying impression on me. The hospitals are not equipped for this”—Pathology worker, Sydney, 27 December.

“We’re all going to get Omicron”—NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard, 26 December.

“Sydney is sleep walking into a catastrophic disaster in January, if we don’t do something about it right now”—Immunologist Dan Suan, Sydney, 19 December.

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Unsurprisingly, reopening state borders and dismantling other public health measures, even as a new variant sweeps the world, produces a reality very different to the lying promises of “freedom” used to justify this historic victory of business as usual over public health.

“Freedom”, they say, means ignoring soaring case rates and focusing only on hospitalisations. But even if we ignore record breaking levels of virus spread in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland, hospitalisations are rapidly increasing. COVID cases in New South Wales hospitals have doubled in a week—from 302 on December 22, to 625 on December 29. We’re following the trajectory set by London and by New York—where hospitalisations are rising by 30 percent per day.

“Freedom”, it turns out, looks like hospital admissions of children with COVID surging in the US, the UK and Sydney.

We were told we were well prepared for this “freedom”—but declaring “COVID normal” in the midst of a surge in cases has pushed the country’s test, trace, isolate and quarantine regime to collapse. Rather than this being taken as an indicator of a reckless policy that risks disaster, politicians are now using the collapse of TTIQ to wind back the few remaining requirements to isolate and test. Healthcare workers having their isolation times cut is one symptom of this disastrous situation—both here and in the US. “Live with it” comes to mean “work while infected”.

Australia’s “freedom” has coincided with a string of studies showing that COVID produces multi-organ disfunction, including in the brain. “Freedom” from public health measures means a burden of long-term ill health stretching into the indefinite future for many thousands of people. You can take your pick of studies, ranging from 5 percent up to 70 percent or higher of people reporting symptoms of “long COVID” or showing clear signs of organ damage from the virus, the blood clots it promotes or the immune reaction it provokes.

Even if all the claims are correct about Omicron being less virulent, perhaps thousands of people each day in Australia are now being sentenced to months or years of ill health that will range from the disruptive to the crippling.

“Now I can walk slowly for five minutes once a week if I’m lucky, but I get chest pain afterwards”, long COVID patient Jasmine Hayer told the BBC this week. “I have to choose between using my voice and moving my body. I can’t do both in a day.” That’s some vision of “freedom” we’ve been sold.

In a widely shared video filmed a few days before Christmas, immunologist Dan Suan summed up the results of his discussions with a string of highly credentialed health professionals. “We are unanimous in our view that Sydney is sleepwalking towards a catastrophic disaster”, he said. Yet there is no sleepwalking involved. This fast-developing public health disaster is deliberate policy. The idea that public health, or public anything, could interrupt business as usual is simply offensive for the Liberal Party and its big business backers.

According to Bill Bowtell, a leading Australian epidemiologist, this has always been the plan. The same “libertarian” views that informed the United Kingdom’s disastrous response to the pandemic—basically to rule out elimination, to refuse to try to achieve it (even in the northern summer of 2020 when cases got down to 60 per day in the UK)—were official policy in the initial stages of the pandemic in Australia.

The first year of the pandemic played out differently in Australia, however. In March last year, public health officials here successfully pushed for a more vigorous public health response. A disorganised but genuinely mass movement of parents pulled kids out of schools for their own safety when governments refused to shut them down. Miraculously, a lockdown that had been intended only to “flatten the curve” actually eliminated the virus from most states.

Having achieved COVID Zero, any state premier could see there would be a massive political cost to letting COVID rip. After lifting the first lockdown too early, and allowing uncontrolled spread from inadequate hotel quarantine, the Victorian government implemented an increasingly strict lockdown from July 2020 to return to zero. This was achieved over howls of protest from big business, from a small army of small business owners violently opposed to prioritising public health over business as usual, and from the Liberal Party.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews could have “done a Gladys” a year before the New South Wales Premier put an end to the eradication strategy. His government could have let the virus spread. Many thousands would have died, and many more would have been forced to live with the debilitating health effects, potentially for years to come. Instead, Victoria’s 2020 lockdown continued until we achieved zero COVID. Victoria bought the country a year while millions were dying across the rest of the world.

Tragically, in public health terms, the time was almost entirely wasted. No dedicated quarantine facilities were built. No start was made on the enormous task of fixing ventilation in schools and other public buildings and workplaces. Next to nothing was done to bolster the hospitals or build new wards or increase testing capacity.

While Andrews was popular following elimination of the virus, Labor kept its supporter base passive. Though the premier threw a few barbs towards Morrison once in a while, he never really waged a battle to defend the idea of zero COVID. He certainly never appealed to his working-class supporters to act, for instance by encouraging unionists and health and safety representatives to implement stringent health and safety measures at work.

When National Cabinet endorsed the reopening plan based on Doherty Institute modelling in mid 2021, Andrews signed on with the other premiers. When he surrendered on COVID Zero in early September, ordinary people might have been disappointed but were left in a weak position to start mobilising in our own defence against the inevitable wave of virus. So there has been disquiet and despair as Victoria and New South Wales opened schools well ahead of the mitigation measures promised. Some 60,000 people under the age of twenty have been infected in the two states since the middle of the year—most of whom would be school students. The meagre information released by the Victorian government shows that, predictably, primary schools have been the centre of most major clusters in recent months.

Despite all this, however, beyond some important local battles, there has been no organised rebellion in schools despite widespread teacher anger. For that, the unions must take prime responsibility. The example of the Chicago Teachers Union shows that it is possible for a union to make a city-wide contest involving tens of thousands of union members over the full suite of health and safety measures—including testing, isolation requirements, cleaning, ventilation and air filtration, vaccines and remote learning. The CTU has lost plenty of battles, but they have won the best COVID safety measures of any school district in the US.

No Australian unions have come close to this level of campaigning. At the highest level, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus earned accolades from then Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter as his “best friend forever”. At an industry level, a string of unions lobbied hard to keep their industry open regardless of the public health implications, with the construction union being a prominent example.

There were political forces with some weight in Australian society who used the time bought by Victoria’s lockdown to plan their next move. These were not the forces defending public health, however. Rather, they were people determined to destroy zero COVID—led by the federal government and big business, egged on by an aggressive campaign from the Australian Financial Review.

Some solid work was done on behalf of these forces by the Liberals’ small business constituency, a section of whom formed the core of a far-right movement that has mushroomed this year. It’s typical of the political mentality of these social layers that their demand was not for state support for workers to enable compliance with public health measures, but “freedom” to operate their businesses regardless of public health orders.

Financial support in the event of lockdowns was dramatically reduced. This was one of the main reasons that the 2021 Victorian lockdown was defeated, as workers simply kept turning up to work in order to keep the bills paid, rather than isolating if needed. And when the Delta strain emerged, the New South Wales government made it a point of principle to introduce public health measures such as lockdowns only when they were too late and too partial to achieve elimination. When a combination of a stricter lockdown and rapid uptake of vaccines (in part driven by mandates) drove the numbers down from the thousands in August to a few hundred in October, there was no thought of using this situation to achieve elimination.

A range of lies including “vaccination is our ticket out of here” were peddled, when in fact, as the OzSAGE group of experts points out, vaccinations alone were never going to be sufficient to preserve public health in the face of a highly infectious and rapidly-mutating virus. But capitalism is not a democracy. The main work of wrecking COVID Zero was done by imposing a policy, not by force of argument.

Yet, despite the determined and successful offensive by the ruling class and its allies, popular sentiment—especially among the working class—has stayed solid in support of public health measures. A Morgan poll in late November found that an extraordinary 96 percent of Labor voters in Victoria agree with workplace vaccine mandates and that support for Andrews is higher than ever.

An Essential poll in early December found only 28 percent of people agreed with the statement, “Governments should never impose lockdowns, no matter how great the threat of new COVID-19 variants, or the effectiveness of vaccinations against them”, outnumbered by the 48 percent of people who disagreed with this. And mobility data and anecdotal evidence suggest that millions of ordinary people are implementing our own grassroots lockdown.

The problem is that no force in society with any weight is interested in turning that sentiment into collective action. With a more combative union movement, a strategy of turning the public health disaster into a crisis of profitability for the capitalist class, to win better public health measures to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic, would be plausible. But our unions came into this crisis conditioned by decades of retreat and defeat without a fight, and have generally done little to change course.

The imposition of “living with COVID” represents a brutal and important defeat for the working class in Australia. The worst thing is that this defeat is happening with barely a shot being fired.

It’s crucial to build the political forces campaigning for public health over “business as usual”. Hence the importance of groups such as Health Before Profits, planting a flag and keeping it flying for public health even in the midst of disaster. Of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, which is planning mobilisations to counter the next anti-public-health “freedom” protest. Of groups like COVID Safe Schools and community initiatives like the South Australian contact tracing page with more than 160,000 members.

We don’t know how the next months will play out. With Omicron, there are worst case scenarios and there are better case scenarios. But all leave a trail of death and illness; they differ only by degree. In a string of countries in 2020, life expectancy fell by a year or more—the biggest drop since World War Two—throwing into reverse decades of gains. We can’t simply hope for the best as those in power demand that we all just “live with it”.

With four major coronavirus variants emerging within the last two years, there is little reason to believe that this will be the last wave, nor that it will wash through the community leaving few dead and the rest of us blissfully immune to future outbreaks—any more than the Wuhan strain or the Beta variant did.

Every mitigating measure that we can win in our own workplaces and in society generally is worth something. Every time we stop one person from catching this disease, it’s a win. So we have to keep campaigning and fighting for every little thing. More than that—we have to keep fighting for a world that prioritises human life above business profits.

Jerome Small

• Redflag. 29 December 2021:
https://redflag.org.au/index.php/article/covid-zero-catastrophe-how-did-it-come

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 They’re gambling with our lives again

Australia is facing an unprecedented wave of COVID-19 infections as state and federal governments stare down the population and refuse to implement adequate public health measures to stem the tide. Led by New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet’s and PM Scott Morrison’s ideological opposition to public health measures that might threaten profits, both Labor and Liberal premiers are culpable.

In mid-December, as New South Wales registered the most dramatic increase in COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, the state government lifted most requirements for density limits and proof of vaccination and reduced regulations for mask wearing and QR check-ins. The message from Perrottet was to get into pubs, crowded shops and cafes and spend, spend, spend. The decision to abandon the most basic public health precautions just as cases were drastically rising was a reckless move that will cost lives and spread illness.

At the press conference at which these changes were announced, Health Minister Brad Hazzard cited modelling that predicted case numbers could reach 25,000 per day by the end of January. The government wound back health regulations at a time when many of the vaccinated have waning protection and are waiting for boosters, and when young children are not yet able to be jabbed.

Almost two years into the pandemic, the New South Wales health system remains underprepared for even a moderate spike in hospitalisations. Nurses and other health workers are overworked and underpaid—across the country, thousands have resigned, and an increasing number are being furloughed because they are catching the virus.

In the eight days since the “let it rip” announcement on 15 December, there have been 24,039 new cases of COVID-19 in the state.

Federal and state leaders, recognising that they had to be seen to be doing something, held an emergency meeting of the National Cabinet on 22 December. It achieved nothing. After the meeting, Morrison just insisted that limiting the spread of the virus comes down to “personal responsibility”.

The response to the overcapacity of testing centres in Victoria and especially New South Wales was not to announce an increase in resources. Instead, the prime minister simply asked the states with low case numbers to consider removing the requirement for people from hot spots to have tests before travelling. This would simply hasten the export of the virus to every state whose borders are now open.

Even the Doherty Institute—whose modelling the federal government couldn’t get enough of when it appeared to support its argument to end lockdowns—now predicts a worst-case scenario of rapidly growing case numbers lifting hospitalisation rates, pushing emergency departments to capacity and filling the nation’s intensive care units. The New South Wales government’s response is to claim that the mounting case numbers don’t matter.

Epidemiologist Adrian Esterman took up this point. “Firstly, as case numbers run into their thousands, we will inevitably see a rise in hospitalisations and deaths”, he wrote in the Guardian on 17 December. “Secondly, everyone seems to have forgotten about long COVID. About a third of COVID survivors are likely to suffer from symptoms three to six months after being infected, including people who have no symptoms from the initial infection. So case numbers are still very important.”

While number of deaths has not yet risen significantly in New South Wales, hospitalisations have more than doubled (from 166 to 347) since the health measures were removed. Despite the intransigence of National Cabinet, there are growing calls to bring them back.

As Sydney Morning Herald articles reporting on the cancellation of around 20 percent of bookings at hospitality venues make clear, there is a kind of “lockdown from below” going on as people change their plans for fear of catching the virus or infecting friends and family. There have been reports on Facebook of customers successfully demanding that their local IGA supermarket reinstate QR codes if they wanted them to shop there.

No such sense from the New South Wales government. Even today’s announcement that QR codes will be reinstated in some high-risk venues is too little too late. It will complement the DIY contact tracing that was introduced on 15 December, under which a “casual contact” is now defined as pretty much anyone other than the very closest household contacts of people who get COVID. The government advice is that “you might find out through your workplace, your education facility, or directly from the COVID-19 positive person. You will not be contacted by NSW Health”. It is then up to you to inform others you may have been in contact with.

On 19 December, University of Sydney infectious diseases paediatrician Robert Booy, who has previously supported decisions made by the state government, summed up all this “freedom”: “The restrictions in NSW are being unwound too quickly. We are now ideologically driven and the public health advice has become secondary”.

Governments have not left us with no protection. We supposedly can count on that much vaunted “personal responsibility”—government code for “not my responsibility” with the added bonus (as far as they and the bosses are concerned) that if it turns out to be a disaster, we’ll be the ones to blame. To add insult to injury this has been accompanied by a series of patronising analogies between defeating a pandemic and individuals using sunscreen. Satirist Pauline Pantsdown drew out the ridiculousness of this when she wrote: “I didn’t wear sunscreen yesterday. Now, everyone else who was on the beach has skin cancer! Sorry everyone!”

Social media has been ablaze with angry responses. “Please everyone just take personal responsibility for the PCR tests you can’t get, the rapid antigen tests you can’t buy, the other people not wearing a mask everywhere you go, and the COVID you’re pretty much definitely going to get now”, one person wrote. The Chaser had an apt headline as well: “Traffic laws abolished in NSW as residents are encouraged to show personal responsibility instead”.
Read more
Queensland Labor trashes public health for tourism and retail bosses

The majority of people have shown personal responsibility again and again through the pandemic. But we need public health measures, starting with the reinstatement of all those recklessly abandoned on 15 December. Reinstate compulsory masks, density limits for indoor venues, QR code check-ins everywhere, vaccine certificates to enter all indoor venues and provide free rapid antigen testing across the community—not to encourage people to go out more, but as a public health measure for those whose jobs mean they cannot stay at home.

Non-essential workers should be paid to stay at home, and bosses should be forced to implement all necessary health and safety measures such as adequate ventilation at those workplaces that are genuinely essential.

Morrison continues to assert that the time for lockdowns is behind us, even as governments in Europe, where the virus is more out of control, are re-introducing them. For him and the bosses, this is another aspect of the Doherty Institute advice that is even more unpalatable than the possible toll of illness and death.

The Doherty modelling shows that a hard lockdown could suppress the outbreak by the end of January, assuming 60 to 80 per cent of Australians received a three-month booster by then. The modelling was given to federal, state and territory leaders ahead of their National Cabinet meeting yesterday. It was ignored. Serious health measures interfere with profits. Patronising the population and demanding “personal responsibility” is free.

Perrottet says that his government is treating New South Wales residents “like adults” as he continues to push back against calls for renewed health measures. “What’s key to us is personal responsibility”, he said this week. “As we move through the next phase, case numbers will increase. That is the new normal.”

We have to continue to fight against this normalisation of avoidable deaths and illness.

Diane Fieldes

• Redflag. 23 December 2021:
https://redflag.org.au/article/theyre-gambling-our-lives-again

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 COVID cases soar, testing in crisis, OH&S out the window: welcome to ‘freedom’

New South Wales has been thrown into a COVID testing crisis as daily case numbers skyrocket, reaching a new record of 21,151 on New Year’s Eve. Per head of population, the state now has a higher level of transmission than the United States, according to New York Times data. PCR testing clinics are overwhelmed, many people are waiting close to a week for their results, and rapid antigen test kits are almost impossible to find.

Heffron Park COVID testing clinic in Sydney’s east on Christmas Day PHOTO Rhett Wyman

Tens of thousands of people worried that they are infected are scrambling from clinic to clinic and from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of a test. People have been camping overnight in lines outside of clinics. Social media is flooded with stories of people being turned away at testing sites. After waiting in the rain and sun for six hours at the Royal Prince Alfred clinic, one local resident told Red Flag that they were greeted by an exhausted health worker with: “Wow! I didn’t even think we would get to the 8:30am’s today!”

Aerial footage shows lines of cars queuing for hundreds of metres outside some clinics. The Byron Bay testing centre was at capacity just hours after it opened this week because surrounding clinics closed over Christmas. According to an ABC News report, one woman needing a negative result to get back into the Northern Territory camped out in her car at the Macksville clinic on the mid-north coast for 26 hours.

Some people are now choosing to stay at home when symptoms appear, when sharing a household with a positive case, or when their rapid antigen test returns a positive result. Why line up for eight hours while sick if you won’t get a result for a week? A report released yesterday by OzSAGE, an independent advisory group of epidemiologists and health policy experts, warns that this “will reduce our surveillance capacity for new variants and give falsely low case numbers”.

Without a functioning testing system, even basic workplace safety protocols are thrown into disarray. A retail worker at a major telecommunications company described the immediate implications. She told Red Flag that she was exposed to COVID at work and now must show a negative result before returning. But the first clinic she went to at 8am turned her away after an hour, the second was already closed and the third—after she stood in a line full of coughing people for another hour—turned her away before midday.

The New South Wales Liberals are using the disorder caused by the testing system crisis to reduce the number of public health measures. Many are outraged at the perceived lack of preparation and total incompetence. But the high demand for tests has not been sprung on an unsuspecting government. When cases began to jump in mid-December, at the same time QR codes and masks mandates were dropped, Health Minister Brad Hazzard speculated that NSW could reach 25,000 cases a day by the end of January.

Not increasing the resources and funding available to the testing system is not just an act of incompetence but fits with the reality that we all are being forced to “live with the virus”. The government’s prioritisation of business as usual is the reason it will not fix the problems: doing so would require tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of workers to isolate. The government and the business lobby just want everyone who can to keep working.

Under pressure, Premier Dominic Perrottet reinstated QR codes and indoor mask mandates and announced plans to distribute rapid antigen test kits for free. These measures, while necessary, are too little, too late and have not prevented the exponential growth in cases. Besides, a further easing of measures was announced this week.

The isolation period for healthcare workers who are close contacts of a positive COVID case has been slashed from fourteen days to seven. The Queensland government caved to the pressure and reversed the order for a PCR test before arriving. Much to the pleasure of the hospitality and tourism industry, Perrottet has double downed on his “let it rip” mentality, urging Sydneysiders to go ahead with their New Year’s Eve plans while also complaining that people are getting “unnecessary” PCR tests.

How quickly “personal responsibility” has turned into just blaming individuals for the health crisis.

Similar measures are now being adopted federally. Following the National Cabinet meeting on 30 December, Scott Morrison announced that only household, or household-like contacts of confirmed cases will be considered close contacts and abolished the casual contact category entirely.

This means you can work right next to a COVID-positive person for eight hours but will not be considered a contact and are not required to get a test or isolate. Contacts will now only have to get tested if they are symptomatic, or if they return a positive rapid antigen test on their sixth day of a week-long isolation. These measures are about keeping workplaces open, not leading a public health response.

“We will miss so many more cases with this new, more narrow definition of a close contact”, Australian Medical Association President Omar Khorshid said in a statement. “Anyone catching Omicron in a restaurant or pub, for example, and who is asymptomatic won’t know they’re infected and could pass the virus on to more vulnerable people ... it will come at the cost of accelerating the outbreak.”

The horrible truth is that the testing crisis and easing of restrictions despite skyrocketing cases fits the course the state and federal governments have set for Australia’s pandemic response. While we are constantly reminded by politicians and the media that the Omicron variant is less likely to send you to hospital on a case-by-case basis, this will be of little comfort to the nearly 1,500 people around the country who are currently in hospital with the virus.

“The impacts of a fragmented testing system and disrupted health system will be felt most by our elderly, lower socio-economic groups, First Nations people, people with disability and regional populations”, the OzSAGE report concludes. “[A] fatalistic approach will be fatal for some people.”

Kim Stern

• Redflag. 31 December 2021:
https://redflag.org.au/index.php/article/covid-cases-soar-testing-crisis-ohs-out-window-welcome-freedom

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