Lockdown Fatigue

If we wait for a vaccine before we go back to work we may not have a job to go to. By Nick Cater.

The delusion that COVID-19 can be eradicated if governments push people hard enough may crush our spirits long before the inevitable splattering of the economy.

The unfortunate spike in cases in Victoria should have settled the argument over whether we are attempting to put a stop to the virus or working out a way to live with it. There is a limit to what can be achieved by public health measures alone, however strict or strongly enforced.

We should know by now that the best we can do is to mitigate the damage while getting on with our lives.

Yet, in the time-honoured tradition of poor governments in love with an idea that isn’t working, Victoria’s Daniel Andrews has decided to double down.

We are long past the point where the likely benefits of a lockdown will be greater than the costs. We deserve to know how much misery these measures are intended to avoid, so they can be balanced against the weight of misery they are causing. Yet all we get is rhetoric when empiricism is what’s required.

Lockdown mark one introduced by federal and state governments in March had a transparent aim and clear justification. In the fog of war, fighting a foe we knew little about, closing our international borders and shutting down narrow sections of the economy was the responsible course.

The best available international advice suggested the death toll in Australia could be as high as 150,000. When you’re facing those sorts of numbers the imperative is safety first. Our leaders could not have known that the estimates from Imperial College London would be out not by a little but by a factor of 1400.

Instead of the death rate of 6000 people per million forecast by Imperial, Australia has lost just 4.2 lives per million. The death toll in Victoria is not 38,000. It is 24.

How much worse could things possibly become before they get better? Might Melbourne be the next New York?

The answer is an emphatic no. Matching New York on a per-­capita basis would require the deaths of 11,000 more Victorians. In turn, a third of the population would have to become infected, since our death rate is extraordinarily low by world standards.

In a study to be published by the Menzies Research Centre, a team led by Henry Ergas finds that the level of risk is considerably lower than it was in March.

Fewer people have been hospitalised than we expected and there are more drugs to treat affected patients. Social distancing measures are widely practised and protection of the elderly has been tightened.

If that weren’t enough, intensive care capacity has been vastly increased, ditto the capacity for testing and tracing. Yet the Andrews government has responded to the fresh outbreak with a bigger and uglier version of lockdown mark one.

And it seems it can no longer trust people to do the right thing. Police have been patrolling the corridors of tower blocks, deciding who enters McDonald’s, raiding a private home after the excessive purchase of KFC came to their ­notice, threatening to issue fines for whale watching and generally carrying on in the kind of manner we thought intolerable six months ago.

The closure of state borders is among the most serious measures imaginable in a federation. Its benefits are questionable and its obvious discrepancies silly. Why is it OK to hold a family picnic on the banks of the Murray at Cobram but not at Echuca?

It might be reasonable for police to make a few random checks of drivers’ licences, which is a pretty good source of a person’s address. But Checkpoint Charlie on the Hume? Give us a break. A break is what businesses and employees in the private sector are crying out for. We cannot wait for the vaccine until they get back to work.

Ironically, police pay packets in Victoria have never been fatter. Overtime in any union-dominated industry seldom comes cheap. It is the same for many public servants. The first and sometimes only beneficiaries of any government spending program are the people who administer them, and this one is a whopper.

Naturally, the Victorian population is unnerved by the daily spike in numbers, which plays into the politics of fear. It demands a degree of courage by leaders who have the full facts in front of them and are smart enough to know that there is ­always a trade-off between precaution and risk.

Yet it is not popular fear that is cruelling Victoria’s chances of a swift recovery from recession, but fear at the top. It is the fear of a leader who is prepared to abandon reasoned policy argument for fear of losing his seat in parliament.

For premiers, the fear of being accused of acting too lightly if the pandemic takes a turn for the worse is far greater than the fear of inflicting unnecessary pain, particularly when those costs will be largely carried by the commonwealth. Yet the costs being added to every day at an ever-­increasing rate are eye-watering.

This time 12 months ago, Josh ­Frydenberg was on track to achieve a surplus this year, and had every reason to hope it would be the first of many, putting the nation back in the black by the end of the decade. A sobering report last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers now forecasts that debt will be with us until 2057, by which time the Treasurer will be 85.

That happy day will retreat further into the distance until the premiers learn to calibrate their policy decisions by the risks to the nation rather than the risk to their political fortunes.