Everyday in Australia people die of communicable diseases, or in traffic accidents, or are victims of crime, or shark attacks. By permanently locking them all in their houses forever we can dramatically reduce this. If you don’t agree with this policy, presumably you want more people to die?
And thus the debate on COVID-19 is quickly stripped of all nuance, ‘no game of golf is worth someone’s life’, we are told as if that’s the true nature of the trade off. ‘Lives are important than the economy’ we are told, as if poverty doesn’t have a direct impact on people’s lifespan. Downturns cause deaths too, and there is a limited pool of resources for healthcare and all social spending and reducing the size of that pool ultimately has an impact on the outcomes that these social services can provide.
So we must avoid crowds; sure. Stay home; sure. Keep away from the elderly and vulnerable; sure. No parties, ok… no playing golf; hhm, ok I guess… no visiting graves…no driving alone in your car too far from home without a reason…report suspicious behaviour from your neighbours, have they posted some old holiday snaps on Facebook – you must report unless you want those medical workers to die!
It is disturbing how quickly the authoritarian streak of governments and the police emerges and how compliant we can become. I’m not talking about the sensible measures, large crowds and the like, but tyranny is always arbitrary and all of a sudden we look to government fiat to learn whether standing by yourself with a fishing rod in the water is verboten but posing for a profile-boosting photoshoot for the Chief Health Officer is fine. Where the rubber of enforcement hits the road, the real ugly side is revealed as police cars lie in wait outside funerals, troll through your Facebook, or swoop from the air upon isolated campers to impose their own interpretations of distancing. It is troubling how close to the surface this all this lies and how readily it emerges.
If you are of a left-leaning bent and are comfortable with this, imagine Morrison maintaining this approach to root out any hints of terrorism or suspected visa-overstaying. If you are a right-leaning authoritarian who is so far comfortable with this, imagine Daniel Andrews using it next to ensure climate compliance. When they came for the fishermen, I did not speak up because I was not a fisherman etc.
Public health officials can be a particular danger – I’d hardly be surprised after this if some seek to expand their powers to further restrict drinking, or smoking, or what people eat – and they could make exactly the same arguments that most of us have accepted during the pandemic to do this. They should remember some of the advice that their predecessors have shared, we are still living through the consequences of public health bodies deciding fat was the primary if not sole cause of weight gain, and creating and enforcing campaigns throughout the western world that precipitated an extraordinary uptake in the consumption of sugars and refined grains and directly caused the obesity epidemic.
When we outsource our decision making to “single-domain” experts in any field, it’s easy for them to create a plan which specifically addresses their issue – of course locking everyone up will slow the spread of a communicable disease, and thus these experts can claim a great victory and if you’re not an expert with the same credentials, what do you know? But locking up a whole society, will have numerous second, third and so on effects, an unintended consequences. There is the economy of course, but nevermind as plenty of economists have written an open letter also saying they support the lock down.
Of course the debate over the extent of the lockdown ends up breaking down along the same semi-invisible class fault lines that most debates in this country do. On the one hand are the upper-middle class, university educated technocrats, who claim to have great faith in the ability of the state and its appointed experts to make the right decisions, but also conveniently are usually employed in the public sector or other relatively secure knowledge industry employment where they are able to work from home and bear the impacts of the lockdown better than most. On the other hand are the young, the working class, and small businesses, people who live more by their wits on a day-to-day basis and draw their income from the private sector. People’s whose livelihoods depend on the wheels of the economy turning, or whose jobs are hands-on and cannot simply be done over Zoom. It reeks of priviledge; if you have a nice house, some savings, a happy family life and a secure government or other knowledge worker job – lockdown can be a bearable or even quite a pleasant experience.
Ultimately, “the economy”, our society, our health and the millions of interacting factors are far too complex for any of these single-issue experts to just utter their announcements and put all our minds at ease. I’d feel a bit more comfortable if some of them were more open to admitting what they don’t know. This particular virus is new, it didn’t exist 6 months ago, and this pandemic is unprecedented in the last 100 years, so it’s outside anyone’s immediate experience, instead they’re relying on imperfect comparisons, hasty guesses, and models, many of which have already proven to be wrong.
So in the end there always needs to be some sort of trade off, the tighter the regulations on movement are, the fewer cases of COVID-19 are communicated, but the greater the unintended consequences in all sorts of areas. Many lives may be saved, the already sick and vulnerable may have more years added to their lives, but how many young and healthy people have years taken away through additional stress now, let alone increases in suicide in the short-term, and direct impacts on mental health.
Every day we accept trade-offs. By allowing travel by cars, some people die in road accidents. Do we want them to die? Of course not, but we have generally as a society accepted this death toll as the price of being able to travel by car. Perhaps we shouldn’t, I don’t know, but we usually avoid engaging with the question so directly. All activities in life carry a risk, and we accept a huge range of risks every day in return for being able to live and move freely in many fields. There’s something particularly frightening and insidious about disease, an unseen killer, that can impact how we assess the risk. As Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky have show, we fear the dangers we hear most about, not necessarily the ones we should.
This pandemic has challenged governments locally and globally more than any event in the past couple of decades. As one more commentator I no more pretend to have all the answers than anyone else. Most people, most politicians, most police, most experts, have done the best they could with incomplete information and limited time in which to make a decision. From here, I’d like to see more people remember than even so-called experts can’t predict the future and aren’t always the best people to understand the broader impacts of decisions that go well beyond their field of expertise.
As usual Shakespeare said it best;