I'm going to take Ghandi's advice and be the change I'd like to see in the world, specifically: I'm going to make clear from the outset that I'm speculating on limited data that I have. This is speculation. Opinion. I do not know for a fact whether this is the case, and that should shape your confidence in accepting my interpretation.
I feel that is important to make clear, because everyday I awake to greater clarity that we are living in an age where people hold incredibly consequential beliefs having never bothered to investigate those beliefs. I also had the tremendous privelege to work on a nationwide longitudinal survey for some 8 years speaking to thousands of Australians during the
Julia Gillard years where I was able to observe for myself, that the press is incredibly influential in shaping people's opinions. There are an alarming number of people who outsource their opinion forming wholesale to the Editorial staff of their local tabloid paper.
There's a line in 2014's 'Pride' said by Bill Nighy in his role as Cliff:
I don’t believe what they say about
us, Lee. Why should I listen to
what they say about them?
Which I feel confident, is a statement of incredibly uncommon sense. It defies confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. These I suspect is actually how news is scrutinized - what we want to believe.
Thus I am simply attempting to form my own opinion by making sense of the data, I received, which was all publicly available. 2020 has not impressed me as to the role and function of journalism, appearing to me as a kind of middle man that actually diminishes value. This is probably how I would satire the function of the press as current:
1. source appears in live public press conference. Source: 'I disagree with my opponents position because of X'
2. Journalist at press conference asks question of source. Journalist: 'If you had a million dollars to give every person in this city, when could we expect it?'
3. Source answers question. [no matter how irrelevant or transparently motivated the journalists question, the content of the source's answer is almost always irrelevant no mater how rational, reasonable or data backed.]
4. Front page headline/leading news story of headline's publication/channel: '[Source] SAYS YOU'RE A CUNT WANTS TO RUIN YOUR LIFE!'
Chomsky is known for his concept of 'manufacturing consent' I these days am feeling much 'manufactured dissent' and it reminds me of the Gillard years. The press is impressing upon me some kind of industrial scale Iago to the general public's Othello. Things didn't work out for Othello. (The Iago I'm referring to is not the parrot from Aladdin.)
So with all that, I'm doing the same thing as much of the press that I read. Constructing a narrative. I am not an epidemiologist, I do have a bachelors degree in Economics, I don't have privileged access to the data.
I was prompted somewhat to write this because of a talk I listened to by Nicole Gurren on the very separate subject of Housing Affordability. It's a good example of narratives being constructed with no reference to any data, no factual basis and dominating the conversation - specifically housing affordability is best solved by > increasing the housing supply by > slashing the project approval red-tape. We tend to accept things, because we've heard them. I'm sure I could lose consciousness before I ran out of examples of this phenomenon.
The First Wave
Australia's first wave was worst in NSW, next worst in Victoria, where Victoria whose capital city Melbourne, has a population greater than that of the nation of New Zealand, and statistically on a per capita basis Victoria outperformed NZ up until the Cedar Meats outbreak which for my speculation is an important data point.
That's skipping to the end of the story of the first wave. My father was working in Mongolia in a climate-disastrous fly-in-fly-out arrangement, when Covid-19 was just an epidemic in Wuhan China. He flew back to Australia on a flight via Beijing where everyone was wearing face masks on the plane but took them off to eat their in flight meals. He flew back to Mongolia a fortnight later, Wuhan was locked down, Beijing was being locked down. By the time he was due to fly back to Australia, he could no longer travel via Beijing, he had to take a route from Mongolia to South Korea, transfer from one Airport to another in Seoul, then fly home.
My mother reported to me that their dinner group of friends from Shepparton one of Victoria's regional centers were unwilling to come to the dinner party my parents were due to host, owing to my father's travelling from Asia. My mother and I were of a consensus that they were being paranoid hypochondriacs. My attitude for the next week or so was 'Don't people remember SARS? Swine Flu?'
Then South Korea had it's outbreak, and the WHO declared a pandemic. We discovered for the most part, most conuntries had no real plans in place. It all felt very reactive. To the credit of the leadership at every level of government in Australia, it appeared our leaders got briefed up very quickly. This was the bizarre week were time compressed, and we began to go into lock-down. Each day, the risks we were taking the day before seemed callous and stupid to me, so I should say the risks I'd been taking.
I had no idea if I was already Covid-19 positive, that was the main thing. I could have been asymptomatic, it was already here. I could be inadvertantly killing grannies just by breathing air.
This was for me, the story of the first wave. We knew almost nothing, some seized on this to go into upbeat denial, or defiant denial, conspiracy theories. Those people are still around, though I assume there's an increased chance in my state, that some of them may now have caught Covid-19, and may have been confronted for the first time in their lives, that an objective reality exists.
There was a contingent I knew of that were overcautious. They didn't leave the house, they washed everything they touched, they disinfected their bananas before peeling them. They left as little as possible to chance, these are the people so desperate to survive, you wouldn't want to wake up in one of Jigsaw's games chained to them.
I feel that the first wave is largely forgotten, or that we have not yet found the time to reflect upon it. The first wave in Victoria was the rich man's wave, the middle class wave, the upper-middle-bogan wave. It was waves of people being disgorged from planes returning from ski trips on Italian slopes, Aspen-Colorado slopes. People returning from destination weddings and cruises. Holidaymakers. International holiday makers. Taking long haul flights across the Pacific Ocean, the South-East Asian Island Chains, the Indian Ocean, breathing recycled air and then walking straight through customs and out into the community.
I recall looking at the Department of Health's daily Covid updates during the first wave, once I had actually learned the nature of the situation, seen what was happening in Italy and New York and subsequently accepted the counter-intuitive seriousness of a tentative 2% mortality rate aerosol spread respiratory disease. The best represented demographic for case numbers nationally was females 20-29. Something like 7% above males 20-29 and 30% bigger than the third largest age-cohort.
My prejudice instantly kicked in, and I was all like 'it's those fucking hipster-bali tourists getting their cheap flights to Osaka and Tokyo via Jetstar. Those incredibly venal twenty-something women that think they are broadening themselves...' Unlike the WHO who transparently archive their situation reports it's a bit harder with the Australian website but here's one from late May that is the statistical picture I referred to and am referring to. You can see in the bar graph bottom middle the demographic breakdown. Anyway, I noticed my own prejudice kicking in, no doubt agitated by tourism Japan's add campaign specifically targeting young women to come live their Samurai experiences in 'authentic' Japan, oh how it bugs me... and caught myself.
The most probably explanation for this demographic phenomena was that women, particularly young women are most at risk of community transmission because they are no doubt over-represented in jobs like Nursing, Waiting, Receptionist... proud of myself at having arrested my tertiary educated, Murakami reading specific misogyny and gotten to what was no doubt the truth, my rationalization soon deflated.
That narrative doesn't square with the data being presented, in the first wave there was little to no reports of healthcare workers contracting it. The great success of the first wave if anything was that our healthcare system avoided becoming the hotbed of transmission and fatalities like Northern Italy and New York. Indeed, I can recall things I thought about in the first wave - one of which was during the panic buying epidemic, I actually thought about the prospect of people invading my home for toilet paper in a supply shock driven breakdown of society. Another was my being drafted into a medical career I never wanted simply because the doctors and nurses were dying off and I eventually would be forced into a medical school basic training draft, much like my Grandfather was called off to fight Germans and Japanese interrupting his dreams of being a con-man or doing a dentistry apprenticeship or something.
There was also a complete lack of news coverage of restaurant outbreaks, or hospitality industry outbreaks, or event outbreaks. To date, I don't think there's been any community transmission that has taken place in a Supermarket.
Thus, I conclude the Victorian, and Australian wave stories are stories of demographics. The first wave was the international holiday demographic. People who can demonstrably take time off work to go overseas for a couple of weeks.
I distinctly remember as Victoria's first wave was winding down, and there was (what I considered then) irrational agitation and public pressure for the restrictions to be released even as the Cedar meats cluster was ballooning, I was riding along a trail feeling constantly frustrated by the demonstrable lack of public understanding of 1.5m physical distancing that I the very concrete sentiment formed in my head 'If we have beat this thing, it is not owing to Victorian public.'
The first wave was manageable because it was among a demographic of people that are largely retired and wealthy, who have no income to lose that isn't rent from property they own, or dividends from shares. Or they were young people, who may feel like battlers, but lockdown for them meant they could no longer go on Tinder dates, a demographic that has some 80% of their social contact invested in the 3 people they take their break with at their casual jobs while they go through Uni. A demographic that sublets the room in their sharehouse for 6 weeks while they go to Japan, New York or Berlin to get authentic food for their Instagram stories, and cheap good quality cocaine to tell their friends about in the break room.
This is a demographic that Jobkeeper and Jobseeker are sufficient to secure. I suspect there's a high correlations between taking month long cruises and being retired, and possibly a high correlation between taking international trips over the (Australian) summer and having a job that can be tele-commuted, or school or University course. I suspect there's a correlation between taking international trips, having a salaried office job with paid annual leave and being able to telecommute that job.
The carriers of the First wave might visit their family once a month, or once every two months, or their family live scattered across the world, where they have taken various roles as social media monitors for firms in different cultural hubs. It's the wealthy, in other words, who on aggregate don't spend much time in their community as they are time poor cash rich. The elderly retirees go travelling to alleviate boredom and 'spend the kids inheritance' where their children were/are preoccupied with their self-diagnoses of 'social anxiety' as an excuse to only interact regularly and in close proximity with 1-5 friends. The demographic that sees pre-drinks as mandatory prior to a party, but showing up to the party that necessitates the pre-drinks is not mandatory.
The state and federal government shut down the key contact point for this internationally jetsetting demographic - school and work, and with that, their social lives and communities naturally shift online. They put up the welfare payments to prevent civil unrest (for the most part) and we rode out that first wave. Bringing us to...
The Second Wave
I have opinions about the second wave that I would acknowledge upfront, mainly to get them out of the way. I feel, quite strongly that they are wrong to fixate on. Specifically:
- Almost certainly the state government (The Andrews Government) made the wrong decision, aka a mistake in allowing our quarantine hotels to use private security firms to maintain the quarantine, when the Australian Defense Force (ADF) had been pledged as available to oversee this task by the Federal Government.
- The initial reaction to the outbreak of community transmission that would become our second wave, of locking down specific postcodes was doomed to failure (emphasis in my opinion) because the outbreak had been traced back using genetic sequencing and through positive Covid tests to the Quarantine Hotels, a set of data that told me, that if people who literally 'had one job' couldn't be trusted to contain the virus, then some 100,000 people in a set of suburbs with incredibly porous, arbitrary and conditional (eg. 'essential' workers could leave the locked down suburb) boundaries - if this was page one in the 'suppression strategy' playbook that whole playbook can be thrown away.
- The lockdown of the public housing residential towers was a fucking nightmare for all involved.
I believe it wrong to fixate on these, because the quarantine hotels using private security worked perfectly right up until it didn't, this is the kind of mistake leadership has to be able to make if we aren't to live in a 'demeritocracy' (quoting myself there) ie. we ostracize anybody who isn't perfect despite having nothing but imperfect alternatives.
It also, creates a problem of hypocrisy for people agitating for early or immediate reopenings on the grounds of damage to the economy. Because that would be the exact line of reasoning to use private security firms instead of ADF personal. The ADF are government sector spending, spending that I assume goes on whether they are training on a military base way out Woop-Woop somewhere or guarding the corridor of a Hotel.
Whereas, the Hotel's repurposed for quarantine are private sector extracting government funds to offset the lost tourist trade owing to the lockdowns, I would be amazed if part of the decision the Andrews government made wasn't informed by an essentially identical but specific argument about the need to protect the economy by not using ADF personal and instead paying the Hotels to hire private security, Hotel managers that in part or accross the board stuck to the old economic paradigm of maximizing profit by having marginal costs = marginal revenue. In layman's terms, to cut every corner possible without losing the government contract to keep international arrivals in 14 day quarantines.
As to the 10 postcode lockdown, my harshest criticism would be my usual suspect of making a decision that disregards ordinary human psychology. Particularly the propensity for people to feel it is unfair, like if the news said their were 40 active cases yesterday, and you were one of 10,000 people living in a suburb that was now locked down and you shared a supermarket with a suburb that is not locked down, most people aren't going to adopt the 'take one for the team' mentality but gravitate towards the 'why me? it isn't fair. I didn't do anything wrong' mentality.
In my experience most people lack the cognitive empathy abilities to overcome prisoners dilemmas, tragedies of the commons. When they are thinking 'I'll escape to my beach-house/cousin's house/visit my mum interstate.' I doubt any sufficient number pause and think 'I probably don't have Covid, but this is exactly what someone with Covid is thinking right now in this suburb, and they are going to flee the lockdown and that's exactly how this will spread...'
So while it was doomed to fail though, I don't think it was pointless. Governments everywhere are observing governments everywhere trying to figure out a) what the best approach is and b) the best approach they can afford logistically and politically.
The suffering under lockdown, is somewhat mitigated by the knowledge we now have that locking down postcodes doesn't work. From now, anybody who tries this in the event of an outbreak, is 100% liable for escalating the situation, because they had every opportunity to learn from the Victorian example.
Getting to the Residential Towers. I've had the fortune to have friends that lived in towers like the ones that were placed in the most severe lockdown nationwide. They have been described as vertical cruise ships. Having an outbreak in one of these towers is just a fucking nightmare. Locking them down in quarantine is a fucking nightmare. It was the right call. I saw the people demanding on humanitarian grounds that they be released, and though I'm sure they are well intended, non of these demands gave me the impression the people advocating had any fucking idea what they were talking about.
What came out in the wash, in dribs and drabs over the past 6 or so weeks are the headlines that get buried in the dumpster fire that is the media coverage of the daily press briefings. Things like the hotel security being hired via Whatsapp and paid $18 an hour (the current national minimum wage is $19.49 per hour, or $740.80 per 38 hour week, which x2 is $1480 where the current unemployed benefits stand at $1124 per fortnight) so guess who's taking that job? People who really have to.
It also trickles out, that people were getting tested after one shift at one work sight (where in Australia you are instructed to self-isolate until you get your test results) and then doing some uber-eats runs after the test, then going to work at a different job sight.
I was fortunate enough to have a friend testify to her direct experience of working as a nurse, having to pick up rosters at quarantine hotels and then hospital wards and working across multiple sites. The media and government appears to have uncovered this also in their inquiries.
The ADF were brought in to door knock and make sure people who had tested positive were self-isolating, apparently 1 in 4 people weren't at home when they had tested positive and been instructed to self-isolate for 14 days. I suspect the natural response when hearing a statistic like this is moral outrage.
Let's try and exercise cognitive empathy though. The above screenshot is from the aforementioned in the pre-ramble talk about Housing Policy Red-Tape. The slide appears
thus far into Nicole's talk if you can't read the screenshot it says 'Healthcare workers living in group households 2016 - source ABS...'
from the transcript: 'This is just a map of our low-paid healthcare and social assistance workers who are living in share group households in 2016. I hope they’re not still living in share houses now, but work also by my lab shows that the informal rental market is alive and well right now in the middle of the pandemic, similar to the remarks that Emily made at the start of this evening’s talk. Much of that stock, unfortunately, is overcrowded and some of it is downright dangerous.'
So the second wave, the crucial, to me, characteristic is that we basically got the first wave spreaders under control, because they were wealthy people who can telecommute their office jobs, have leave entitlements, have relatively secure housing etc. I described it all above. We got them under control through hotel quarentine, then we introduced them to a different demography...
A demographic that works in essential services - nursing and security, for near minimum wage, with little job security, no housing security etc. People who can't afford to take sick days, people who needs so badly to earn $365 above the Jobseeker payment a fortnight, that they will work full time standing in a corridor telling people to get back in their rooms for 38 hours a week over the next best option of doing whatever the fuck you want all day for $1,124 just $365 less.
It also appears to turn out, that the kind of person that takes this job has a large family, a large family that might have religious observances and large family gatherings, possibly language barriers, almost certainly a greater sense of felt filial piety. This low income, low job security, low housing security demographic appears to be the crucial difference in the second wave, they stand in stark contrast to the demographic of the first wave.
Just going by the 10 postcode lockdown, and the public housing tower lockdowns, the second wave was very much a North and Western suburbs wave, whereas in our first wave, the 'hot-spot' was squarely in the South and East, particularly the Mornington Peninsula. For those unfamiliar with Melbourne, the South and East are the well-to-do suburbs, the North and West are the working class.
Would you be willing to bet the farm, that a similar analysis of ABS census data for Melbourne won't show that the Hotspod, super-spreader suburbs aren't characterized by Low-income aged care and security workers correlating with low home ownership rates, in informal share-houses, room share etc? That it will turn out that the people that lift your Nan in and out of bed and change her diapers, are incredibly well paid homeowners from small families with tertiary educations and are just incredibly selfish pricks?
This is what the data screams to me, and it frankly, must be ignored. Because nobody likes to discuss why it is that we pay a Fund Manager $120,000 a year plus bonuses to underperform an index fund as they allocate Superannuation, or a Social Media 'Expert' for a Boutique Interior Design business is paid $50,000 per year with 20 days annual leave and 8 days sick leave benefits, but someone, who if they fuck up cost the economy $6 billion a week, is paid $18 an hour and can't legitimately get their name on a lease.
We know plenty of fund managers are well compensated to lose money. We know plenty of social media experts are well paid to... well it's hard to tell whether they are doing anything at all. And we know, that if someone does quarantine security right, they can save us $6 Billion dollars over... 8 weeks and counting. We know an aged care worker, if they turn up to work sick can kill any and all of their residents.
That's the market, and the economy we are supposed to be in a rush to reopen. I'd also suggest, that because there's likely to be a high correlation between working an actually hard but essential job for minimal compensation and being a first or second generation immigrant, that many people don't wish to discuss this narrative because of the inevitable racist vitriol that will be directed at the people willing to work harder than us at work worth doing for people unwilling to pay them a cent more than they are obligated to.
If somebody screws up their one job, when they are hired at $18 an hour via Whatsapp and provided no training, I'm not angry at them. I'm angry at the recruiters and the management.
Certainly, certainly the decision to not use the ADF and to instead use private security was a catastrophic fuckup. Was it however an error of commission or omission? It appears, and it makes sense to me, to simply be an oversight. An act of commission would require evidence, including testimony surfacing where somebody advocated for private security - I'm agnostic, waiting for such evidence to appear.
An act of omission, an oversight squares up with other facts - like it was fine for the first wave, the Government appears to have learned 'as it goes' that people were testing positive and still going to work/refusing to self isolate because of economic pressures, and they made adjustments like offering payments and getting the test result turnaround time down.
Think if you will, of Covid like fire, and the South and East suburbs, for Socio-economic reasons are like wet green foliage, tertiary educated, home-owning, white collar workers with declining birth rates. The North and West are dry tinder stacked on oily rags swept up against old newspaper collections, job insecure, housing insecure first and second generation migrants with large intersecting families, religious observances and community events with high birthrates and multiple siblings. Suppression might work out East, down South.
Not West and North though, once the fire was there it went up in flames quickly, and we failed in our obligation to protect the vulnerable. Even if ultimately absolved of responsibility, these essential workers are going to have to live with 'to make rent I wound up killing 2 people/6 people/12 people.' for the rest of their lives.
These people aren't thought of victims though if you pick up a paper. The victims are cafe owners, gym owners, restaurant owners, landlords both residential and commercial, event coordinaters, footy fans etc. The real victim is the Economy.
The too oft escaped algebra of Covid however is that transmission rates increase quickly, it's non-linear, and it takes a relative age to bring them back down. It takes 15 minutes of exposure to aerosol droplets of Covid-19 to catch it, about 4 days for symptoms to show up, and 2 to 3 weeks to recover, and some 2% of people don't recover.
Now this suggests, that the way to handle outbreaks is to lock down movement and contact fast, and release these measures gradually. Fast in, slow out. This runs counter to public sentiment, the situation needs to escalate to scarily close to out of control before lockdowns are acceptable, then as soon as numbers appear to taper or start decreasing, the public demands to know when restrictions will be eased.
If you think of this behavior as an individual, it would be like a person testing positive refusing to isolate until they have given it to at least two other people, and then demanding to leave isolation the moment their fever reduces rather than after they are deemed non-contagious and recovered. Given that in a community, there will be many people who never contract the disease, perhaps the better analogy to the body would be the hands and knees agitating for release, because all the symptoms are in the lungs, head and toes.
I actually know the 3 degrees of separation between myself and George W Bush, it's possibly just 2 degrees of separation with a middle man that could be cut out. Given that he's (as of writing) a living President and all the living Presidents know each other, I have 4 degrees of separation which is to say, I know a guy who knows a guy who's dad knows George W who knows Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump who certainly knows Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi and I have 0 influence over any of them. I have little enough influence over people I know directly, it's a lot of effort to get them to turn up to one of my exhibitions or even respond to an email.
I have little enough influence over myself, when it comes to procrastination, eating right, exercising etc. I often don't follow my own advice.
Except that san travel bans and movement restrictions, it's possible that a virus I have could infect past and present leaders of the free world. Through collective incompetence I could play a role in the death of Jimmy Carter. Some resident of Wuhan whether they were a floor mopper in a Wet Market selling Bat soup or a lab technician that fucked up protocols (we'll probably never know who patient 0 was) hospitalized UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and infected Brazil's President Bolsanaro.
This is a virus, that can get into clubs I never could. Yet, I live a lifestyle to-date more secure against Covid than the Prime Minister of England, The White House and President Bolsanaro.
I also feel, now that the curve is flattening in Melbourne's second wave, that the public does not consider the position of the state Premier and the respective position of the press, particularly tabloid newspapers like the Herald Sun.
The newspaper can and has agitated and riled up the public for quicker easing of restrictions, they've been heavily critical of the Premier's Roadmap out of lockdown. Now I imagine that if the Premier capitulated and released lockdown measures so people in Metropolitan Melbourne could have dinner parties of 5 people, and travel across town and stay at their beach house etc. and cases were stable for a whole week before, hypothetically, spiking again into a new outbreak of triple figure daily cases, and the stage 4 restrictions were put back in place...
I don't see the Herald Sun running a front page apology 'We were wrong, Gov was right.' I don't think they'd take any responsibility for their editorials. I think they wouldn't even blink before they blamed the premier for backflipping on his roadmap and coming out of lockdown too early. I can't imagine them saying 'well after criticizing him for not being conservative enough to post the ADF on the quarantine hotels, then urging him to be optimistic about releasing restrictions, it seems we don't know what we are talking about and have failed to inform the public and serve the public interest.'
That's my interpretation of the data available. The First Wave could be referred to as the 'First Class' wave and the Second Wave the Second Class. It's a story of demographics and vulnerabilities, one that echoes around the world on multiple scales.
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