Living with Covid: Are Australians accepting people dying from Covid?

We seem to be at the point in this pandemic where people die every day from COVID-19 … and we’re OK with that. Just last week, on average, 39 Australians died each day after catching the virus.

For example, just last week numerous videos circulated in the United States showing airline passengers cheering as the announcement was made that a federal judge had voided the mask mandate.

This is despite mask-wearing being one of the most effective ways of containing super-spreader events, according to epidemiologists like Saskia Popescu, who looked at the dropping of the mandate in despair. The US President’s chief medical adviser, Antony Fauci, said it was a decision a judge did not have the medical experience to make.

There have been similar scenes here in Australia as COVID-19 restrictions have been relaxed. Witness the jubilation at the lifting of the dancing ban in December, 2020 or the joyous airport reunions as the Queensland border opened to domestic hotspots in time for Christmas, 2021.

By that point Queensland had still only recorded seven COVID-related deaths. We all knew what was coming and yet we did it anyway. The eighth death was reported on January 7 and by yesterday the total number of deaths of people with COVID-19 in the state had reached 869.

The impact has been disproportionately felt by older people. The federal health department has broken down the number of deaths in Australia by age group and it shows almost 83 per cent were aged 70 years or older.

‘Learn to live with the virus’

Perhaps government messaging has been a factor. As the phrase “learn to live with the virus” became more and more common people may have thought the worst was past.

The requirement to use the QR check-in app to enter restaurants and retailers was dropped. Even if people did check in, they weren’t being contacted if it later emerged that a positive case was present at the same time.

On Thursday, the rules for close contacts changed meaning those who are asymptomatic no longer had to isolate for seven days. A day later, the Queensland government announced it had disbanded its central contact-tracing team after 15 months of work that involved tracking more than 15,000 contacts and 10,000 cases. This is while Queensland goes through an Omicron outbreak.

What has changed is our attitudes. The federal government read the room when they shut international borders. It is hard to imagine going back to these or other restrictions without significant pushback or disobedience.

Getting life ‘back to normal’

What seems more plausible is that with the passage of time and the gaining of knowledge about COVID-19, people have shifted the virus in their mind to be a given risk of life.

We could do more — wearing masks at all times, investing in air filtration to remove airborne virus particles, or reinstating restrictions on the unvaccinated – but we seem more interested in getting life “back to normal”. It is like our acceptance of influenza, which claimed 1,080 Australian lives in 2019.