Hello everybody!!!!!!!!!!!
Drunk Ed here, ready to offer up some boozy words of wisdom and ramble on about The Things. This might be a long one, folks. And it deals with some unpleasant things – like lockdowns, and billionaires.
What Things are happening right now? Yeah, exactly – Olympics! Great game by the Kookies in the men’s hockey final. Pipped at the end in a shootout, what an annoying way to win Silver! Full credit to the Belgians, their first Olympic gold in hockey they should be super damn proud!
Water Polo’s been pretty good too. Gods damn that’s a hard sport to play. So tough!
Hey you know what else is happening? Lockdown 6.0 baby! Another Locky D!
Which sucks.
There’s very little GOOD about lockdowns. I mean really, the ONLY good thing is that it’s extremely effective at beating SARS-CoV-2. That’s really the only thing it’s good for. And bringing Influenza deaths down to zero. Really good at that too. So beating Covid and beating Flu, thay’re the only things lockdowns are good for.
They’re bad for a lot of other things though.
Teachers – here’s a fun fact – teachers do the work of angels, in the toughest of circumstances. Which is one of those platitudinous (wow what a great word! How good are platypuseses!) saying that everyone agrees with but for some reason we still pay them bugger all. They’re working with CHILDREN during a PANDEMIC via remote fucking teleconferencing software in the hardest, toughests imaginable circumstances. HIGH SCHOOL IS HELL BUT SURELY ONLINE LEARNING IS MORE HELLER.
Be extra nice to teachers.
Be extra EXTRA nice to teachers.
Small businesses. One of the great tragedies of this pandemic is that ‘mum and dad’ stores will go out of business but Gerry Fucking Arsehole Fucking Harvey is going to get richer and richer until one day he eats some bad prawns and suddenly dies in an explosive diahorrea episode that floods the streets with his foul-smelling fecal torrents. Yay capitalism.
So no, I don’t like lockdowns. Nobody likes lockdowns.
I had an interesting discussion the other day with a workmate. He’s convinced that lockdowns are terrible because businesses will struggle and some will fail. He thinks that lockdowns in regional areas, with no known cases of covid, are a flippant power-grab by dictatorial politicians.
I can totally see why he thinks that.
But what I think is often missed in the discussion about lockdowns is that they’re not a cure. Lockdowns are a prevention, not a cure. Yes, if a lockdown lasts long enough and is adhered to rigorously enough, it will beat the virus – Melbourne proved that last year. I don’t recommend it for shits and giggles.
But a short, hard lockdown like we’ve seen from WA, from South Australia, from Queensland and Victoria are not designed to crush the virus once it’s run wild throughout the state. The way to do that is with rapid and widespread vaccination of 80+% of the population. And that, spoiler alert, may take some time. No, a short hard lockdown is to PREVENT an outbreak from running wild throughout the state. They’re done when there’s only a few cases – like six, for example. And so when there are six cases in metropolitan Melbourne that’s the time to lock the whole state down – because this virus, and especially this Delta variant, fucking LOVES to spread. If you don’t believe me, look at New South Wales.
Sure, the exponential curve has been greatly reduced in NSW. Instead of seeing thousands of cases a day they’re seeing 200, 250, 300 etc. But that’s not a decreasing number. And it’s getting harder and harder to control with piecemeal lockdowns. The approach seems to be – and I’m an outsider here, I haven’t been following NSW too closely – it seems to be to wait until a few cases appear, and then lock down those Local Government Areas. Wait until a few cases appear somewhere else, then lock down those LGAs. The trouble is, that’s using lockdown as a cure, not a prevention. And people move. They travel. They visit sick grandparents, they shop, they meet up with friends and family. And you don’t know you’ve got the virus until you’ve moved around a for a bit. If you just lock down the whole state, whether there are cases or not, you can quench that movement and crush the virus.
But it’s not easy. People struggle. And that means we all need to look out for each other. Shop from local small businesses – but shop online, if you can. Keep the local restaurants alive by ordering takeaway from them. Keep your friends sane and comforted by giving them a call, or sending a care package. We need to stop the Us vs Them mentality and focus on an Us vs Virus strategy. None of this is easy.
We all need to drink something nice, to eat some cheese, to fondle a boob or two. We need to look after ourselves, our families, our friends. We need to stay informed and set our friends and families straight when they spread misinformation. We need to tune out when the news and the doomscrolling is affecting our mood. And above all we need to boycott arseholes like Gerry Fucking Harvey. And Clive Motherfucking Palmer. They can fuck themselves right off.
And next time a federal election comes around? Don’t vote for fucking Liberals. I’ll admit Labor definitely has it’s flaws, but at least they’re not openly hostile to the environment, to science, academia, the arts or the poor.