IN THE NSW town of Bowral last week it was hard to find a car space. Motels, hotels and virtually every restaurant were booked out.
The queue outside the main-street pie shop extended, with social distancing, 100 metres along the footpath. This was a town in recovery mode. Not a sign of Coronavirus. The hotels alone had been turning people away every night, at weekends up to 50 per night.
CANCELLED
Then one person in Woolworths tested positive. The official reaction was immediate and rehearsed, exactly as it should have been, contact tracing, COVID-19 testing and cleaning. It was contained. There is no risk to anyone now.
Yet by Thursday July 16 virtually every hotel room reservation had been cancelled and the streets of Bowral were again empty.
It wasn’t because of a Government edict. There wasn’t an official warning given to stay away. The public reaction was self-generated, to the news that one person in one store in one town had become ill.
So fixated with new cases has the public messaging become that a single person feeling ill with COVID-19 shuts down the local economy, for who knows how long.
To be clear, one person in one shop became ill with COVID-19 and as a result hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tourists cancelled their reservations, changed their minds about visiting and thus damaged the recovering incomes of hundreds of Bowral’s retailers, hotels and motels.
Hundreds more worried citizens queued in their cars for up to six hours at times so they could be tested. Most had no symptoms, and probably few visited Woolworths in Bowral. But they got tested, just in case. Just to be safe.
SCARED
Just because they are scared. Because the cycle of Government-media messaging has trained us to be frightened and illogical.
I’ve never witnessed such a deliberate conditioning of the public, such a nationwide inculcation of fear – not with SARS, not with influenza, not with AIDS, not with bushfires, droughts or floods.
Pray the public will not keep over-reacting, because the economy will not survive it. Cases will pop up in most towns and suburbs as a matter of course and we can’t shut the towns down without destroying businesses. It’s happening now. Coronavirus is not going away and there’s no vaccine.
BLAME
The public attitude must be changed and that can only occur when Government messaging moves from “better to be safe than sorry” to become more sophisticated, more accurate and more realistic. Currently it seems the messages are crafted to include covering one’s butt just in case something unexpected happens and the Government gets blamed. This has to stop.
The public will learn to live with a small amount of risk as long as that risk is accurately defined. PC
Have we gone crazy? Government radio ads ask us to get checked if we have symptoms or not, so we go and sit in our cars for 6 hours and get checked, but what if we get Covid the day after? The only way, if getting checked is the answer, is to get checked every single day until we get a vaccine. This messaging is simplistic nonsense.
Threats and scare campaigns are the standard MO of our over-controlling public servants. Just look at any government communication with the public (“Stop it Or Cop it”, for example). They either scare us or fine us into submission. Nothing will ever change until our elected representatives take the side of quiet Australians and push back against controlling State bureaucrats – but they never will.
So every time we get one outbreak we shut down that local economy? It’s impossible to get back to normal if that is the only plan we have. We need to move to normal, careful but normal. And we better get used to it because it could be years.
Easy to say Mr Flett, but what if it had spread from Woolies to the pubs and hotels and suddenly it’s off and running. We do need to be safe rather than sorry.