NEVER in history has virtually all media attention been devoted to the effect of a disease, measured every day in every country in the world as increases in mild cases, critical cases or deaths.
We’ve never seen media hysteria like it, not Y2K, not RSI (remember Repetitive Strain Injury?), not even climate change.
And why is it happening? Do governments drive the media with multiple daily briefings or is it the other way around? Either way, the Wuhan Disease will pass but it may leave governments fighting for their lives.
We are in what history will see as the Mad Months where our livelihoods and lives are being threatened and our standard of living and quality of life is being deliberately lowered by governments every day.
ALARMIST
To find the latest news we go to the media. We expect it to report the facts, yet we know that isn’t always true. We have become used to occasional alarmist reports and we can live with false reports that gain coverage then fade away. But what we have never experienced at this level is the sheer weight of information from such an endless number of sources, nor the willingness of social and traditional media to publish and air reports from people who simply do not deserve to be heard.
GPs comment on the spread of a disease about which the world’s best medical minds still know little – like a suburban vet commenting on the progress of the world’s first head-transplant operation.
This crisis is turbo-charged by the public having too much information. The media pile-on has become the norm. The tragedy of the Ruby Princess saga has now become a witch hunt as we chase down some poor coot who will be burned at the stake for making, presumably along with others, what was a wrong call that has turned out to be a terrible mistake.
How far will this pile-on go? Will we get his/her name, a photo and address to which we can send news crews to wait outside the gate? Will an apology make us feel better or do we need to destroy a career, a life and family? Jail has been mentioned more than once. Is this really what we are going to do? The lessons have been learned, but many continue to bay for the blood of specific people.
We should be concentrating on our actions today and where we will be tomorrow – and the latter will not be pretty, certainly politically.
Nobody knows how long Wuhan Disease will last, nor do we really know if it will be worse than say, a seasonal flu, because we have never measured seasonal flu with such repetitive intensity.
We don’t know how many will die, how widely it will spread, what can stop it. Governments don’t know, Jim on Facebook does not know and the best medical minds do not agree. And yet governments everywhere are reacting to the worse-case scenario, a “bubonic plague” sweeping unchecked around the world, 20-50 million deaths, body-filled carts in streets, ‘bring out your dead’, red crosses on doors.
Of course, they have no choice to act this way because to take too little action could result in that very scenario, but that will not stop them being judged in hindsight – and judged without any gratitude or recognition of the complexity of the challenge.
What will history say of a time Governments gave away billions of dollars (money we don’t have) to make life a little better for those suffering because of a situation arguably caused by the government?
INFLUENZA
It matters little if you’re a government or a chief medical officer, nobody can predict where this will go, but consider a scenario:
Imagine the world in a year’s time if the deaths from COVID-19 happen to be less than the seasonal influenza. (I use the flu as an example, not because it is the same as COVID-19, but because it is a human-transmitted large annual killer of mainly old people). And yes, the Wuhan Disease is worse in some ways and there will be further deaths – and that is tragic.
But what if at the end, whenever that might be, we find that in some respects it was actually a better result than anyone in charge anticipated. Better than a flu.
Just say. And because governments could only work to the worst scenario, they will have closed down their economies and ruined millions of livelihoods (voters’ livelihoods), in what might possibly be judged by some to have been an over-reaction.
Who knows how bad it will be? But what we do know is that in the end everybody will have suffered one way or another. Superannuation funds will be depleted, savings reduced or gone, houses lost, businesses folded. People will be worse off, certainly financially, after having gone through an extended period of dramatic loss of lifestyle because they were told they had to.
BLAME
No voter is going to be happier or better off financially than they were before they’d ever heard of Wuhan Disease. And they will be looking to blame.
If it turns out that it wasn’t as bad as we were told it would be, there will be a media pile-on fuelled vigorously by Opposition parties and every financial expert – all with the benefit of hindsight. Every talking head will say they told us so. Social media will publish thousands of stories about personal suffering caused not by COVID-19 but by governments’ over-reactions to it. Facebook reporters will delight in telling how they had COVID “and I didn’t really suffer at all. So why did I lose my job?”.
Lawyers, who are already gearing up, will make class actions a way of life. And once it starts, it will snowball. Few will take into account the fact that governments faced the impossible challenge of protecting the health of millions and at the same time saving their livelihoods, in a situation never faced before. Fairness will not come into the equation when 20-20 hindsight will be rife.
PILE-ON
If you think the Ruby Princess story is a pile-on, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
In that scenario, regardless of whether the right decisions were made for the right reasons, all those who had suffered, the media and the Opposition would be out to demonstrate that the decisions were incompetent. Our leaders would have been seen to have wasted billions of “our money” and “ruined our lives”. And they would be punished. The backlash would be enormous.
Governments have never faced such an onslaught of media, social and traditional. Nor has so much information and misinformation been focussed on a single danger.
It’s tic-tac-toe. Nobody wins. If governments’ current actions turn out to have been over-reactions, then fewer will die, but everyone will still be worse off. If the effects of the Wuhan Disease turn out to be as bad as predicted, then more will die, but either way millions of people, voters, will be worse off than they were just weeks ago.
It is almost impossible to gauge politically. If it takes too long to recover there will be anger (and any recovery will seem to take too long). If it is a quick recovery then the Government will be hung for having mis-judged and wasted our money.
It will not be pretty.PC
