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No point masking the truth – we do need someone to tell us what’s good for us

As we teeter on the brink of a third Covid-19 tsunami, our health authorities seem afraid to mandate the simple steps that could save thousands of lives. But it’s not a popularity contest, argues Madonna King

Jul 07, 2022, updated Jul 07, 2022
Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard addresses the media during a press conference at Southbank in Brisbane. (AAP Image/Jono Searle)

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard addresses the media during a press conference at Southbank in Brisbane. (AAP Image/Jono Searle)

As inappropriate as it is for a journalist to declare their fandom, I am about to do just that.

Chief Health Officer John Gerrard is just what we need as Covid takes aim again at our elderly and our most vulnerable, our workplaces and classrooms.

Dr Gerrard is authoritative. He doesn’t want to star in any movie. He’s enthusiastic about everything most of us don’t understand, and he knows it like the back of his hand.

Good friends – medicos who know him well – say he’s straight up and down, and was interested in all this stuff before any of us believed it was real.

And his clear no-nonsense language cuts through the political wallpaper that dominates our lives.

But yesterday, he ran close to losing me. “It’s about personal responsibility,’’ he said. “The future is not about public health measures and public health mandates.’’

Surely, though, it is. We have road rules to encourage people not to jay walk. We have rules about the selling of cigarettes to encourage people to give up. We use nudge economics to influence speeding and environmental behaviours and big punishments meted out to those who deliberately hurt others.

So why shouldn’t Covid – the biggest challenge in our generation – be treated with the same might?

If personal responsibility flourished, we’d value kindness more than we do. We’d not need the statute book of laws that govern everything from the price of a loaf of bread to when we can have our first alcoholic drink.

Personal responsibility would dictate that.

But Covid, as we were warned yesterday, is bigger than that. Dr Gerrard said this: “Either you or someone you know will be affected with this sub-variant in coming weeks. It’s important for you to prepare now.’’

But who’s listening? Few people are registering a positive RAT test. Few doctors will examine, in person, someone if they have a sore throat – meaning we don’t know if we are suffering the flu, Covid, RSV or something else.

We’re told we don’t have to isolate when someone we live with gets it, unless we are health professionals. And here’s a hint on who works in that industry: walk through a shopping centre at Carindale or Indooroopilly or Chermside.

Those wearing masks work in the health sector. They know the threat that Brisbane now faces, and they are exercising personal – and professional – responsibility. They will tell you that our hospitals are stretched to breaking point. They are too, many of them now working seven days a week.

Some will even explain that today is more scary than Covid at its previous peak; and that’s partly because we’ve dropped our caution levels, as masks and QR codes and pop-up testing stopped being used.

We’ve been told it’s business as usual. But with an expected 1000 Queenslanders in hospital within three weeks with a new brand of Covid, it’s not business as usual.

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Some public transport won’t run next week because so many drivers are ill. Sports carnivals, along with flights, are being cancelled.

So why wouldn’t it be just as important now to mandate our behaviour, as it was last year?

High vaccination levels aren’t the answer to that question, because people are still really, really sick – and dying each day.

More than 2000 State health staff are down with Covid. More if you count the flu. Workplaces have stopped. Too many people are not fronting up for their regular checks. Aged care homes are akin to prison cells.

Yet we don’t have to mandate masks, because of ‘personal responsibility’?

If that worked, people would be wearing them. AND THEY’RE NOT.

This Government claimed credit for leading Queenslanders during the early stages of the pandemic, or at least up until election day.

But what about leadership now? What about telling us how this will unfold once school starts (and public transport slows down) next week, and the EKKA comes to town. Is the advice to attend? Or to stay away?

How about telling us why we are not being told we must wear masks? At least in the new era of accountability, can we find out if that issue was discussed at Cabinet – and whether anyone paid to sit around the Cabinet table supported a mandate to wear them?

The problem here is that mandated mask-wearing is not popular. It will turn some against the Government. And we’re left to think that’s the most likely reason why their use is not being mandated.

Personal responsibility, at least when it comes to Covid, is just being offered up as an optional extra – at least for those not hooked up to tubes in a tired and stretched old hospital system.

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