Raina MacIntyre Why Covid-19 will never become endemic
For most of the pandemic Australia has worked to contain the virus through evidence-based public health measures such as border closures, case finding, contact tracing, quarantine, social distancing, vaccines and, at times, lockdown. Sadly, the weaponisation of lockdown as a pointscoring issue and emotional trigger has led to a conflation of lockdown with all other public health measures, most of which do not impinge on freedoms. Denial is a major theme during the pandemic. Denial of airborne transmission, denial of science, denial of Omicron being serious and denial about what it really means to “live with Covid-19”.
The denial of the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was started by experts on the World Health Organization infection control committee and allowed all countries to take the easy way out. If handwashing is all you need, onus can be shifted to “personal responsibility”; if ventilation needs to be fixed, that shifts responsibility to governments and private organisations. Australia only acknowledged airborne transmission after the Delta epidemic in mid-2021, almost a year after the WHO acknowledged it. Globally, 18 months was spent on hygiene theatre and actively discouraging mask use. As a result there is low awareness among the general public of the importance of ventilation and masks in reducing their personal risk.
We had effective campaigns on handwashing, but no campaigns of similar effect have been used to empower people to control their own risk with simple measures such as opening a window. People living in apartments are largely unaware of the structural factors that make them high risk for transmission, or of the simple measures to reduce risk. The failure to focus on airborne transmission has hampered the ability to control the spread and has endangered health workers. Correcting it is critical to the long-term sustainability of health, business and the economy. How can restaurants recover without a safe indoor air plan that may prevent a lockdown cycle that disrupts and ruins their business?
