Government Interventions Can Control COVID-19
This is not a contentious fact
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I took the train to work today. I write a lot of my articles to the sound of moaning tracks, and this one was no different. On Friday, I am going out to a show in a live theatre, probably after getting food at a restaurant in the city. It’s summer in Sydney, so I’ve been going to the beach a lot, and this weekend will probably be no different, although I’ll try to get to the local bouldering gym for a few hours as well.
This is life in Sydney, January 2021. It’s not quite ‘normal’ — I’ll be wearing a mask to the live show, and the gym will probably be at 50-75% capacity rather than totally packed — but it’s pretty close. We still have some restrictions, and probably will until vaccination rates get very high, but even so life is more placid than chaotic in the city right now.
Which is why I find the latest myth, that government restrictions can’t control COVID-19, so utterly astonishing. Because they clearly have here.
The Battle Against COVID-19
We are now nearing 12 months into a global pandemic, and people are fatigued. The initial optimism that we could beat this by working together has faded into terrible ennui as we realize that even our long-term fixes aren’t easy options. Vaccines are a glowing light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s painfully obvious now that earlier predictions about the difficulties of rolling out vaccinations across the world were on the mark, and that it’ll be quite some time before the pandemic can really be declared ‘over’.
The world feels, in a word, exhausted with the entire process.
Which makes the newest myth totally understandable. After 12 months of ceaseless back-and-forth between lockdown and the semblance of normality, people are well and truly tired of it all. It is easy to become apathetic, and imagine that there really is no way that we can prevent…
