Did we do it? Did we flatten the curve?
After all, we’re closing in on just a year since the experts warned us that we had just two weeks to “flatten the curve”. By which they meant that there was no way to actually prevent either the spread of the Chinese virus, or the number of infections and hospitalisations that would result. The best we could do, we were told (by the experts!), was to “flatten the curve”: that is, slow the rate at which the virus spread so that hospitals weren’t overwhelmed.
Well, it must have been true. Everyone from Jacinda Ardern to New Zealand’s favourite pink-haired frightbat and go-to expert-on-everything said so. The prime minister even brandished a cutesy graphic (provided by her science advisor, she said!) from the “podium of truth”.
But then, something odd happened.
Six months later, Jacinda the “COVID Queen” declared that flattening the curve was not enough. The virus had to be eliminated. Never mind that, in human history, only one harmful virus, smallpox, has actually been eliminated – and that took an intensive, half-century global effort. Jacinda was on the case! ’Rona, begone!
Except that it wasn’t. Not in New Zealand, nor the rest of the world. The “tricky little virus” just kept thumbing its nano-scale nose at Jacinda and popping up (usually in close proximity to the New Zealand government’s quarantine).
And so it is that, a year down the track, New Zealanders suddenly find themselves being thrown into lockdown again. So, the virus wasn’t eliminated after all. But surely the curve was flattened?
But New Zealand’s government follies are only a microcosm of the unhinged hysteria that’s swept governments across the world.
Everywhere, from Australia to Britain, politicians waved their little graphs and gibbered that there was only two weeks to flatten the curve.
Not only was the curve most conspicuously not flattened, but we’ve gone from “flatten the curve” to “the new normal”. Well, that must be true, too, because it’s the same experts telling us so. It’s not like bureaucrats and politicians would lie, exaggerate and generally exploit a crisis for their own benefit. Only an unforgivable cynic would dare suggest that they’re just a pack of hysterical ninnies who couldn’t organise a root in a brothel, to use a pithy Australian adage.
So, what does this “new normal” look like? Well, um, almost exactly as if a pack of hysterical ninnies who don’t know what they’re doing are in charge.
This, for instance, is an actual report from the Sunday Times: Adults will be allowed to sit down outdoors for a coffee or on a park bench with one friend, or with members of their own family. Yes, that’s a real headline. As one commenter put it, “John Cleese couldn’t have written this shit”. At the same time, the US’ indisputable, unquestionable expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci now says that Americans should muzzle themselves with not one, but two, hell, even three masks.
And just to prove that governments aren’t on power-trips or anything, the UK government is openly touting “vaccine passports”. That is, Britons will not just be prevented from travelling, but even from going to the shops or the pub, unless they submit to vaccination. In the US and Australia, employers are likewise urging the government to pass legislation that will ban their citizens from even having a job without a jab.
So, in just under a year, we’ve descended into a world where governments and their bureaucrats decide who can work and who has to stay at home under virtual house arrest, who can operate a business and who has to shut up shop and go broke, what supposedly free citizens must wear and whom they are allowed to sit on a park bench with.
In his introduction to Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah, his son Brian wrote that his father’s essential message was, “Governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions”. Tell me he was wrong.
And they never did flatten that curve.
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