CathNews New Zealand

A striking feature of Australia’s path through the Coronavirus has been the coming out of epidemiologists and social biologists.

From being little known members of small institutes they became rock stars, invited to press conferences, deferred to by politicians, selectively chosen for comment by the media, but also resented by representatives of big business and defenders of individual freedom.

The resentment is understandable because their expert advice has urged restrictions on freedom that business groups wanted removed, and their advice has prevailed.

But perhaps it also points to deeper differences between the two approaches.

The business lobby looked for a response that focused on the big, the certain and the technological. Scientists concerned with the spread of epidemics and the response to them focus simultaneously on the big and the small, on the probable and the human.

Those who wanted to remove restrictions in the interests of economic growth wanted certainty in naming a timetable for freedom and in fixing in advance the conditions that must be met, and promising certainty.

Without certainty about laying in supplies, contracting staff and opening premises, it is difficult for big businesses to operate.

They wanted a hard science that could deal with large quantities, organise deliveries on time, find the technological challenges to sourcing and delivery.

If they had in mind a relevant field of expertise it would be mechanical engineering.

Instead of that, they got epidemiology, assisted by the human sciences.

It is paradoxical in that it also deals in very large numbers — trillions of viruses, large human populations and potential infections. But at is centre is the need to predict the behaviour of small and uncertain things and to give advice based on that behaviour.

The cause of the pandemic was the simplest and smallest of beings — a protein and a prick, as the Coronavirus was described.

It had the capacity to change unpredictably and so defeat the defences marshalled against it.

Those defences lay partly in technology — vaccines — but also necessarily in the changed behaviour of large populations of people and in the acceptance by individual persons of those changes.

Both the spread and the restriction of infection have been shaped by human behaviour.

The epidemiological response also lay in modifying that behaviour through large scale organisation to dismantle shared workplaces, close schools and shops, limit freedom of movement and of association in groups at pubs, churches and sporting grounds.

These are precisely the activities that mediate economic activity and underpin social life.

Instead, people were asked to live restricted lives with all the effects that this had on their mental and physical health and on their financial security.

The target of the sweeping organisation, of course, was the variety of people and groups who were affected by these measures and particularly of those who would be most at risk of catching and spreading infection. Together with the aged and the elderly in nursing homes, these included people who are least valued in society: the people who were mentally ill, homeless, unemployed and immigrants.

Their health, crowded accommodation and presence on the streets meant that they were more likely to be infected and to infect others.

They also included people who in their work were exposed to infection, including nurses, doctors and quarantine staff.

Among them were the least noticed people whose work, often at the risk to their health and lives, was the most significant. They included people involved in caring for the aged, delivering food and supplies, ensuring the integrity of quarantine, and cleaning in nursing homes and hospitals.

They were often lowly paid, less likely to be vaccinated, and forced to work casually in more than one job to support their families.

These formed part of the vast interlocking network of relationships that epidemiologists and other experts had to take into account when evaluating responses to the coronavirus.

Each of these relationships was subject to change as the virus mutated, transmission times shortened and social conditions also changed.

In such a world the inability and refusal of experts to name definitively the dates for loosening restrictions and reopening the economy, even after a serious program of vaccinations has begun, is both necessary and principled.

The answers depend on many variables:

• the number of vaccinations,
• their take-up by vulnerable people and areas,
• the compliance with restrictions,
• the effects of mutations in the virus on health and on infection,
• the pressure on hospitals,
• health workers and others,
• the spread of infection despite tracing and other controls, and
• the harmful effects of lockdown on people, to name just a few.

Any judgment about opening times will depend on a series of other provisional judgments.

The response to the coronavirus, too, disclosed the gap between the value of the work of different groups of people and its remuneration and esteem.

People involved in caring for the aged, delivering food and supplies, ensuring the integrity of quarantine, and cleaning in nursing homes and hospitals were among the least well paid. But their contribution to the community was of vital importance and far greater than the highly remunerated executives in business and politicians.

The discrepancy between the value of work and its remuneration was shown in the spread of the virus in nursing homes by people forced to support their families by working on different sites.

The deeper challenge posed by epidemiology and allied sciences to the received wisdom about business lay in the reconsideration of values prompted by the necessary response to the virus.

Instead of relying on economically competitive individuals to generate wealth, society now depended on people’s readiness to sacrifice themselves for others.

Governments, in turn, had to support people in order to avoid economic collapse.

The dignity of each human person, the care for the common good and the precariousness of all human enterprises were the pillars on which a resilient society needed to be built.

The central questions were human, not technological.

If we look in retrospect at the effects of the coronavirus and of the response to it on Australian society, we can see on the one hand the move from big to small, from competitive to cooperative and self-sacrificing, from the exclusion of people who are marginal to inclusion and protection, from the institutional settings that viewed managers, financiers and investors as the most important in society to the recognition that the most important were actually those looked down on and badly paid.

Those re-evaluations were the sign of a well-functioning society.

On the other hand, the outcome of the response to the virus has revealed an opposed dynamic.

• Wealthy individuals and corporations have grown richer while those on precarious incomes have grown in number.
• Those left unemployed in the lockdowns have had their support sharply reduced.
• House prices and rents have risen.
• The most valuable members of society still need to work multiple jobs to support their families.
• The comfortably off are vaccinated while those more in need of it, and more vulnerable to its spread are not.

The emblem of the values espoused by the Federal Government remains its encouragement to large corporations to milk Jobkeeper, to retain their profits from it, and to have their identity concealed.

It is evident that the values of big business have triumphed over the values whose adoption proved central in responding to the coronavirus. But the victory will come at a cost to social cohesion.

It will also make it more difficult to put out the fire next time.

• Andrew Hamilton SJ is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
• First published in Eureka Street.
• CathNews NZ is grateful to Andrew Hamilton SJ for his permission to re-publish this and future columns.

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