Coming out of Coronavirus

Thursday, September 30th, 2021

As restrictions drag on and the number of infections rises, more Australians are asking when lockdowns can cease.

Federal politicians and business leaders have argued the case for a quick ending while claiming the authority of scientists.

Science being science, the relevant questions have been tied to numbers.

They have asked:

How few cases should there be in the community before leaving lockdown?
What percentage of the community must be vaccinated before the lifting of restrictions?
What number of deaths should be tolerated for the gains of opening the economy?
And when precisely should the opening of Australia take place?

In this drive towards opening Australia, reflective decision making risks being sidelined.

It would insist that science can provide evidence for answering these questions, but cannot itself decide them.

That rests with the community through its leaders.

It would also insist that in answering the questions no simple and partial calculus will work.

Answers must be based on respect for the needs of all people in the community, and especially the most vulnerable.

Before Australia moves from lockdowns to an open community, too, it must ensure that the most vulnerable people will be protected.

Scientists cannot decisively answer these questions about the end of lockdown because they necessarily rely on provisional and changing knowledge about the virus, its behaviour and effects, about the efficacy of measures taken against it, and about the likely behaviour of people as they remain in or are released from lockdown.

Their advice will inevitably be modified as new evidence emerges, for example, of dramatically more contagious and lethal mutations, or of decreased effectiveness of vaccines.

More importantly, the decisions that people and their leaders must make are about values and only secondarily about numbers.

A mixed group of scientists and cabinet members may accept the same numbers and the same projections about the consequences of lifting lockdowns but come to different conclusions about whether it would be wise and right to do so.

Their differences will arise out of different judgments about what is important in society, and ultimately about the basis of human value.

In the debate about responding to coronavirus human value is often defined in crude terms by comparing the value of one human life with another, or the value of one group of people with another.

By comparing the value of people who are elderly with people who are young or in the workforce, for example, some would argue that we should neglect the lives of one group while focusing the life of others. In this kind of analysis, the value of a human life is measured by economic criteria of cost and benefit.

This reasoning is crude because it focuses on one aspect of human reality, that of economic transactions or of age, and makes it decisive in all questions of policy. It ignores the complexity of the human relationships that compose a human life.

It also devalues personal dignity, which is grounded in the conviction that each person is of unique value, and so cannot be used as a means to someone else’s end.

Respect for human beings demands recognising that each person must be taken into account and that, because we depend on one another, we are also responsible to one another.

From this it follows that it is impossible to compare the value of one human being with that of another.

When reflecting on social policy, we must consider all the sets of relationships that compose fully human lives, of which economic relationships are only one of many.

The challenge inherent in moving to live with the pandemic is to regard the human life and flourishing of all human beings as precious and to act in a way that sees this flourishing of all, and especially of the most vulnerable, as the responsibility both of the community and of government.

No responsible policy may sacrifice the lives of one group in order to protect the life or goods of others.

Good policy will begin by reflecting on the risk to people’s lives and relationships posed both by the spread of the coronavirus and by the restrictions imposed in order to prevent it.

Both entail considerable loss in terms of physical and mental health, personal and economic relationships and community services.

Without planning and intervention the risk and cost will befall most heavily on the most vulnerable people in society.

In moving from a restricted to an open life the personal and social costs and benefits of the change to all groups in society must be weighed.

Because the transition is now seen to depend on the level of vaccination, the most vulnerable people will be those who are not vaccinated.

They will be most at risk of being infected, becoming seriously ill, and of spreading infection.

This suggests that the proportion of people fully vaccinated before opening the economy must be at the higher rather than lower level of estimation, and should be as high in vulnerable sections of the community as in the better resourced.

Those particularly vulnerable both to the virus and to lack of vaccination are people who are aged, homeless, unemployed and casual workers particularly in rural areas, immigrants, and those confined in prisons, detention centres, nursing homes and other institutions.

The nurses, officers, security, cleaning and cooking staff working in those institutions are also vulnerable, especially if they are forced to work in more than one casual job to support themselves.

Children will be particularly important.

They are vulnerable by reason of age.

They are also most likely to infect other children and their parents, and so to compromise efforts to keep infection out of institutions that house vulnerable adults.

Because of the interlocking relationships in which all human lives are set, the different groups of vulnerable people cannot be totally isolated from one another.

If children spread the virus through families, it will pass further through employment into institutions, and so on to hospitals and health staff, so posing severe pressures on health services to serve increasing demands from unvaccinated patients.

These things do not argue against loosening restrictions on movement, commerce and gathering.

The effects of the restrictions on people’s health and livelihood make a powerful case for such loosening. But they do press for spending time and money on preparing for it.

A higher rate of vaccinations in order to reduce the number of people vulnerable to acute illness and death, communication specifically at persuading people in vulnerable groups to be vaccinated, planning to provide accommodation promptly for all homeless people, strengthening stretched health systems, vaccinating for young children who otherwise will spread disease, and ensuring that people held in prisons, homes for the aged and other institutions do not merely avoid death but have a fully human and social life, are just some of the actions required.

Caring for these things is the stuff of good government.

Trust in it is lacking.

Indeed political comment on the haste to move out of constrictions suggests that it is controlled by the timetable for the coming federal election.

That inference may be unfair but it underlines the need to resist haste in moving before due preparations are made.

We should learn from the experience of many nations that have opened up prematurely only to be forced to lock down as numbers of infections and deaths rise and medical resources cannot cope.

In their relationships with the virus neither partisan political imperatives nor public impatience enjoy sovereign power.

Andrew Hamilton SJ is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
First published in Eureka Street. Republished with permission.