Friday, March 27, 2020

COVID-19 In Australia


Brigid Delaney writes that COVID-19 is ravaging Australia:

By Monday an estimated 88,000 people lost their jobs in the hospitality industry alone and tried to file for unemployment. The system crashed under the demand.
Black Monday brought waves upon waves of frightening news (record job losses, NRL season over, Olympics won’t go ahead, Queensland to shut borders, 3,000 Australians stranded on cruise ships; pubs, cafe, licensed premises, gyms etc all shut at midday). There were heartbreaking sights: the streets all across the country empty, except for thousands and thousands of people queuing at a mandated social distance for Centrelink. The next day people started lining up at 4:30am.
The virus is invisible – but the economic devastation is a tragedy you could see. Each job loss represents a seismic explosion in an individual’s world. By the end of Monday at least 15% of people I know had lost a substantial portion of their income, or their jobs or businesses they had spent decades building up.
Suddenly jobless in my circle were yoga teachers, barmen, baristas, cafe owners, a university support worker, university cleaner, personal trainers, roadies, two tour managers for bands, freelance journalists, friends in PR and regional journalism, playwrights, coffee cart owners, sound engineers, winery owners, chefs, cinema operators, kitchen hands, film production crew, ushers at theatres, stage hands, driving instructors, those doing contract work for financial services, event organisers, florists and professional MCs.

Around the world, the virus leaves upheaval and fear in its wake:

Fear is everywhere this week. You can see it in people’s eyes and hear it in their voices. It even leeches out of text messages – as if the virus had the power to distort even the most disembodied form of communication.
The fear is not just the mortal fear of contracting what could be a deadly virus, the fear is losing your job and having no money, the fear is being evicted and made homeless, the fear is foreclosure, the fear is being separated from your family – whether interstate or overseas (or in my case, a town two hours away), the fear is bankruptcy and sacking your staff, the fear is your debt, the fear is for the education and anxiety of your children, the fear is for the health of your elderly parents, the fear is for your immunocompromised friends. It goes on.

These are very trying times -- all over the world.

Image: BBC

2 comments:

The Disaffected Lib said...

I was disheartened to read a report from CBC that Canadians largely approve of our government's handling of the Convid-19 pandemic. What that revealed to me is the shallowness of the public's grasp of what this pandemic is, how predictable it was, the repeated warnings science has been lavishing on governments these past 15+ years and how, despite that foreknowledge, despite those warnings, despite the measures that could have been implemented to enable us to blunt such a contagion, we wound up no more prepared than we are for an asteroid strike.

If a majority of Canadians can give this litany of failures a big thumbs up that merely ensures we will have more fiascos such as we're experiencing now and we'll be just as unprepared for those future catastrophes. This has been a collective failure on the part of governments Liberal and Conservative. This is the direct result of kicking these threats down the road, content to let the next government deal with them. This is the same approach we take to climate change in all its dimensions and facets.

To those, Liberals and Conservatives, who place the economy above all else, the dead that we cart away from our hospitals are the price of their folly. The fallout from climate change is engineered in their economic policies. With world oil prices at rock bottom, far beneath the price needed to pretend Tar Sands bitumen is still viable, our government is pumping billions of dollars into fossil industry bailouts. And yet Canadians approve of their governments' handling of this, the first of a succession, of catastrophes headed our way.

Owen Gray said...

I continue to hope there will be positive and long-reaching consequences from this, Mound. I know, however, that human memory is short and human progress is slow.