Needs must when the devil drives: Coronavirus and the economy

Control measures have drastically reduced the number of Covid-19 hospital admittances but without herd immunity or a vaccine, cases will resurge if social mixing is reinstated.

The Morrison Government knows that survival is more important than surpluses, yet little thought has gone in to the end game.

Does the government continue to tell people to stay sequestered in their homes, dodging the slings and arrows of a rising death toll, even though this is killing the economy?

Or does it take arms against the virus and through a controlled spread, create herd immunity throughout most of the community, while kick-starting the economy?

Needs must when the Devil drives. We should now focus on structured ways to allow the virus to spread, either suburb-by-suburb or state-by-state, to gain herd immunity.

Net debt is now 19 per cent of GDP and will swell to 30 per cent. Australian household debt is a colossal 200 per cent of income. Most of that is tied up in mortgages.

The government owes a record $850 billion in gross terms. Who will pay that off? Young people over the full term of their working lives. Last year I wrote about intergenerational inequities in the South Australian context but the same applies nationally.

The Australian economy is in the most perilous position since the Great Depression.

Biology

There are two biological problems here: we don't know if people who have recovered from Covid-19, have gained immunity or if they have, is it strong enough to battle a second infection?

Even if herd immunity was successful, lockdown would never end for high-risk groups, such as the elderly, those with cardiovascular disease, diabetes and asthma.

I fall in to that category too at 61 years of age with chronic kidney disease. They would need to remain cloistered in their homes until a vaccine was developed.

We don't know if any of the 35 R&D vaccine projects under way globally, will succeed. If one does, it will be years before it is commercially available and distributed.

In China, less than one per cent of people with no chronic health conditions died, but the death rates were above 10 per cent for those over 65 with a heart condition, and seven per cent for those with diabetes.

In Australia, there are millions of young and middle-aged people with chronic health conditions. Even if the aged and those with chronic conditions were isolated, the virus may still overwhelm the hospital system, with a speculative death rate of 30,000 people or more.

Unfortunately, many Australians believe that staying at home will kill the virus. That is false.

Even if we eradicate the disease in Australia, says Professor James McCaw, a mathematical biologist at the Doherty Institute, the virus will spread around the world and return.

"That epidemic in some places may also go locally extinct after a small or a large wave," he said in The Age. "But it's almost implausible to imagine this virus going extinct globally, which means that it will be here to stay. It will become a part of our everyday life …"

Economy

Now comes a question often asked in university philosophy tutorials. How much is a human life worth? Is it a million dollars for a person in their teens or much less for a person with a chronic illness in their 70s or 80s?

Note that 99 per cent of Australians will survive the virus. Do we look after the many or the few?

Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt know that suppressing the virus for too long, will compound the economic damage to the Australian economy. The current social and work restrictions are jeopardising the economic survival of the nation.

Even if the Australian government halts the JobKeeper payment of $1500 a fortnight in September, can it really return to the old Newstart rate of about $540 per fortnight?

Saul Eslake forecasts the ranks of the unemployed will double to almost 1.4 million. I suggest it will be twice that number.

The New York Times states that in the last three weeks, 16 million US workers filed for jobless benefits. About 6.6 million people filed for unemployment benefits in the last week alone. International trade is down 30 per cent. America is slipping in to a deep Depression.

If we decide to 'damn the virus' and do a 'controlled release', by lifting sequestration, are we willing to wear 30,000 deaths so that almost 285million people, can go about their lives?

If it is proven that people infected with Covid-19 have developed a strong immune resistance AND there is no sight of a vaccine being developed within the next two years, then the answer lies in a 'structured release' of the virus in to predetermined communities.

The task before us is to create a strategy which minimises risk for the elderly and those with chronic illnesses. A healthy future depends on it.