This was published 5 months ago
Opinion
It’s not fashionable but I’m looking back on 2021 with gratitude
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academicIt is the custom of opinion pieces like this one to thunder at something or other. To parse what is objectionable in public life and invite readers into some communal complaint. Done well, this is an important cog in the machine of democratic accountability and improvement, and it seems especially suited to our times of generational calamity: chiefly climate change and the pandemic.
And yet, as this trying year closes, I feel the urge to express something altogether different; something perhaps unfashionable and even unsuited to a forum like this, but which seems important to register, even if only as punctuation before we resume hostilities in the new year. And that thing is gratitude. Especially in the context of the pandemic, and especially in Australia.
Goodbye 2021: Students graduating from high school this week.Credit:Kate Geraghty
I don’t mean to gloss over the grief. These are dark times of profound suffering. That suffering is unevenly, even unfairly distributed. Lives have been lost and livelihoods destroyed. The mental health anguish of many has been severe. Children will have been denied some of their most developmentally crucial experiences, some teenagers will never be able to retrieve their lost coming-of-age rites. If the economists are right, a generation of young people whose careers have been stunted at their very beginning may never fully recover from that.
We cannot yet know the full scale of the damage of all this. For what it’s worth I expect it to be deep and enduring – echoing for decades rather than years. But that underscores just how deep the suffering might have been had this pandemic been only slightly different. We should take account of this.
We might, for example, have been afflicted with a far worse virus. Others certainly have been. Here I could recount all kinds of stories of the medieval plague, of the European cities whose populations have still not recovered. But really, we need only go back to the most recent major pandemic to grasp our relative fortune.
Spanish Flu killed at least 50 million people in two years – about 10 times what COVID officially has. It was especially deadly among children under five, for whom COVID has been mercifully mild. It had a remarkably high mortality among healthy 20-40-year-olds. And it infected about a third of the world’s population. Had COVID behaved similarly, it would have killed about 260 million people by now.
Hospital beds in the Royal Exhibition Building during the Spanish flu of 1919.Credit:Museums Victoria
Then there’s the way it killed people. Some died within hours of having symptoms. Dark spots might appear on their cheekbones in the morning, and by afternoon their entire faces would be blue, and their extremities would be black. People bled from their noses, their mouths, even their ears. Their stomachs and intestines would haemorrhage. COVID is truly horrible, but I’m grateful it isn’t like this.
I’m grateful, too, that COVID’s Delta variant didn’t arrive until this year. Victorians will recall the pain of last year’s second wave, which took some four months to bring under control. Victoria drove its cases back to zero partly because there was no vaccine available, and because doing so ultimately proved feasible. But imagine if that outbreak was of the Delta variant instead of the pre-Alpha mutant strain that it was.
Even with vaccination, Delta produces many more cases because it is so much more infectious than earlier strains. Victoria’s 2020 peak of just over 700 daily cases looks puny now, and by all accounts the health effects were milder, especially for the young. When images of Delta’s ravages started emerging from India, we didn’t quite appreciate what we were seeing. On some level, we probably assumed our wealth meant our health systems could never be so overwhelmed. The truth is they were never put to such a savage test, and I can only say I’m hugely relieved.
Which delivers us neatly to vaccines. Amidst the fury surrounding them – of blood clots, rollouts, mandates and refusals – it’s just so easy to overlook the astonishing fortune that we have them, and that they are so incredibly good. Rewind less than 18 months and none of this was assured. In America, Dr Anthony Fauci was hoping that any vaccine might be 75 per cent effective, but conceding that 50-60 per cent effectiveness was more realistic. And at that point, our species had never produced a vaccine in fewer than four years, in that case for mumps.
Top US infectious disease specialist Dr Anthony Fauci was hoping that any vaccine might be 75 per cent effective.Credit:AP
And yet, here we are, with multiple world-class vaccines produced and tested in less than a year, boasting initially efficacy of something like 85-90 per cent. They worked well in older people, which not all vaccines do, and was especially important given these people were most at risk. True, their protection against infection wanes over time, but it seems that they continue to provide significant protection against severe illness and death. And yes, these vaccines were developing on work already done on similar viruses. But even so, just about no one was expecting this level of success this quickly. We have been abnormally fortunate.
Almost nowhere is that fortune clearer than Australia. We took full advantage of being a remote island to minimise COVID’s initial onslaught. We then successfully suppressed COVID in a way that would have been completely unsustainable had vaccines not been quickly produced. And it turned out that by the time our will to suppress finally broke, vaccination was there to save us. The result is an impressively low death toll by global standards, and several states that have decided for themselves to leave COVID-zero rather than have it forced upon them – a vanishingly rare achievement.
Everywhere you look, there are frightening counterfactuals. Had this deadly virus been a little more so, had its more frightening variants arrived a little earlier, had our persistence not lasted just long enough for the vaccines to arrive, this whole pandemic might have been horribly different for us. I’m grateful for that.
We’re living through something truly historical, and for that reason, something historically awful. But with that in mind, it’s worth us recognising how relatively well we’ve fared. Partly because it’s psychologically helpful to recognise it, but also because we may not always be so fortunate.
It’s entirely possible we will live through another pandemic that will not spare us the worst possibilities, at which point we might look back at this moment very differently. Or perhaps even this pandemic has some devastating third act that will have the same effect. I’m taking nothing for granted. And that, I suppose, is the point.