December 25, 2018: a Christmas that I’ll never forget and yet barely remember. The vagaries of my memory are because it just wasn’t a particularly memorable day. I think we went to a buffet somewhere. Maybe I got some novelty socks with my dog’s face on them? But while the details are hazy, the date is still significant. This was the last normal, blissfully mundane Christmas for most Aussies. In 2019, the festive season was smoked out by the bushfire disaster. Then in 2020, as we counted our blessings about the nation’s Covid-zero status quo, Sydney’s surprise Avalon cluster prompted snap border closures and hastily implemented restrictions that put a halt to the usual seasonal exodus to visit family and friends interstate.
But earlier this year, as we approached the 2021 festive season, hopes for a relatively normal Christmas were high. After more than a quarter of the year spent in a gruelling lockdown, Australians had embraced vaccination in a way few other nations could match, and as we collectively cruised into December with nearly 90 per cent of the adult population double jabbed, the end of the pandemic – and rolling lockdowns, mask mandates, endless hand san and general existential dread – felt tantalisingly within reach.
Unfortunately, this has turned out to be a dream so near and yet so far, thanks to the head-spinningly swift emergence of the Omicron variant, a strain so mysterious and mutated, its potential threat remains science’s best guess. Australians are now potentially staring down the barrel of another compromised Christmas, but should we really be putting a dampner on the holiday cheer?
The phrase ‘Covid normal’ has been chucked about in press briefings for months now, as the prospect of ever returning to Covid-zero evaporated with the arrival of the Delta variant. And yet, what this means for our day-to-day is far from clear. For almost two years now, the number of daily cases has been the convenient yardstick of risk, the trusted metric amongst a tangle of obscure and unfamiliar data points like the R0, ICU capacities and positivity rates. In a single number, we could understand the stakes at hand – but now, that one-stop stat is no longer the litmus test for danger it once was, thanks to our world-leading levels of vaccination.
But just try telling that to our lizard brains. As much as Australia has led the world with its high jab rates, we are still far beneath the curve when it comes to tolerating community spread at scale. And it’s this uncharted reality that is creating such a mental tug-o-war between our survival instincts and our wishful thinking. In NSW, the chaotic press briefing delivered by premier Dominic Perrottet, health minister Brad Hazzard and chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant on December 15 – the date that almost all health measures in NSW were lifted – seemed to perfectly capture this internalised punch-up between head and heart.
In the ‘head’ corner, Hazzard and Chant put 'em up for science, warning against going out to crowded clubs and doing away with masks. Hinging their argument on Australia's preoccupation with high daily cases, a prediction of reaching 25,000 infections a day by late January was a stark vision of life with Omicron. Premier Perrottet, in the ‘heart’ corner, was quick to duck and weave, urging the public (and the media) to ignore daily case numbers and instead embrace the newly granted freedoms of post-lockdown life, safe in the knowledge that hospitalisation rates and deaths remain low. These mixed messages ring true in my own rationalising, as I try to quiet my anxieties about this ‘let it rip’ strategy, while counting down the days to my booster shot.
Like the majority of Australians, my experience of Covid up until now has been largely abstract. Without a first-hand connection to the virus, it has become a mythic boogieman, a comic book villain, a computer game big boss (and with a name like Omicron, it certainly sounds the part). But for most people overseas, coexisting with the virus is just an everyday part of Covid-normal life. In many countries, daily cases still reach the tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands – some models project the UK could start recording more than a million new cases a day by the new year. The knee-jerk horror we feel here in Australia has long since been normalised elsewhere in the world, but that’s little comfort to the gnawing unease many of us feel – myself included – as we take our first tentative steps into a similar social paradigm.
It feels counterintuitive, reckless even, that borders have reopened, check-ins have been axed, and restrictions have been lifted while our hot vax summer is at the mercy of Omicron, but ‘living with the virus’ – another phrase popular in press briefings – is bound to be a culture shock. Even as I write this article, two of my colleagues have received text alerts after attending exposure sites – followed by the awkward slapstick of using a personal rapid testing kit for the first time (depending on who you ask, self swabbing is no better than having a nurse do it, in case you were wondering). Soon, even this will be a thing of the past, as check-ins have now been retired and contact tracing will become, in the words of Kerry Chant, “light touch”.
In many ways, such a crash course in Covid-normal living is going to be the fastest way for our economy to recover, particularly for the industries that are desperately awaiting the return of international arrivals. But we can also set a pace for this reality shift that best suits our individual needs. We have the right to choose – when and where we wear a mask; what types of social settings we’re comfortable with; how we engage with people, be it with an elbow bump or a (consensual) bear hug. For some people, this brave new ‘Que Sera, Sera’ mindset will be liberating. For others, it’ll be too much too fast. Wherever you might fall on that spectrum, we are all in control of how we live our lives in these extraordinary times. Holding onto that knowledge might just be the Christmas gift you give yourself.