The military model
The political model
The bureaucratic model
The centralised health system model
Are all doomed to failure when confronting a threat such as covid.
In some ways they make it worse
You really do want to think of covid in a similar way to a well-dispersed terrorist organisation
It can pop up anywhere
It can live within the community without giving itself away
It can be impossible to detect
It's highly adaptable
And the forces we bring to bear upon it are bureaucratic
Slow to adapt
And by their very nature will always be playing catch up football
But it's worse than that
You can track terrorist organisations by use of technology
Cellphone data
In some ways the covid app is an attempt to do something along those lines
But in the end
Large centralised bureaucracies will always fail against a hidden enemy
and some of the things they do will be counterproductive
The threats and fines for crossing borders
For instance
If you are a person running drugs from Victoria to Metropolitan Brisbane
And you sneak through the border
Or you come across in the boot of a car
Or even just get an exempt truck driver to bring your drugs
The threat of massive fines and now jail
Means that there is no way you are going to go and get tested should you become ill.
And some people are always going to do the wrong thing
If we eliminated it completely from Australia
People in Indonesia would pass it on to New Guinea
Torres strait islanders regularly Cross to the gulf of Carpentaria
And it would come back
And because no one in the northern territory was expecting it
It would probably be dispersed all over Australia within a month
I honestly truly believe that it is probably going to be impossible to find a solution from a centralised authority figure for this pandemic
Add to this the growing fatigue with the lockdown measures
and in the end of the only solution will be that people will just have to take their own personal responsibility
A little bit like if you are going on a road trip around Australia
You take personal responsibility for how you drive your car
if some idiot is coming towards you on the wrong side of the road
You don't dig your heels in and drive straight out him whilst calling the police to come and intervene
You take personal responsibility to avoid the risk and to mitigate the risk as much as possible
And then you just accept that there is some risk
and then you decide if you are willing to take that risk at a personal level
And then you just get on with it
A vaccine is going to reduce that risk quite significantly
Butter vaccine will not completely remove that risk
That risk will be with you now probably forever
Despite Bobby's belief that it will disappear in 2 years