Disaster Management In Action

Plague sweeps my fair (if currently slightly charred) land.  The citizenry cringe indoors barricading themselves against outsiders, fearful that the mere presence of a stranger will bring disease and the slight chance of death if you're old, feeble or already unwell.  To be fair the plague is sweeping a good number of other lands as well and the reaction has been the same in most.  This is where the human race steps up and shows its mettle.  As the corona virus (or whatever we're calling it nowadays) takes hold the human reaction has been immediate, decisive and rather stupid.  The stock markets melted down and those barricades we're all building are apparently made largely of toilet paper rolls.

This has got to be the silliest response to a potential public health disaster I can imagine.  If we were in danger from a sudden outbreak of explosive diarrhoea then it would make sense but in the disease riddled post apocalyptic wasteland these people are imagining toilet paper is going to have the same value as petrol in a Mad Max movie.  I can't help thinking we'd respond to a zombie apocalypse by stockpiling air freshener and breath mints.

The truly silly thing about it is that toilet paper is one of the few things we still manufacture in this country so the likelihood of us running out is low.  Things we are likely to run out of include iPhones and pharmaceuticals but strangely we're not stockpiling them.  Meanwhile our government has announced that it is implementing the nation's emergency plan.  What that plan consists of wasn't gone into in any great detail and at the moment it seems to consist largely of telling people its being implemented.  This is probably an attempt to reassure the terrified public assuming any member of the public can take time out from the vicious battle for the last toilet paper roll on the shelf to pay attention. 

The remainder of the government's advice consisted largely of attempting to persuade us to behave like civilised human beings.  You know, wash our hands, sneeze into tissues, don't whip up race riots against the Chinese, that sort of thing.  Once upon a time it was expected that parents would teach their children this stuff as a matter of course but the government is probably justified in assuming that that doesn't happen too much any more.  On that last point our Chief Medical Officer went on television to point out how concerned he was that the corona virus might engender hostility towards the Chinese and that this needed to be countered.  I'm glad he's on top of that.  Hopefully a human rights lawyer somewhere is working on a cure for the disease.

Fortunately private enterprise is stepping up to the plate.  Then it is washing that plate, sanitising it and locking it up in a sterile environment.  My employers have airdropped bulk shipments of facemasks and hand sanitisers onto the affected parts of China.  I'm sure this is sheer altruism and not a desire to get our Chinese employees back into the office as quickly as possible. Qantas nobly flew some Australians out of Wuhan and have been praised to the skies by the prime minister for doing so.  Flying people places is what Qantas does on a daily basis and the publicity generated is probably a good return on investment.

Closer to home the Reserve Bank has cut interest rates which everybody agrees was an appropriate response.  I guess the less you have to pay on your home loan the more money you have to spend on toilet paper.  People are worried about the economic impact but I think it could be our salvation.  Discretionary spending levels have been at worryingly low levels but if we buy enough toilet paper we could pump sufficient money into the economy to get the country humming along.  It could certainly be the salvation of this government as they now have a perfect excuse not to produce the budget surplus they've been bragging about.

Within my little team we're alert but not alarmed.  Very, very alert as it turns out.  I cleared my throat and was immediately deluged with a barrage of toilet rolls that gave me a nasty concussion.  It wasn't even a cough I swear.  I can't even see my colleagues anymore.  Those who aren't hunkered inside remote bunkers working from home have built themselves toilet paper forts that reach to the ceiling.  Building management has installed hand sanitisers in all of the lift lobbies.  This is a great idea as the murderous scrum for the sanitisers has completely taken people's minds off how long it takes for the lifts to arrive.  I staggered into the lift after lunch bruised and bleeding with hand sanitiser dripping from my hair.  Once in the lift I couldn't help myself, I faked a cough and got an uninterrupted trip to my floor as everybody else decided to take the stairs.

One wonders what we would do if we got a pandemic that actually killed a lot of people.