(Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)

How calming, how reassuring, to think one day we’ll be able to treat coronavirus “like the flu”.

Just a few thousand deaths a year. No worries.

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison outlined a sketchy pathway to a post-lockdown world (a pathway with no signage, by the way, no speed signs, no indication of length, no warnings of sudden turns) he declared that the third phase (or maybe the second — it’s a little irrelevant when the stages have no concrete vaccination numbers attached to them) would “manage COVID-19 consistent with public health management of other infectious diseases”.

“Now, what does that mean?” he said. “It’s likely we may be in that position in phase two, but in phase three that basically means that the hospitalisation and fatality rates that you’d see from COVID-19 would be like the flu or, arguably, better.

“We’re already seeing evidence of that in other jurisdictions that have higher levels of vaccination. So, when it is like the flu, we should treat it like the flu, and that means no lockdowns.”

We absolutely, obviously, need to get to a point where there are no more lockdowns. That beatific vision would be much clearer already if it wasn’t for the botched vaccine rollout.

But to declare that we should treat it “like the flu” is to blithely ignore what the flu is really like, and how COVID-19 is different.

In 2019, pre-pandemic, there were more than 300,000 confirmed influenza cases and 800 deaths. The real death toll is estimated to be in the thousands. Flu rates plummeted last year and again this year, thanks to the lessons we’ve learned from the coronavirus. So far this year there have only been about 400 cases.

Even if we can get vaccination rates high enough that we can end lockdowns without condemning vulnerable people to death or the horrors of long-COVID, we should never become as blasé about it as we were about the flu.

That means people have to remember how to wash their hands (a surprising area of ignorance, as we found out at the start of the pandemic). To cough or sneeze into elbows as opposed to merrily sprinkling potentially deadly particles about the place. To adopt the habit common in Asian countries of wearing a mask if you’re sick, to keep your germs to yourself.

If only the whingeing cretins who moan that masking up impinges on their freedom would instead ponder the possibility that they could pass on the bug that kills a loved one.

And, unlike too many people when they get the flu, Australians have to learn to stay home if they have any lurgy. As epidemiologist Professor Nancy Baxter told The Sydney Morning Herald, “presenteeism” should be wiped out. “We now know that many of us … can work perfectly fine at home. We need to be a lot more open to that,” she said.

No more snotty-nosed people in the workplace, please.

Even if we were willing to just accept another virus cruising through the population “like the flu”, COVID is unlike the flu in a bunch of ways. Sufferers might be contagious for longer. They might be superspreaders. They might be sick for months after infection.

The prime minister is scrabbling around in a political quagmire and it’s no wonder he wants to paint a pretty picture of the pathway that will get us out of lockdowns (and him out of trouble).

The coronavirus is not the same as the flu, and even if it was we shouldn’t accept that the number of deaths is inevitable, which is why this shimmering mirage of Morrison’s won’t get him the clear air he so desperately needs.