Pandemic? Oh, that pandemic. How the media simply moved on from the biggest story of the past two years

Now, just on two years in, it seems we’ve found out how a pandemic ends: not with a bang, but a whimper. Overnight, we just move on. But for people who want our attention — equally media and political parties — there are still a couple of unresolved questions: where are we moving on from, and where to?

Not from COVID, itself, of course. There were over half a million new cases reported in Australia in the past fortnight, and more than 300,000 the fortnight before that, and the fortnight before that. COVID deaths hit their peak this quarter.

And yet, media and politicians alike have comfortably positioned the past weekend’s South Australian election as the marker for a post-COVID country, coming as it did almost two years to the day after Australia’s big first step — closed borders.  

It’s not been the steady path through — from lock-out to lockdown, through elimination, to the release of vaccination — that a sense of Australian exceptionalism encouraged us to expect as recently as last spring. We’ve got to the vaccination phase, but the disease hasn’t gone away.

And yet, as Daniel Defoe foretold in what’s still the best journalistic reporting of a pandemic, A Journal of the Plague Year, as soon as things start to look better “the People had cast off all Apprehension, and that too fast”.

The idea, complete with technical terms, is that the “pandemic” has yielded and become “endemic”, just as influenza did 100 years ago, and as tuberculosis did 100 years before that in the early days of industrialisation.

The media are plugging on, with COVID becoming, journalistically at least, something like the weather: daily details, dropping further and further down the must-read list, lit up with the occasional quirk — a new variant, the China breakout, yet another rebuttal of the lab-leak conspiracy. A story sparks briefly to life, then sputters out of public attention.

The ABC is doing its best, maintaining its regular long reporting on the pandemic (like the podcast Coronacast, although now cut back to weekly). The Nine mastheads still deliver the daily figures up top on their home pages. But who’s paying attention?

Thanks to the all but instantaneous feedback from the internet, they all know what their audience wants — or apparently doesn’t want, in the case of COVID. Around the world, politicians are finding it a lot trickier.

Remember just last November as we were emerging, blinking into the light, out of the Delta lockdowns in NSW, Victoria and the ACT? When Morrison greeted us with his “can-do capitalism” v “don’t-do government” that he seemed to have picked up from his brief stint at the Glasgow climate summit?

It was a stab at picking the exact moment when the highly vaccinated Australian community was stepping over the line from the COVID to the post-COVID world. Instead it marked the transition from Delta to Omicron.

Morrison’s trademark enthusiasm encouraged his Liberal premier colleagues in NSW and South Australia to stick to their predetermined deadlines for opening up, just as Omicron surged, overwhelming the test-trace-quarantine system. The rapid antigen tests failure seemed to rhyme with the government’s vaccination failures.

South Australian premier Steven Marshall paid the price when that party loyalty compounded all the local challenges, leading to a rare, one-term government.

Morrison’s early call was a spectacular own-goal that seems to have undone all their political management of the pandemic.

By getting the timing wrong, by getting ahead of the community, Morrison fed the sense that he’s all politics all the time. He seemed to be operating on an electoral timetable, eager for a summer transition  leading to an autumn election where the Liberal Party would be rewarded for its steady management by a grateful populace.

Instead, Australia has gone post-COVID the same way as the rest of the world: through the experience of widespread infection of a disease rendered less dangerous through widespread vaccination.

The government is still eager to claim credit. Morrison was recently banging on again about the wholly imaginary 40,000 lives saved by the government’s actions. It’s even more eager to change the subject.

Will it matter? Or has South Australia (and South Korea earlier this month) set the trend that moving on from COVID means moving on from the government tied to its unfolding?