The March Covid Apocalypse That Wasn't

South Australia's Covid wizards get it wrong, again

Back in February, it was predicted (by modelling wizards at the University of Adelaide) that South Australia would be deluged with Covid in March because that is the month when the ‘Festival State’ explodes with culture courtesy of the Fringe Festival and the World Music event (WOMADELAIDE) which would see vast numbers of people congregating in crowds, dropping their guard against the Virus of Doom.  “Experts predict”, we were ominously told, that “the state could record as many as 1,100 cases a day as tens of thousands visitors flock to enjoy the cultural celebrations” whilst up to “100 people a day will be hospitalised”.

How has that prediction by the Covid astrologers gone?  Well, the arts came and went and people flocked to them in droves – the 1,280 shows attracted more than three million cheek-by-jowl attendances, breaking all records.  The economic bonanza to the state has not yet been finalised but the 2022 Fringe “brought $50.1 million of new money into the state”, including the visitor smackeroos from the 32,000 interstate and overseas tourists who spent $2,258 per capita on average.  The 2023 Fringe is expected to knock this amount into a cocked hat.  ‘Will my state GDP look big in this?’ is going through the Labour government’s mind so they have shown no desire to reprise the Covid restrictions of yore.

But what of the 1,100 cases a day and the hundred victims of the Doom rushed to hospital?  Well, the official stats have shot this down in anti-climatic flames – there were 345 ‘cases’ of Covid per day on average (only one third of the doom-laden forecast), with fewer than twelve hospitalisations per day on average (barely one-tenth of the forecast).  [As for ‘Covid deaths’, well, there were a not-so-grand total of two (both elderly, of course) in, for example, the second last week of March].

Leaving aside the fear-inducing and rubbery definition of a Covid ‘case’ and ‘hospitalisation’ (there is no need to yet again rehearse the old ‘with/from’ sleight of hand and the definitional fraud of what constitutes, against all clinical sense, a Covid ‘case’), these stats are reverentially regarded as data gospel by the high priests of Covid so, even on their own terms, the Covid apocalypse never arrived as a result of the cultural mass madness of March.  Covid continues to peter out as the non-event it always was epidemiologically.

Our Covid overseers, however, are nothing if not persistent and despite their horror-scope of March viral mayhem having as much veracity as your average fortune-telling script, they have followed up, undeterred, with a dire prediction of more Covid carnage after the forthcoming Easter hols - ‘SA Health has warned of a COVID peak …this Easter’ as a result of social gatherings during Easter get-togethers.  These predictable forecasts of Covid doom are all part of the legacy psyops by now (including the classic routine of the ever-newer, ever-scarier variants which has somewhat fallen out of fashion).

Still, the repeated forecasts of Covid catastrophe do serve the purpose of justifying the entire response to the Great Covid Fear, including its closing act of the push for the ‘boosters’.  Whilst 93.8% of eligible South Australians aged 16+ have had their first dose, and 92.1% their second, however, the third shot is a laggardly 76.2% and the fourth is in the popularity doldrums at around 44%.  Take-up rates for the fifth shot are not yet available, probably because they would be too embarrassing for the vaxx commissars.  It’s a slippery slope from declining the fifth Russian Roulette barrel to questioning the whole Covid edifice of harmful pseudo-science.

It is kind of pleasant watching the Covid villagers lose their fear of the Covid ogre as it retreats to its mountain lair.  Apart from the few mask bitter-enders and the remaining vaxx addicts, most people have by now stopped caring about Covid itself here in South Australia.  Sure, the madwoman in the attic, our Chief Health Officer, Professor(!) Nicola Spurrier, is still touting her wares (Covid ‘cases’, superspreading events and all the rest of the Covid baloney) but fewer and fewer South Aussies are stepping up to buy.

The forecasts of viral doom are also gaining only limited traction with the media who have largely lost interest in the waning fear potential of Covid - Spurrier’s low-key pressers do not have compliant media hanging on her every word, ready to megaphone her grim oracular tidings.  The media have other hysterias to fan (like the indictment of Donald Trump and his fiendish attempt to run for office again on the deplorable ticket, or the free speech fetish of the trans-exclusionary femininazis and their positively antediluvial ideas of  just two biological sexes).  The media are also necessarily being assiduous with bucket and hose trying to quell the growing flames of bad news about the safe and effective wonder vaccines lest it raise too many concerns about the whole Covid policy disaster.

(Hat tip to Greg, a Sandgroper ever vigilant to the Covid fable downunder, for bringing the March Covid plague that wasn’t to my attention – I avoid the media like the real plague that it is).