Convenience Big Store: Australia’s Covid nightmare 😷

2 August, 2021

In the headlines

There's a Cabinet rebellion brewing over the government's "ruinous" travel plans, says Jason Groves in the Mail. The proposed "amber watchlist" for countries at risk of going on the quarantine red list is set to be scrapped after a fierce backlash from Tory MPs and the travel industry. Belarussian Olympic athlete Krystsina Tsimanouskaya is sheltering at the Polish embassy in Tokyo after refusing to return home, saying it was "not safe" and she feared being jailed for criticising her team's officials. Two YouTube pranksters have duped anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn's brother) into agreeing to end his criticism of the AstraZeneca jab in exchange for an envelope full of Monopoly money. The pair filmed a meeting in which they posed as pharmaceutical investors, offering Corbyn £10,000 in cash before swapping the envelopes when he was distracted.

Comment of the day

Wiktor Szymanowicz/Steven Saphore/Getty Images

Australia's Covid nightmare

Throughout the pandemic, Australians have looked at the UK as if it were a "post-apocalyptic Covid wasteland", says Matthew Lesh in The Sydney Morning Herald. By contrast, "Australia was bliss". Now the tables have turned. Life in London for Aussie expats like me is getting back to normal: nightclubs are open, my social diary is filling up and I recently popped to Barcelona for the weekend. Aussies back home, meanwhile, are suddenly "trapped in a Covid nightmare". Our world-leading contact tracers have met their match in the fast-spreading Delta variant and cases continue to rise despite a harsh lockdown. Businesses are shutting, jobs are being lost and the country is on the cusp of another recession.

Australia's zero-Covid strategy is "no longer achievable" – and, now we have vaccines, it's no longer desirable either. The UK shows a different approach is possible. Having prioritised vaccines, the Brits are opening up, probably for good. Professor Neil Ferguson, whose modelling "frightened the UK into lockdown last March", has said "the bulk of the pandemic" in Britain will be over by autumn: "an unimaginable timeline for Aussies". Australia will need to muster the confidence to live with Covid. The alternative is an eternity of fear, lockdowns and becoming a hermit nation. This starts with surrendering the addiction to zero cases and the obsession with every single hospitalisation and death. "Living is risky." We all eventually die. In the meantime we need to "get on with life".

Suffering is good for us

There's something "eerie" about the 21st century's affluent classes, says James Marriott in The Times, with their "neurotic" aversion to the slightest suffering. Witness the "esoteric workout routines", yoga, wild swimming and, especially in America, medication these people go in for. The desired state is "wellness", a "perfect peace" of body and mind that's meant to be not just "sublime", but normal. Suffering is seen as a failure resulting from vague external forces such as capitalism or "modern life". And it's all underpinned by the bizarre idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a glorious state of "low-carb, quasi-communist, gazelle-persecuting bliss" until they were corrupted out of Eden by the arrival of civilisation.

What nonsense. Hunter-gatherers had high child mortality rates and were vulnerable to wild animals, broken bones and natural disasters to a degree we "warm, sheltered, medicated modern humans" can scarcely imagine. Only thanks to civilisation can these people even begin to think discomfort is unusual. Suffering is inevitable, no matter how many mental handrails the "cult of safetyism" provides. Nothing is more human than to be "stressed, or envious or anxious or discontented or bored". That's why all great art is about suffering. The blandest people are always those for whom nothing has ever gone wrong: "We certainly do not need more of them."

Inside politics

Rishi Sunak is "flexing his muscles", says Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times. The Chancellor has fired off a formal letter to the PM urging him to ease "draconian" restrictions on inbound foreign tourists. But he has his work cut out if he wants to succeed Boris Johnson, says Paul Goodman in The Times. It's easy to be popular when you're splashing the cash, less so when you're delivering swingeing spending cuts, as Sunak must do soon. One senior backbencher dismisses him as "the Martini candidate" – the drinks brand's "beautiful people" ads depicted people seeking cosmetic surgery "to become gorgeous enough" to sip Martini. Yet Sunak's overseas aid cuts show that there's "steel beneath the silk".

Sport

Charlotte Worthington won Olympic gold for Britain in the women's freestyle BMX event yesterday after landing a 360-degree backflip – she's the first woman to do so in a competition. The 25-year-old took up the sport just five years ago. "It was incredible," she said after her medal-winning run. "We've been trying to find that big banger trick and when we found it, we were, like, 'I think this is the one'."

Noted

With 56% of Americans choosing to be cremated, the bereaved are often not sure what to do with their loved one's ashes. Deathcare start-ups hope to change that, says The Hustle. Parting Stone will turn ashes into smooth stones for $695, Eterneva will make them into lab-grown diamonds for jewellery for $3,000 and Vinyly, a British firm, will press them into a record for £1,000.

Snapshot

Data update

There were 1,339 drug deaths in Scotland last year, a "grievous tally" in a country of only 5.5 million, says Stephen Daisley in The Spectator. Having cut funding for drug and alcohol services by 53%, the SNP has panicked and is desperately trying to change course.

Snapshot answer

It's Eric Tucker, whose paintings are being sold for up to £14,000 each by a Mayfair gallery. The labourer and sometime gravedigger lived out his days in Warrington, Cheshire, and kept his art depicting northern English life private. More than 400 paintings were found in his terraced former council house after his death in 2018, and he has since been hailed as a "secret" Lowry. Tucker's art now looks set to make more money than he earned in his entire life.