The long road

How can we think and talk about the months that lie ahead?

Yeah, I know… it’s been a hell of a year already. As a friend commented on a recent FB post of mine, “today is the 172nd of March 2020”. It sure feels like it. We’ve made it as far as September — by the calendar, just six months since the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic.

Those of us in the southern hemisphere have made it through winter (but without seeing snow unless it fell in your back yard). Even as those of us in Melbourne continue to endure a protracted lockdown, the warming weather, lighter evenings, and a scent of jasmine on the breeze from the climber on our falling-down fence (we haven’t been allowed to have it replaced yet), all make my mood tilt more towards the optimistic than the bleak.

So we’ve made it through six months. If the record-breakingly optimistic estimates for a vaccine timeline are correct — not counting programs such as Russia’s that appear not to be waiting for the completion of phase 3 trials — we’re looking at another 6 to 12 months before a safe and effective vaccine will be available globally. The distance we have yet to go is at least as long as how far we’ve already come, and perhaps more than twice as long. We may yet have to make it through another Melbourne winter. Just writing that feels like I’m breaking an unspoken rule… but it’s true, and I think we need to be able both to face it, and to talk about how we’ll face it.

“We’re all in this together.” Yeah, right. The billionaires that have made billions more this year are — for the most part — not in it with us. But even if we set aside those enjoying the privileges of spectacular advantage, and those suffering even more acutely the privations of longstanding disadvantage, the effects will not be felt the same. In my home city of Melbourne, those who live alone and are not in a romantic relationship with anyone else have had to bear isolation in a very different way to those in relationships. I have a delightful family with whom I very much enjoy spending my time, so I’ve had an infinitely easier time in lockdown than someone living in a dysfunctional or abusive household. The Victorian government have announced some changes which will hopefully make life easier for single people living alone, and there have always been exemptions for people to leave home if they were unsafe, but these inequalities will continue for weeks and months to come.

Inequality is the order of the day when it comes to the impact on our working lives, too. That’s what has led me to writing this story. Many people are working from home now — it’s a mixed blessing (and that “blessing” would probably be described as something entirely other for those with young kids at home), but for those who can do it, it has at least allowed for continuity of employment. But my friendship circles are disproportionately filled with professionals from two fields: aviation, and the performing arts. The pandemic has not been kind to those fields. I’ve read a fair few posts and comments from people in those fields, and this is at least in part a response to those. I will endeavour to be kind and — I hope — helpful, even if my attempt at honest consideration of the situation will neither be the cathartic blamestorming nor will it give the false hope of tabloid journalism. I’m not going to say it’s all ScoMo’s fault, and I’m not here to stan Dan.

A number of my friends are professional performing musicians and music teachers (pandemic notwithstanding, it can be hard to make ends meet without being both). Many more are professional pilots (most of whom are — or were until recently — employed by passenger airlines). Most of those friends are now either working other jobs (there’s a decent chance the driver who delivers your supermarket order is on furlough from an airline) and/or relying on some form of government assistance. I’ve read comments from friends, and from friends-of-friends in those sectors, who either want someone (anyone!) to give them some idea of when they might be able to pursue their vocation again, or challenge those imposing restrictions as to why their activity remains prohibited while another activity of comparable or greater inherent risk is permitted.

I’m going to consider how we might answer those questions but… you’re not going to like it. Aviation never really stopped. Even passenger aviation is considered an “essential service”, because there are people who have to be able to fly from place to place to conduct some other essential service, and that makes us essential in pretty much every definition. We also continue to move stuff from place to place, and that service is in as much demand as ever. So my aviation colleagues aren’t asking about when they’ll be allowed to fly planes again — we already are — but rather we want to know when our planes might be full again (and as a result, when might we no longer need second jobs as truck drivers). When it comes to the performing arts, “when” they will even be allowed to resume is a very real question. And along with that question, there’s plenty of “why” — specifically, “if [insert sporting activity] can happen already, why can’t we?”

The answers will be very different, and they will have to be complex. A simple answer here is a wrong answer. Even “x will happen when we have a vaccine” is a wrong answer (because the time frame that will follow depends on how effective the vaccine turns out to be, and how quickly it is sufficiently widely administered that public health authorities can rely on the resultant herd immunity to supplant other control measures).

I believe most opinions within the aviation industry are dangerously over-optimistic about the prospects for recovery in that sector. Yes, from an Australian point of view, once we have the virus well under control nation-wide, domestic aviation will be able to pick up again. Alan Joyce has been arguing for state borders to be opened up because it will let him put more planes in the air. True, there are lots of people who want to travel — to see our friends and family whom we have all missed so very, very much. But that won’t be nearly enough. Aviation in Western Australia and Queensland is currently doing very well relative to aviation in the rest of the country (but still not as well as pre-COVID) for three main reasons:

• the states have been among our best in terms of pandemic control
• they are our biggest states, so travelling by air is often the only practical way to go, and
• you can’t dig up expensive dirt by Zoom (at least, not enough of it, and not yet)

A while ago, I read a remark from someone (I think it was on Twitter) along the lines of “COVID-19 has done more for your company’s digital transformation than your CIO/CTO ever did”. I’m sorry I can’t remember it exactly — you might take issue with specifics anyway — but the essence is both recognisable and irrefutable. Before COVID-19 [“BC”?], Melbourne to Sydney was one of the busiest air routes in the world. A huge proportion of that travel wasn’t folks visiting their friends and family, or connecting to international flights — it was for business: meetings, on-site service delivery, etc. While a little of that is still happening in sectors who can meet the requirements of essential travel, most of it is just gone and has been gone for months. If those businesses still exist, they’ve had to find other ways of doing things. Yes, it turns out that meeting could have been an e-mail. Or if it couldn’t be an email, it could be a Zoom or a Teams meeting. That manager who lives in Adelaide now dials in from their iPad, and it’s fine. We’ve all got used to saying “you’re on mute”, and we’ve moved on.

So… I don’t think aviation is coming back. Not even when we have a vaccine. I would be surprised to see more than half of the BC domestic capacity return to the skies, and I think international air travel (fares, schedules, capacity, classes of service) will be nearly unrecognisable for years. The only positive aspect to my forecast there, is that we were in a serious pilot shortage before the pandemic hit, so even a partial recovery in that sector should see the majority of existing pilots re-employed (I’m not so sure I’d want to own a major pilot training operation, however — if I’m right, demand for the product could take decades to recover). Could we at least hope the resulting reduction in carbon emissions from that sector may avert the climate emergency? We shouldn’t.

But what about the arts? A manager with whom I was on a meeting the other day, claimed that aviation has been hit “worse than any other sector in the economy”. I bit my tongue, because correcting him would not have been productive… but come on! We’ve cut about 90% of our BC level of activity, but the performing arts just stopped. Almost overnight. Unemployed. Oh sure, during the early days of lockdown there were some lovely on-line performances from professional performing artists, but it’s not like any of them got paid for that. I’m vaguely aware of a few performers who — being unable to tour or put on live shows — are finding ways to sell tickets to virtual performances… but I’ll bet even without the costs of travel and venue hire, those artists are still going backwards on such ventures. It’s not like I’ve booked tickets to those shows (not only has our discretionary spending dropped to nearly zero in order to safeguard our financial situation, but even if I had spare money sloshing around, I’ve developed a visceral aversion to online versions of live performing arts). So it’s a terrible time to be a performing arts professional. But — once elimination or highly successful suppression strategies have time to play out, or once we have a widely-available and effective vaccine — they should be back.

In stark contrast to aviation, once the arts are allowed to resume in a context where people feel genuinely safe to cram into venues, I firmly believe we will see a rapid recovery in that sector. Because god, have we ever missed them! I feel like I’ve lost an entire sense, being deprived of the ability to enjoy or participate in live music, to go see a musical or a live comedy gig or just something where a whole bunch of strangers get together for no other reason but to appreciate someone else doing something really, really well. And also unlike aviation, none of that has been replaced by other things, or undergone a “digital transformation”. Rehearsing a choir by Zoom is terrible. Online performances are a pale shadow of being in a live theatre or concert hall. The Disney+ version of Hamilton is good… for a TV movie. But it’s a shit way to experience a musical. And there’s really only been one good piece of group performance that looked like this.

So the moment we can have the performing arts back, we will — and, I suspect, with a vengeance. But that brings me to the second question I’ve seen a lot: some variant of “if [specific permitted sporting activity] can resume, why can’t [comparable but prohibited musical activity]?” It’s a damn good question… but what you won’t like is that it has a valid and compelling answer.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece about pandemic response strategies, and how to understand them in terms of Reff. If you didn’t read that at the time, or if you’re still confused by what Reff means, I commend it to you. I think it’s pretty readable, and is of some help when it comes to tools for laypeople like you and me to talk about the epidemiology of this pandemic. You will note that every genuine control strategy for COVID-19 relies on making changes to people’s behaviour, to affect the probability of any given infectious person passing the virus on to an uninfected person. Since SARS-CoV-2 spreads through respiratory droplets, these control measures all have to do with limiting how much one person comes into contact with another person. Spacing people apart is one way to do that. Improving ventilation is another. Getting people to wear masks when they are around others is another. And ultimately — if the situation is bad enough — stopping people coming into contact with others at all (to whatever extent is possible).

Unless and until they can be supplemented by the widespread administration of a suitably effective vaccine, any public health response strategy to control COVID-19 must include sufficient restrictions on contact between people to maintain Reff below 1. Human society and interaction is insanely complex: you can never do only one thing. For example, if you have a ban on people having guests to their houses, but allow people to meet friends for lunch in a park, then many more people will meet friends for lunch in a park than would have done so if they were permitted to have guests over to their houses. But it still might make sense to make the former ban, because spending time together eating outdoors is lower risk than spending time together eating indoors.

But what if we’ve got a number of comparably safe (or risky) activities? For example, kids playing moderate contact sport outside might have a similar level of risk to a group of kids playing instrumental music together indoors (let’s assume it does — whether or not that specific example is true is outside the scope of this piece). The choice isn’t just whether each of those activities is safe enough to be permitted independently — there is an overarching choice as to whether permitting both activities has an acceptable combined level of risk. It is entirely possible that permitting one of them is fine, but permitting both is not fine… even if the second activity you choose to permit is lower risk than the first one.

An excessively simplistic calculation might run like this: the baseline risk for the group under consideration (changing nothing else) gives an Reff of 0.8. Permitting either activity is expected to add 0.15 to Reff (let’s say there is zero overlap between the activities, so their effect is independent). If you permit one of them, your Reff increases to 0.95. If you permit both, your Reff increases to 1.1. Permitting one still yields successful suppression. Permitting both gives exponential growth.

Let’s extrapolate that to public policy-making at a state level: as a state health officer charged with managing the pandemic response, you could be responsible for determining which of thousands of activities in hundreds of different settings might be permitted or not, and every time you change one of those things you need to wait the better part of two weeks to see what effect that change has had… and at each step along the way, you know you will also have to deal with indirect effects (such as people deciding that, if organised professional contact sport under intense scrutiny and an actively managed contact bubble is OK, then surely their game of touch footy down the park with a bunch of mates is OK too). With that many factors in play, even though we hate the result, it may be perfectly valid policy to determine that (for example) school sport can resume, but school music groups cannot — not because the music groups are more dangerous than the sport, but because the combination may present too high a risk while permitting only one does not.

Why do they always seem to pick the sport first? Perhaps it’s for reasons unrelated to health (e.g. the relative popularity of sport vs music in Australia). Perhaps it’s for health-related reasons (kids denied sport won’t get enough physical activity). Perhaps it’s for inadequately thought through health-related reasons (kids denied sport won’t get enough physical activity, but they didn’t consider that kids denied music will miss out on equally important social and emotional activity). But that doesn’t mean that the choice to permit one and not the other is inherently wrong.

And live performing arts is a high-risk activity: performing music outdoors sucks (unless you’re a massively-amplified stadium-rock band), so everyone needs to be indoors. You can’t sing or play a wind instrument while wearing a mask. Being spaced too far from the other performers makes some kinds of live performance difficult or impossible. Venues are expensive, so you need the seats filled. And there’s just so much contact that takes place at every step of the way. Some of that can be mitigated, but a lot of it can’t be… at least not without ruining what we were all getting together to do in the first place.

As a result of all of the above, I don’t think live performing arts will be coming back until almost everything is permitted again. Live performing arts that rely on international travel are largely toast until vaccine(s) make that travel permitted without mandatory quarantine on arrival. And even live performing arts from local performers will be among the last forms of activity permitted pre-vaccine. But, when they can return, at least I have reason to believe they will, and will do so in full.

These are just two of the sectors where I have an especially keen interest in how we progress over the coming months. As you can see (I honestly have tried to edit for length), there is a huge amount to consider just within those sectors. I expect there are similarly complex considerations affecting many other sectors and fields of human endeavour (tertiary education, tourism, accommodation, trades and apprenticeships, construction, hospitality…). Everyone involved in such sectors will want answers about how their particular field is going to be affected, or why they are restricted when someone else isn’t, but complexity overwhelms almost any attempt to tackle such questions in the public sphere, which is why we end up only hearing the sort of bollocks regularly attributed to “business leaders”.

We’re all going to need support to get through this, and the road ahead is very long indeed. Our Commonwealth government would do well to stop talking about how things need to be “open” by Christmas — as if that will do anything to lift us out of the recession we’re now officially in. They have only one job right now: keep unemployed and underemployed Australians out of poverty. For many months to come, the unemployed and underemployed will include — among others — the majority of my friends and colleagues in the aviation and performing arts sectors. You and I, my friends… we really are in this together.