Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This post is a musing on the reaction to the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic here in Australia. It will have some relevance to citizens of other countries (and definite relevance to writers and GMs) but that wasn’t the primary goal when I was writing it – though that relevance did manifest along the way.

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I’m also listing this reverie as Campaign Mastery’s submission to the January 2021 Blog Carnival, which is all about characters, and is being hosted by Plastic Polyhedra. I may write something more targeted later in the month as well, but this seems to be at least marginally on-point.

A multitude of Experiences, a singular theme

Every country has had a different experience, albeit with similar elements. You can’t discuss the way people in the US feel about the Pandemic without getting into their national politics, and the Presidential elections, and even – most recently – the successful passing of a Covid support bill and the maneuverings around a demand by Trump that it be increased in scale from six-hundred-and-something to $2000. Italy endured a nightmare early on, but a harsh lockdown brought the virus under control – until a second wave, as bad or worse as the first. And those are just two examples. (Someone needs to compile a book on this!) In every country, ‘local’ issues provided the context into which awareness of the virus manifested, and every country therefore responded differently, at different speeds, with different urgencies of need, and hence, citizens of every country in the world had a significantly different Covid experience – and a different reaction to that experience.

But there are nevertheless salutary lessons that can be learned. Perhaps about Pandemic response. Perhaps about Politics and political failings. Perhaps about being divorced from reality. But certainly, and always, about people.

And so long as there are simulated people in RPGs, that makes all this relevant to the RPG community.

Australian Context

First, some context by giving a background on the Australian Covid response.

In The Beginning

Our first confirmed case arrived on 25 January 2020, a man who had returned from Wuhan in China. By the end of the month, there were eight more. The government here recognized the seriousness of the situation and seized on the crisis as a distraction from the furor over his bungled activities during the 2019-2020 bushfire season Why do Australians blame the PM for the bush fire? – Answer by Mike Bourke (My thesis was that we don’t – there are too many real things to blame him for to waste time on a furphy).

Normally, one crisis doesn’t follow another, and political blows like those described in my answer to the question would spell the end of a career and the potential change of government at the next election. But 2020 was, in no way, describable as normal.

On January 31, international travel restrictions began, initially for those traveling from China. From March 1 to March 11, these restrictions were extended to other nations, as outbreaks took hold – Iran, South Korea, and Italy. From 16 March, all international travelers to Australia were required to self-isolate for 14 days.

For the next month, the Australian Government began quietly advising all Australians overseas to return home while they still could.

By 27 February, the PM activated the “Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)” (what a mouthful!) – indicating that the intervening weeks had been spent drawing up the plan.

On March 12, an economic stimulus package was unveiled, and all credit to the government for setting aside its partisan economic biases in doing so – it may have been inadequate, it may have been insufficient, but it was the right thing to do.

March 13 saw the last-minute cancellation of one of the major international sporting events hosted in Australia each year, the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix, and even to those who don’t follow the sport, this was the final confirmation of the gravity of the situation. To ram that message home, the state government of Victoria at the same time suspended all jury trials to limit the spread of the virus.

First Bungle

But that wasn’t enough to prevent the biggest screw-up of the Australian Pandemic Response to date. For some reason, the Virus loves life aboard a cruise ship; a number of cases and one death had resulted from the Diamond Princess (which had docked in Japan). This had been followed rather quietly by the docking of the Ovation Of The Seas (79 out of 3500 passengers subsequently tested positive), Voyager of the Seas (at least 34 passengers and 5 crew members subsequently tested positive), and Celebrity Solstice (11 positive cases).

Then the Ruby Princess docked on 19 March, and in a bureaucratic bungle of the first magnitude, 2700 passengers were permitted to go home – no Covid testing, no instructions to self-quarantine, nothing. The next day, it was announced that three out of 13 passengers who had been hastily tested had returned positive results. 5 days later, one passenger was dead and 133 were positive. 4 days after that, 284 passengers had confirmed cases. Two days after that, the total was 440.

This was a hard lesson in exponential growth, something a large number of students had ignored in high school or forgotten. Watching the numbers mount, day after day, was a defining event in the Australian awareness of the Pandemic.

Hard lockdowns started all over the country, growing gradually more restrictive over the next few weeks before gradually easing off over a two month period. Long story shortened: despite a few false starts in nursing homes, schools, and a meat-works, by June 20 we thought we were on top the situation, nationally; on 6 June, the two most populous states had both reported no new cases for the previous 24 hours, and numbers in other states were ones and twos, and the national mood two weeks later was optimistic. Out national totals on June 6 were 7,260, but since April 13, the number of daily cases had been 30 or less, and falling. Often, the number was in single digits, and the speculation was on how soon it would get to zero.

Second Bungle

But 20 June was the day the wheels came off.

We had started repatriating Australians caught overseas and putting them into enforced Hotel Quarantine for 14 days. This both filled some of the rooms that would have been occupied by tourists in normal times and isolated those arriving from high-risk locations – and almost everywhere was a higher risk than Australia at the time.

Back on 25 May, a night duty manager at one of the Hotels reported a fever and tested positive the next day. Five security guards from the hotel also tested positive, as did some members of their families. To the rest of the country, this was just another spotfire, an outbreak to be contained. We had done it and seen it before.

In the days that followed, stories began to emerge of misbehavior – guards consorting with quarantined guests, guests being allowed out to visit others, and that sort of thing. Human stupidity had been played as a trump card, as is so often the case.

Four weeks later, it became clear that the virus had escaped containment. Fresh lockdowns were locked into place for ten Melbourne Suburbs. On July 4, two more postcodes were added, and nine public housing towers containing some 3,000 residents.

It took until September 19 to get back to where we had been on May 25, a Coronavirus wave that was substantially larger than the original outburst of the infection, and all linked back to the selfishness and stupidity of two people responsible for Quarantining those who might have been infectious.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, restrictions had gradually been easing, perhaps more slowly than a lot of us would like, but things were getting better.

From September 19 to December 12, the average had been just 15 a day – and most of the time, it was less than that, with a few bad days lifting the average. For example, Nov 1 was a day with zero community transmission.

On 27 November, Victoria reached 28 consecutive days without local transmission – the benchmark for eliminating Covid-19 from the community. My state, New South Wales, couldn’t boast the same record, but then we had been taking 4000 people or more a week from Covid hotpots in the form of returning Citizens.

Third Emergency

In late November, there was another scare, as a small outbreak in South Australia seemed to have been spread by casual contact with a Pizza box. This involved a security guard at another Quarantine Hotel, who was moonlighting as a cook in a fast-food franchise – normally, not an issue. But he caught Covid. Wasn’t the first time it had happened (even disregarding the Victoria mega-cluster) and wouldn’t be the last time. But he made a pizza and from the information given to contact tracers, it seemed that another victim had caught Covid from coming into contact with the box.

This suggested a far more dangerous variant had arrived – either it was super-infectious or super-resilient, and either way, bad news. Borders snapped shut and everyone braced for the worst – and then it emerged that the second victim in question hadn’t only spent a minute or two in the presence of the infected moonlighting security guard, he was in fact a co-worker at the Pizza Parlor as well as being a guard at a different Quarantine Hotel. The virus was no more dangerous than it had been. Panic canceled, sigh of relief.

Although no-one realized it at the time, we had just been through our third defining experience of the Pandemic.

Once again, we felt on top of the situation, nationally. Borders were back open, businesses were open, and people were making Christmas Plans.

The nation had experienced its second defining experience of the Pandemic, and come out the other side. It was hoped that we would be effectively Covid free aside from the occasional spotfire until distribution of the vaccine began, currently scheduled for March.

The Current Outbreak(s)

It started small. These things always do.

On December 16, Two cases of Covid-19 were reported, both of whom had visited a club in the Northern Beaches suburb of New South Wales, a relatively isolated and affluent part of Sydney. One of them worked in the central business district.

At the same time, and entirely unrelated to this pair of cases, a driver who transports new overseas arrivals from the airport to Hotel Quarantine tested positive.

In days, the number of attendees of the club who had tested positive rose to 38. And contact tracing showed that they had been to a number of sites widely-distributed over the greater city in the meantime. This was the beginning of what is now known as the Avalon Cluster.

Several of those sites also became the locations of outbreaks, including a reintroduction of the Virus to Victoria.

Simultaneously, a cluster centered on a bottle shop began to grow, which is now known as the Berala Cluster.

Limited lockdowns were ordered in an attempt to save Christmas, and social gathering restrictions were reimposed.

On December 30, a third cluster arose amongst a family in the Sydney suburb of Croydon (in which I used to live, about 35 years ago), and Victoria reported cases of community transmission for the first time in 61 days, with three cases being confirmed, suspected to have originated with a traveler from the Avalon cluster before movements were restricted. (As a result, both New South Wales and Victoria have announced new restrictions – but that will come into the story a little later).

Since December 16, there have been 411 confirmed cases. One gets the feeling that as quickly as one brush-fire gets stomped down, another is breaking out. None of them are big, and the situation is far from out of control.

I wasn’t affected by the first round of restrictions (ordered on December 16-21) as I had not been to any of the danger sites, and so did not need to self-quarantine.

The international backdrop has remained grim throughout. As one jurisdiction starts to get the virus under control, it runs rampant somewhere else, and ultimately seems to reemerge in the original jurisdiction. There is always a Covid-19 catastrophe occurring somewhere. At the moment, the US (210, 590 confirmed cases in the last 24 hours) and the UK (More contagious variant, and 57,725 new cases in the last 24 hours) are at the forefront. By inauguration day, on current trends, the US will have recorded around 420,000 deaths, and be approaching 3500 more a day. At the same time, the UK will have topped 100,000 deaths – from a much smaller population base. Australians are very well aware that they have dodged a number of bullets in this Pandemic, and that it could all happen here.

Let’s normalize those numbers by scaling them to what they would be, relative to Australia’s total 26 million population:

USA: 328 million people:
 

  • Now: 210 590 daily cases = 16,693 cases, scaled
  • Jan 20 projection: 420,000 deaths total = 33,293 deaths, scaled
  • Jan 20 projection: 3500 deaths per day = 277 deaths per day, scaled

 
UK: 67,886,000 people
 

  • Now: 57,725 daily cases = 22,108 cases, scaled
  • Jan 20 projection: 100,000 deaths total = 38,300 deaths, scaled

 
Australia: 26 million people
 

  • Now: 43 daily cases
  • Jan 20 projection: 960-odd deaths total
  • Jan 20 projection: 2.2-3.5 deaths per day

The last is where we are at, here in Australia; the first two are where we know we could go, if it all goes horribly wrong for us.

UPDATE [12 Hrs later]: The indications are that we have stomped on this latest outbreak pretty effectively, with only two cases being confirmed in the last 48 hours. This is being credited to the original victims who did the right thing and isolated immediately they experienced symptoms. Instead of three months or so to contain the outbreak, I think it will just about be all over by the end of January or the middle of February – based on numbers far more recent than those used to create the quoted projections. We aren’t out of the woods yet, but can see light through the trees.

Which sets the framework and the context for my reflections, which were rough-drafted during my return train-trip from Christmas with my family.

Pandemic Reflections

There is a quiet panic afflicting Australia right now, a creeping paranoia that assumes the worst of everyone those afflicted happen to meet. Still, that’s better than an overt panic, which we have seen manifest in hoarding and panic buying in the past.

The cause is, not unexpectedly (given the events of 2020), a Covid-19 outbreak in a relatively isolated part of the city of Sydney. One suburb is in strict lockdown, and one in slightly less severe restraint.

Should a resident of the city from outside those suburbs have the temerity to visit family over the Christmas break, they are treated with automatic suspicion and mistrust by the public at large. Some businesses will even close their doors to you if you admit to being from the Greater Sydney Region – and a few will do so until you convince them that you are not, according to local sources.

At the same time, some backpackers from Europe (mostly England, I believe) have been publicly castigated by authorities for daring to congregate in large numbers on a Sydney beach, in defiance of social distancing orders, and, on the far side of the country, a returning citizen breached his Hotel Quarantine and was not recaptured for twelve hours.

Either before she escaped, or after she was recaptured (more likely the first), she used social media to spout a lot of conspiracy nonsense about there being no Coronavirus. Which explains why she didn’t listen to the advice to return before it was too late to do so, I suppose.

In effect, what this person was effectively saying was that their personal liberty was more important to them than the life of anyone they might infect, if the pandemic was real despite their beliefs to the contrary.

The result? People are scared – not of the virus, which is only sensible, but of the possibility of the virus.

Our political leaders are not immune; borders snap shut at the first whisper of the word ‘outbreak’. Mask wearing in enclosed spaces has just been made mandatory (with a $200 fine) in any enclosed commercial space (with a few exceptions). And it’s these panicked reactions that are communicating this fear to the general populace, who were already sensitive to Covid-related fear in the first place.

Overcoming this problem will not be easy, because the virus is something worthy of fear. But panic is not something that we can afford, and it is all to easy for a quiet panic to become a hot one. We need to transform the public attitudes from one of fear to one of a healthy respect. Wariness, yes – but not unthinking fear, because fear is primal, and makes us prone to mistakes of judgment.

In this climate, the ‘mandatory masks’ order, however well-intentioned, risks inflaming an already tense situation. I can easily imagine, six months or a year from now, a store-keeper saying to a stranger, “How do I know you’ve had the jab? We don’t want no Coronavirus around here!”

Misinformation remains public enemy number one. Earlier today, just a few hours before posting this essay, I saw someone suggesting that ‘all the vaccine means is that you have the virus without symptoms, you can still give it to someone else.’

That’s full of so many half-truths that it’s hard to know where to begin. And no, I don’t know the nationality of the person who wrote this – she could be Australian, English, Canadian, American, South African, or from anywhere in Western Europe for all I know. There are one or two locations that I consider more likely than the rest, but that doesn’t rule out any of the alternatives.

As an aside: Two half-truths don’t make a truth. At best, they make a quarter of a truth. Three, an eighth. And so on.

A vaccine – any vaccine – teaches your body to recognize the pathogen against which you are being immunizes, so that it can be fought off before it can take hold. You can be immunized and still catch the disease (but you have to be really unlucky for that to happen) – but you aren’t infectious and can’t give the disease (or the cure) to others just by being nearby. Most Vaccines don’t promise no symptoms; they promise milder symptoms or less.

That’s wandering off-topic, but I think it needed to be said, anyway.

In a way, you can understand the actions of the tourists, when you compare the Covid situation in Australia with the tragedies unfolding in their homelands. These were / are backpackers who came here before the Covid lockdown and have (sensibly) stayed. In many cases, they may even have been working and saving for their ticket home – which would have become a problem when the sources of casual employment dried up during the height of the lockdown. If not being in an environment that has just had more than 50,000 cases a day for the sixth straight day isn’t a reason to celebrate, what is?

The saying used to be that you had to walk a mile in another person’s shoes before you could judge their actions and decisions. Well, I can’t do that, for the reasons I explained at the start of this post; all any of us can do is to project our personal experiences onto the global canvas in order to interpolate what those elsewhere are going through, filtered generously with empathy and compassion.

We are “privileged” – if that is the right word, I have my doubts – to be center-stage during one of the defining events of the 21st century.

There aren’t many events of this magnitude.

You can’t discuss a character of the 1930s or 40s without considering the impact of the Great Depression. You can’t talk about the 1940s (even if someone was a child at the time) without considering the impact of World War 2 on their lives. The 1960s are defined by the social shifts that began with Elvis & The Beatles and culminated in the Vietnam protests, and by the end of segregation in the US. These are events that defined their respective generations, and marked everyone else in some way.

The moon landing of 1969 is often mentioned in this vein, but it doesn’t quite have the same impact – the landing itself is not even on the same order of magnitude as the downstream impacts of the technologies that were developed in order to make it happen, or that arose as a consequence.

You can, for example, trace a direct line from the Apollo technologies to the early personal computers, and thence to the personal computer, which (I would argue) has had an even bigger impact on everyday lives than the watershed event itself did.

Getting back on topic, the primary effects of the Pandemic will fade quickly over society as a whole, though individual losses and scars will remain.

The secondary effects are mostly economic, and we will be lucky to see the back of them in a decade or so at worst.

The tertiary consequences will be felt for a generation. The father who lost his job, the grandparent who died, the hard times (and the family growing closer together, in many cases – it’s not all doom and gloom). Just repairing the economies of many nations will take a decade or more.

Everyone who lives through this time will have at least one Covid story to tell – and it won’t be a short one, because to understand it, you will need the context as a foundation.

No-one will emerge from this event completely unchanged. But to understand the change, you will need to understand their story – and to walked a mile in their shoes. And the closest we can come to that is to have read about them.

Someone should gather these stories and write them down.

But, in the meantime, there are specialists at walking in other people’s shoes who can lead the way. We’re called GMs.

We’re used to condensing a lot of influences and situations into a single coherent characterization. We can use our imaginations to perceive a character before something like this, and extrapolate the impact they have experienced from the combination of research and our own experiences.

There might be a lot of trouble with people understanding each other in the coming years, because we will all have experienced different stimuli and had different reactions to them. People will be strangers to each other, at least in part, and connections between them more shallow as a consequence.

But if we make sure that we understand the characters that have been through anything even remotely similar, and then educate our players in that understanding on a case-by-case basis, just as opportunities arise, then they will take that knowledge and use it in their encounters with others, who will – however imperfectly – spread it further.

An imperfect but better understanding of what each other has gone through can only help bind us together. And wouldn’t it be a good thing if some benefit from all this could spread – like a virus?

Okay, so that’s wishful thinking. It doesn’t detract from my main point, which is that we, as writers and GMs, have to know how to incorporate the human responses to the Virus (or any equivalent) into our characters – even if the experiences triggering those human responses are different to those we have personally experienced. Anything beyond better characters is a bonus – but the alternative is to have characters that feel like a missing tooth, a nagging incompleteness that renders them unfit for purpose.

To do what we do, as well as we can possibly do it, we have to understand what others have experienced over the past year, and the year that is just beginning, and maybe the year after that.

Why so long? Some simple math that no-one is really talking about.

The US hoped to have a million people vaccinated by the end of 2020. They fell short. They hope to have ten million vaccinated by the end of this month – and are already falling short of their targets. But let’s assume that they make up the lost ground later in the month, and hit the 10 million target. The next target is 100 million by the end of the year.

The current population is roughly 330 million. You need about 70% to get to the point where the general public are generally safe to go about their lives as normal (and more is better). That’s a minimum of 231 million people. At 100 million a year, that’s two and a third years – about April, 2022. But some of those 231 will have died of other causes in that year – especially if the elderly and frail are amongst the first recipients, which is the plan almost everywhere. So we might need as much as an extra 23 million or so for that factor alone. Which carries us into the middle of 2022.

And that’s best case. Since supply of the vaccines is more or less population-proportionate, the same time scale applies to just about everywhere, with a margin of error. And unless dedicated facilities are built just to manufacture the vaccine – which they might be – it’s hard to see how it can be possible to go any faster.

Covid-19 will be a part of our lives, and all the more significant for it, for at least the next two years (as well as the year just passed), at least in my self-educated self-informed opinion. I can hope otherwise, but don’t realistically expect it to be anything less.

No-one can reasonably be expected to do this work for us; they have other concerns. It’s up to us. We have the resources – we can start with the Spanish Flu of a century ago, and by observing the people around us, and taking notes about what we see. And we can listen to the stories of others from other parts of the world, and try to put those into context, and understand them.

We’re the ones to do this, because we have to do it anyway. Even if our campaigns are not set in the current day, so that we don’t have to worry about characters having lived through the Covid-19 Pandemic, our players will have done so, and are likely to react differently to a threat of plague even in a fictional setting than they would have done two years ago, before all this started. On top of that, the demands of realism will have increased; there will be less scope for glossing over unfinished work because everyone’s now an expert on the subject. So it behooves us to do it ourselves so that we can ensure that we do it right. Anything less is entrusting the verisimilitude of your campaign to a complete stranger without even looking over the results of their work beforehand.

This essay is a good start, nothing more. But at least it’s a start.

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