Mia Freedman: The new COVID argument that’s dividing vaccinated people.

Last week I went to a wedding. It was bizarre. Not the wedding. The wedding was romantic and moving and wonderful.

The bizarre part was being at a wedding.

For two days - it was a country wedding - I barely had a conversation about COVID. I didn’t see or wear a mask. We celebrated. I danced. I met strangers. We stood close and talked.

And it was glorious. It had been so long since I’d done any of those things. Years.

I’d forgotten what it feels like to put down that familiar state of vigilance, alert, dread. In the lead up, right until an hour before the ceremony was due to start, I kept waiting for it to be cancelled.

Hearing that I spent two days unmasked, close-talking and dancing, you will likely be thinking one of two things: 

1. That sounds awesome.

2. That sounds terrifying.

So which is it for you?

This week, as COVID restrictions fall away in NSW and Victoria, some people are thrilled while others are freaking the hell out.

Ever since vaccinations became widely available in the middle of last year, there has been a clear and often combative divide between the 90 per cent of us who are vaccinated and who have followed all the health advice over the past two years and the noisy 10 per cent of Australians who are unvaxxed.

But now, there’s a new COVID divide opening up among the vaccinated and it’s ramping up.

In the first camp are the people who are ready to embrace what it truly means to live with COVID in an endemic way, as we do with other contagious illnesses for which there are vaccines, like the flu.

These people have either had COVID or know others who have and their view is that so long as you’re vaxxed, you’ll recover pretty quickly. If you asked them how many people in their state had COVID right now, they couldn’t tell you. They don’t pay much attention to the numbers anymore because they’re no longer so frightened of catching the virus.

They know that of course there’s a small chance they could become seriously ill and a miniscule chance they could die but similar risks apply to a lot of things we do including driving a car and overall, they’re prepared to assume personal responsibility for that risk in exchange for more freedom. The people in this camp are leaning back into pre-COVID life and keen to keep moving in that direction. New variants notwithstanding (sorry, triggering I know). 

In the second camp are those who are still freaked out by COVID for various reasons. They want restrictions to continue or be increased. They are opposed to any relaxing of rules around masks, gatherings, schooling, QR codes or borders. They believe our top priority as a community must be to continue to protect the vulnerable and keep case numbers down. Perhaps they or a loved one has been seriously affected by COVID. Perhaps they are family members of the almost 4,800 Australians who have died with the virus. 

The divide between these groups began as a hairline fracture because we were all united in our exasperation with the anti-vaxxers.

But in the past few weeks as the Omicron wave has begun to subside, people return to work and school after a Very Weird Summer, the divide is becoming stark.

The same week as the wedding, a friend got into a heated argument in her school’s Whatsapp group when she asked if anyone knew when masks at school might become optional.

Immediately, it blew up.

Another parent shot back that their child didn’t mind wearing a mask constantly “because it means she is protecting vulnerable people”.

My friend then rejected the passive aggressive implication that her own child didn’t also care about vulnerable people. 

Cue: barfight as a dozen people started swinging chairs.

About half supported permanent mask rules and the other half wanted to know what the off-ramp was.

And here is where it can get ugly.

Because those in favour of keeping restrictions tend to paint those in favour of relaxing them as selfish granny-killers or anti-vaxxers.

And those who want to relax them often view those in favour of strengthening them as paranoid killjoys.

Neither is wholly true.

The same moral principle that split families and friendships over vaccination - the idea that your personal decision to be vaxxed has an impact on others so it’s not just about you -  is now dividing the vaccinated. 

How much do you sacrifice to protect the vulnerable in the community?

There is no easy answer to this question.

Fact: we have all sacrificed an enormous amount over the past two years to protect the vulnerable. And now that the vaccines are here and everyone has had the opportunity to have them and we’ve seen the hospitalisation and death rate drop drastically because of this, well, there’s a growing belief that it’s time for a shift from external regulations to personal management of risk.

And yet.

Understandably, some people are finding it hard to make that shift. Either because they themselves are vulnerable or because they have understandably absorbed so much fear about COVID since March 2020 that they’re having trouble adjusting to the idea that now we have vaccines, it really is like the flu.

The thing is, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have vulnerable people in their lives. Honestly, who among us doesn’t love someone who is at risk of serious complications if they were to catch COVID?

At the wedding, there were many vulnerable people. There was someone with a disability who had come from a nursing home. There were cancer survivors and people with all manner of health issues that meant they would be high-risk if they caught COVID. 

And yet.

They all weighed up these risks against the joy and the meaning of attending that wedding. And that’s not to say that someone who decided they didn’t want to attend was making a poor choice. The point is that it would have been a choice. 

The wedding was allowed to go ahead (all guests were asked to RAT before they came, we checked in when we arrived and all COVID protocols were followed).

The other difficult aspect of this maddening disease is that you can be low-risk and become seriously ill. Similarly, I know of high-risk people who have sailed through COVID without getting critically ill. If this virus has taught us anything is that it’s maddeningly random.

The one thing every scientist and health expert can agree on is that being vaccinated is your best chance and that unvaccinated people are much more likely to be hospitalised.

I think we should be proud of the sacrifices we have made these past few years to protect the most vulnerable people in our community.

The question is, what happens next and how do we retain our compassion and humanity while also recommencing our lives?

Feature image: Mia Freedman