Does anyone remember Crocodile Dundee?

“That’s not a knife!” Mick said dismissively at the New York punks trying to hold him and his girlfriend up with a small folding penknife. “This is a knife!”

Stop me if I told you this before but COVID-19 is not a pandemic. COVID-19 is a penknife. Spanish flu in 1918-19 was a pandemic. It killed more than 20 million people in the space of 18 months. COVID-19 is entering the northern hemisphere spring with fewer than 10,000 deaths globally, having killed the first in November, ie 4 months ago. The virus will be stopped by the sunshine of the northern summer.

COVID-19 kills those who catch it and who are weak for other reasons – age, infirmity, respiratory weakness etc. But not all who are exposed catch it. Not all who catch it die. This panic is misplaced. In fact the cure, as imagined by panicked politicians, is worse than the virus. This is no reason to kill small businesses and strangle taxpayers to support the barely surviving business.

Then the clueless central bankers add to our misery with their incredibly stupid policy response – “whatever it takes, there are no limits to what we will do” said the pathetic creature Philip Lowe, so-called governor of Australia’s central bank. He is willing to trash the Australian currency for this? He obviously never recovered from his university education.