Is this honestly helping?
Residents are advised to stock their pantries with drinks, including three litres of water for each person each day, dried and long-life food such as canned meals, toilet paper, batteries, candles, matches, manual can openers and water sterilising tablets. Analgesics, masks, gloves, a thermometer, disinfectant and prescription medications should also be stockpiled and people should have enough supplies to stay in their homes for 14 days.
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No cases have been confirmed in Australia yet, but 40 million masks have been stockpiled for delivery to hospitals and medical centres. Mortuaries and clinical waste management services have been ordered to prepare for increased activity.
So we’re told to calmly prepare for what may either be the Aporkalypse or a media blowout, and we’re expected to assume that a bold monotype headline splashed across the top of a newspaper will be enough to assuage any issues we have with the problem?
Are you fucking kidding me? You’re telling people to stockpile food and water to last them two weeks. Given this nation’s tendency to panic at the smallest thing, it’s like shouting fire in a crowded theatre, embedded in concrete, at the bottom of the ocean. Of course people are going to fucking panic, it’s what we do best. We’re naturally trained to dump copious amounts of adrenaline into our system at the slightest sign of any danger, so now we’re doubly fucked. Not only are the supermarkets going to be filled with people hurriedly scurrying to stock up on as many Aldi Organic Sausage-Snacks as possible, but they’re all going to be potentialy capable of lifting up and throwing cars, too.
There has honestly got to be a better way of doing this that isn’t such an abominable clusterfuck. All of you, for a minute, imagine you’re either a politician or the editor in chief of a broadsheet newspaper. Punch yourself very hard in the testicles/breasts. I mean proper fucking hard. I want your skin to bruise and seep blood. I’ll wait.
Do it again.
And again.
Okay so by now you’re doubled over in pain and have been decorated in haematomas like a festive blood-puppet. Here’s what you do:
- You run the entire swine flu epidemic stuff somewhat as is, but you report the pure facts and you get the pure facts from the authorities
- You don’t run any fucking opinion pieces on the epidemic that allow spacktards and morons to claim everyone’s going to die because Jesus is pissed off or that a pharmaceutical company did swine/11 or whatever. Don’t give a voice to the nutjobs, it just makes sifting through this shit so much harder.
- Make it very clear to everyone that if they haven’t been to Mexico in the past few months and haven’t come into contact with anyone who has and they have the sniffles, it is extraordinarily unlikely that they have swine flu.
- Take into account the fact that people are stupid. ALONGSIDE the Swine flu coverage, post a ‘disaster agnostic’ series on disaster preparation, how to stockpile water, what things to get for purifying water, generator recommendations, emergency contact lists, etc.
Under no circumstances play this thing up to sell papers, airtime, etc. Inform and enlighten the public as best you can. Give them unadulterated facts and keep everyone calm. Give people the information that they need gently, rather than screaming it into their faces like an overclocked wind-turbine attached to a speech synthesiser.
For fuck’s sake the last thing I want is to be pummeled to death by a morbidly obese woman in a coles at 2 in the morning when I’m trying to buy munchies which she interprets as a threat on her life/stockpile of 15 litres of copha.
Fuck you all.