SYDNEY, Australia – One case. A young security guard in a quarantine hotel who tested positive for the coronavirus and experienced mild symptoms.
That was all Perth, Australia’s fourth largest city, needed to be fully locked on Sunday. One case and now two million people stay at home for at least the next five days. One thing and now the highest state leader, Mark McGowan, who is facing elections next month, is calling on his voters to make sacrifices for each other and for the nation.
“This is a very serious situation,” he said on Sunday when he reported the case, the first the state of Western Australia found out of quarantine in nearly 10 months. “Each of us must personally do everything we can to stop the spread in the community.”
The speed and severity of the response may be unimaginable for people in the United States or Europe, where much larger outbreaks have often been met with half measures. But Australians looked familiar.
The lockdown in Perth and the surrounding area followed similar efforts in Brisbane and Sydney, where a handful of infections led to steeply escalating restrictions, suppressed virus and a rapid return to a near-normal state. Ask Australians about the approach and they might just shrug. Instead of loneliness and sadness or indignation at the impediment to their freedom, they have become accustomed to a Covid routine of short-term pain for collective gain.
The contrast with the United States and Europe – sharp at the start of the pandemic – has grown even greater over time. In total, fewer Australians have died (909) than the average number of deaths per day now occurring in Great Britain and the United States.
“We have a way to save lives, open up our economies and avoid all this fear and hassle,” said Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland who has developed a multilayered, or “Swiss cheese”, model of pandemic. protection. widely distributed. “Everyone can learn from us, but not everyone is willing to learn.”
Australia is just one of the many success stories in Asia and the Pacific. The region’s middle powers, including New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, are essentially getting better at controlling the virus, while the great powers of the World War II era are getting worse.
The center of trust, if not gravity, continues to shift east, especially as China comes back to life. Some argue that successful public health brings not only wealth and more stable economies, but also national pride and the practical expertise that mutating viruses demand.
“I’m not sure we’re being viewed with enough interest,” said Dr. Mackay.
Australia’s geographic isolation gives it a great advantage. Still, it has taken some decisive steps. Australia has strictly restricted interstate travel, while mandating hotel quarantine for international arrivals since March last year. Britain and the United States are only now trying to make quarantine mandatory for people coming out of Covid’s hotspots.
Australia has also maintained a strong contact tracking system, even though other countries have essentially given up. In the case of Perth, contact tracers had already tested the man’s roommates (negative so far) by the time the lockdown was announced and quarantined them under 14 days at a state-run facility. Authorities also named more than a dozen locations where the guard allegedly touched or inhaled someone.
Australia’s fight against the coronavirus has not gone smoothly. The Perth case illustrates a persistent vulnerability – a number of outbreaks have been linked to hotel quarantine, including one in Melbourne late last year that led to a 111-day lockdown. The strict border rules have relieved many people, including thousands of Australians stranded abroad.
But evidence of the country’s success has been building for months, and it hasn’t been shaped since December by a complete absence of the virus than by a series of quick reactions that have destroyed minor outbreaks.
For Christmas, it was Sydney’s northern beaches, closed off when a few, and then a few dozen fallen came to light. Vacation plans were ruined as anyone from greater Sydney was not allowed to travel to other states. Testing increased. There were few complaints, and it worked: the city of five million residents has not reported community transfer for two weeks.
Brisbane followed suit with a brief lockdown in early January after a cleaner in the hotel’s quarantine system became infected with a highly contagious variant of the virus first identified in Britain. It was the first known appearance of the mutation in the community in Australia, and officials quickly passed on. Annastacia Palaszczuk, the top official in Queensland, including Brisbane, announced the lockdown 16 hours after the positive test.
“If you do three days now, you can avoid 30 days in the future,” she said.
Brisbane is now back to Covid normal, as is all of Australia beyond Perth. Across the country, offices and restaurants are open, with rules requiring physical distance. Masks are recommended but not required. And big rallies are in the works: The Australian Open, after facing a series of challenges from infected arrivals, expects to accommodate 30,000 tennis fans a day when it kicks off February 8.
Dr. Mackay, who has worked closely with Australian government officials, called it ‘the hammer and the dance’.
“The lockdowns give everyone in contact tracking and public health a chance to catch their breath, to make sure they interview everyone so no one forgets and then remembers – and that allows them to really stop sending,” said he.
Europe and the United States seem, in his words, to prefer “the half-baked lockdown.” He said they put too much faith in the vaccines without acknowledging that their impact on transmission would be glacial, not immediately.
Much of Europe in particular points to fatigue and then failure. An analysis of 98 countries’ responses to the pandemic by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, found that many European countries topped the Covid performance charts a few months ago. Britain, France and a few others are now closer to the bottom, along with the United States.
“They didn’t go far enough,” said Hervé Lemahieu, a Lowy researcher originally from Belgium who led the study together with Alyssa Leng. “When they made a profit, they relaxed too quickly.”
As of Monday afternoon, no other infections had been found in Western Australia. The residents quickly adapted themselves within the shuttered space. Masks bought months ago were put into use. Nursing home workers called the families of each resident to review the protocols.
Allan Thompson, an investment banker in Perth, said he was one of many who raced back to their homes on Sunday to do their part.
“You know that John Prine song – ‘It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown,'” he said. To paraphrase that, we’re only in half an inch of water, and we don’t think we’re going to drown. We think we’ll get on top of this. We know that doing the right thing at the right time is good. “