SYDNEY, Australia – One case. One young security guard at a quarantine hotel who tested positive for the coronavirus and experienced minor symptoms.
That was all that Perth, Australia’s fourth largest city, needed to start on Sunday in complete exclusion. One thing and now two million people stay home for at least the next five days. One thing, and now top state leader Mark McGowan, who faces an election next month, is appealing to his constituents to sacrifice for each other and the nation.
“This is a very serious situation,” he said on Sunday when reporting the case, the first that the state of Western Australia has found out of quarantine in almost ten months. “Each of us must do everything in our power to stop the spread in the community.”
The speed and severity of the reaction may be unthinkable for people in the United States or Europe, where much larger outbreaks have often been achieved with half measures. But to Australians, it seemed familiar.
The closure in Perth and environs followed similar efforts in Brisbane and Sydney, where a handful of infections led to sharp increases in restrictions, a subdued virus and a rapid return to near normal. Ask Australians about the approach, and they might just shrug their shoulders. Instead of loneliness and sadness or cries about the impediment to their freedom, they became accustomed to a Covid routine of short-term pain for collective gain.
The contrast with the United States and Europe – sharp at the beginning of the pandemic – became even clearer over time. In total, fewer Australians (909) died than the average number of deaths now occurring every day in Britain and the United States.
“We have a way of saving lives, opening up our economies and avoiding all this anxiety and struggle,” said Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland, who created a multilayer or ‘Swiss cheese’ model. developed for pandemic defense. is widely distributed. “Everyone can learn from us, but not everyone is willing to learn.”
Australia is just one of several success stories in the Asia-Pacific. The region’s central powers, including New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, are essentially getting better at managing the virus, while the major powers of World War II are getting worse.
The center of confidence, even if it is not gravity, is still moving east, especially as China comes alive again. Some argue that successful public health is not only wealth and more stable economies, but also national pride and the practical expertise that mutates viruses.
“I’m not sure if we are being looked at with enough interest,” said Dr. Mackay said.
Australia’s geographical isolation offers one major advantage. Yet it has taken a number of decisive steps. Australia has been restricting a strict interstate trip since March while imposing hotel quarantine on international arrivals. Britain and the United States are only now trying to make quarantine mandatory for people coming from Covid hotspots.
Australia also maintained a strong system of contact detection, just as other countries essentially gave up. In the Perth case, contact detectives tested the man’s housemates (so far negative) at the time the closure was announced and placed them under a 14-day quarantine at a state-run facility. Authorities also named more than a dozen places where the security guard may have touched or breathed someone.
Australia’s fight against the coronavirus was not without its flaws. The case in Perth illustrates a persistently soft spot – 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 caused trouble for many people, including thousands of Australians stranded overseas.
But evidence of the country’s success has been building for months, and since December has been less shaped by a complete absence of the virus than by a series of rapid reactions that have wiped out small outbreaks.
Before Christmas, it was the northern beaches of Sydney, which were locked up as a few and then a few dozen cases. Holiday plans have been ruined as no one from greater Sydney has been banned from traveling to other states. Tests have risen. There were few complaints, and it worked: the city of five million passed two weeks without a case of community transfer.
Brisbane follows the start in early January with a brief shutdown after a cleaner in his hotel 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 moved quickly. Annastacia Palaszczuk, the highest official in Queensland, which includes Brisbane, announced the exclusion 16 hours after the positive test.
“If you do three days now, it could be that you do 30 days in the future,” she said.
Brisbane is now back to Covid normal, as is the whole of Australia beyond Perth. Across the country, offices and restaurants are open, with rules requiring physical spacing. Masks are recommended but not necessary. And there are big events: the Australian Open, after a series of challenges from infected arrivals, expects to seat 30,000 tennis fans a day when it starts on 8 February.
Dr Mackay, who has worked closely with Australian government officials, calls it ‘the hammer and the dance’.
“The blockade gives everyone who makes contact and public health a chance to catch their breath, to make sure they are interviewing everyone, that no one forgets and then remembers something – and it really makes them stop the broadcast,” he said. he said.
It seems that Europe and the United States, in his words, prefer ‘the half-baked lock’. He said they had too much confidence in the vaccines, not realizing that their impact on transmission would be icy and not immediate.
Especially a large part of Europe indicates 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 reached the Covid rankings a few months ago. Britain, France and a few others are now closer to the bottom, along with the United States.
“They did not go far enough,” said Hervé Lemahieu, a Lowy research fellow originally from Belgium who led the study with Alyssa Leng. “When they do make a profit, they relax too quickly.”
As of Monday afternoon, no other infections had been found in Western Australia. Within the shutter area, residents adapted quickly. Masks purchased months ago were used. Workers in nursing homes called the families of each resident to check protocols.
Allan Thompson, an investment banker in Perth, said on Sunday he was one of many who rushed back to their homes to do their part.
“You know that John Prine song, ‘It’s an inch of water and you think you’ve going to drown,’ ‘he said. ‘To put it bluntly, we’re only half a centimeter of water and we do not think we’ll drown. We think we’ll get to this. We know it’s good to do the right thing at the right time. ”