How Australia controlled the Covid
As a citizen of the United States living in Australia, I’ve felt incredibly conflicted in 2020. Life has pretty much gone back to normal here, but every day I hear about the rest of America and most of the world continuing to suffer physically, mentally and economically. I decided to write a little blog post highlighting some of the things that were enacted here that, gradually, allowed Australia to go back to normal, in many ways.
I felt so strange this year as I had a big American Thanksgiving in Australia while knowing that Americans in America couldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) do the same. I feel so lucky that we can gather in Australia, that we don’t typically have to wear a mask, that we can go see live music. Then again, the fact that I probably won’t be able to get home quickly, even in case of emergency messes with my mind every day.
Australian citizens and residents are rarely allowed to leave the country in 2020.
I type this as a recent outbreak just sprung up in Sydney. We’re told that contract tracers are on it. People in New South Wales, (where Sydney is located) have begun flooding testing centers to do their bit and catch any potential stray cases. As of today we had eight cases announced, down from 15 yesterday, a good sign. It looks like it isn’t nearly as bad as the Melbourne outbreak earlier this year. We haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of who this case actually came from, but the scientists have determined it’s a strain that came from America. Before this latest outbreak over the last week, we’d gone months with only one random case of community transmission in the entire country. (Of course people arriving from overseas in hotels were still testing positive, but they were under control.)
It’s exciting feeling like things are mostly going back to normal. Most of the restrictions have being lifted, live music is back and we’re allowed to dance again, Ongoing talks continue around the idea of a travel bubble forming between Australia and New Zealand.
So let’s jump back to the beginning in early March when these cases all started to take off. Much like the rest of the world, people were scared. Australians made international news for fights in the store over toilet paper. Cases began to appear throughout the country, as they did in the US, UK, Italy, you name it.
Here are ten factors that I believe had a huge affect on containing the coronavirus.
- Ban on overseas travel going out
Unless there was a special situation, Australians were not allowed to go overseas. Legally they were not allowed to leave unless they had special permission granted by the government. I think because I am a dual citizen Australia could not technically have been barred from leaving, although it would have been quite hard to get an affordable flight. Not only that, but also my return would have been quite annoying to achieve, which I’ll write more about later.
2. Ban on all overseas travel coming in
Not only did we not let people out, but also, we made it quite difficult for even our very own citizens who resided overseas to come back in. We started seeing news encouraging Aussie citizens to come home if they were overseas, saying it might become much harder to get them home in the future. In the beginning, most countries implemented a ban on China, and yes, we did this. Then we saw the high cases coming out of places like Iran and Italy, and we banned them. Eventually we banned people from every single country from entering. The only people we let into Australia were citizens and permanent residents unless it was a special government granted circumstance. Learn more about it all on this government website.
But there’s more.
3. Mandatory quarantine in a guarded hotel for two weeks.
Any citizen or resident or special case arriving overseas into Australia is required to quarantine for two weeks in a guarded hotel. I think is probably the big catch, the thing that would be incredibly hard to orchestrate in countries with much higher populations than Australia and much more international airports (or even land borders like US has with Mexico and Canada and all of Europe). Australia has 13 international airports. In contrast, the US has 149. It’s a much larger effort to manage 149 airports compared to 13. Then again the US pours mountains of cash into its military, so I do think it is technically doable. It would just require a lot of organization and working together for a common goal.
One more important note about this: At first this quarantine was paid for by Australian tax dollars but now any resident or citizen who wants to fly into Australia has to quarantine with $3,000 AUD of their own money. Here’s my interview with a lovely friend who was in quarantine in Perth a few months ago after living in Sweden which explains this more.
4. Focused lockdowns where there are outbreaks
Once we got the virus more under control, we still had outbreaks from time to time, as we’re seeing right now with Sydney. Australia has only eight states and territories, and when Victoria experienced a huge outbreak in July and August, all other states started shutting boarders to Victorian residents. If a resident of Victoria wanted to fly to the Northern Territory, they had to quarantine in a hotel the exact same way overseas travelers did. I don’t know if that would “fly” in the US. Plus with so many Americans regularly crossing state borders, the force necessary to force them all to quarantine would have to be enormous. It would be a huge operation to orchestrate this in the US, it already was in Australia. How many ways can you cross the border in Kentucky for example? Every single one of these entries would have to be secure.
Here’s an example of how it worked: When the rest of the country had started loosening restrictions and opening up businesses and activities, the state of Victoria realized they hadn’t been properly training the guards at the quarantine hotels and that the virus was out in Melbourne, their biggest city. They had to double down. The government locked down Melbourne, and I think masks were made mandatory (somebody please help me confirm this!). The state was on serious lockdown for 112 days. It worked too. It took a while but the numbers stopped skyrocketing and slowed to a stop. And the rest of Australia could live reasonably normal although there were a few micro outbreaks in New South Wales that came from Melbourne before the country locked the borders. During the time of the micro outbreaks, masks became highly encouraged in New South Wales as well, but after we got it under control things went back to no mask normal.
5. Contact Tracing
When Covid first arrived, cases were sporadically all over the country, so the whole country shut down, venues closed, no dining, no concerts, no sports, no church. Once we got a better handle on cases, things shifted. Northern Territory, the territory with the lowest population, was the first to be able to open up because there were no new cases. Eventually New South Wales started opening up again cafes and restaurants, but QR codes were everywhere, see image above. The new normal in Australia is if you wanted to dine in or have a drink anywhere, you have to register your name and number so you can be contacted if by any chance you end up being exposed. I don’t know how effective this has actually been, it seems hard to enforce everyone actually registering their true details. (I always do!) I do know they’ve traced the latest outbreak in Sydney to one or two venues in one suburb which is interesting. Also, whenever there is an outbreak, news outlets and politicians publish a long list of all the venues where the Covid positive case has been to alert the public.
6. School Closings
In the beginning schools weren’t officially closed, but I think the government encouraged people keeping their kids home if possible. They also made childcare free for essential workers and vulnerable kids which was very generous, especially for a conservative government. However, schools have remained pretty much open since then, with the exception of the big Melbourne outbreak where schools went to online learning for several weeks. And of course when schools were closed so were all other venues too. I have not kept up with the school closing thing very well so please let me know if I can better update this section.
7. Masks
Masks have rarely been mandatory during the pandemic but as news of cases start to rise in certain areas you definitely see more people wearing them, and businesses and governments start encouraging them. In this latest Sydney outbreak along with closing businesses and locking down people, masks were highly encouraged. They seem to be one helpful piece of the highly complex puzzle of preventing Covid.
8. Government support
I actually think this is another one of the biggest factors that helped Australians stay home and chill out during Covid. The Aussie government shelled out stacks of cash to the unemployed, and they’re still doing it! Citizens and residents had two financial options. They could either do job seeker where they get $250AUD a fortnight until 31 December 2020 and $150 per fortnight between 1 January and 31 March 2021.” For the Jobseeker there are 2 components — income support and coronavirus supplement. According to my friend who has used this option, both rates have reduced a bit since September.
Alternatively they could use a program called Jobkeeper. For Job keeper it was 1500 per fortnight per employee, until September. As long as you could prove that your employees were being paid this. Another key thing with Job Keeper was businesses had to demonstrate that their revenue has reduced by at least 30% due to the Covid-19.
Luckily I have not needed to do either of these things, so I feel a bit murky around everything that is happening here. I think another option is that Australians were allowed to tap into their superannuation, which basically means they could access their forced savings. This pissed off a lot of Australians, which I can understand.
I feel for how little compensation Americans are getting in comparison, but then again I interviewed people in Colombia, Mexico, Kenya and Mozambique who got nothing from their government. Unfortunately, situations can always get worse.
9. Free testing and free quality health care
Another thing which has helped Australia manage the pandemic so well is the fact that this country has free, good health care. Also testing centers are easy to find and free and encouraged, so if anyone is feeling sick there’s really no incentive not to get tested. I talked to people in India and Nepal that explained that poor health care and lack of access to tests can make containing the virus much harder.
10. Elephant in the room
I don’t love everything about the current Australian government, but the way they’ve managed this virus is remarkable. Maybe they’re making up for the awful bushfire debacle we had this time last year. I wish more countries would take note of what we’ve done, but the realist in me knows that for Europe, US, or most other countries, to do what we did would be far more challenging. Australia is a massive island with no land borders. The entire continent of Australia has fewer people than the entire state of New York. We’re less populated with vast amounts of space between cities. That by default helps slow the spread. Also, while there were a few protests against the lockdowns, Australians are remarkably trusting in their government. A lot of people in New South Wales just had their holiday travel plans canceled because of the relatively speaking, small, Sydney outbreak. People lost money and are not going to see their loved ones after a really terrible year. People are angry, but I wouldn’t say they’re tearing down the doors of parliament crying hoax or stocking up on guns. Trust in the government has helped the management of Covid 19 massively in Australia. But, we could trust our government, they were giving us money every other week to help the economy! Unfortunately, you can’t always trust governments.
I hope the above has been helpful and informative. Check out the links I’ve included to learn more and feel free to share this around and maybe inspire other people to look into different ways different countries do things.
Fellow Aussies, please let me know if I’ve missed anything and I shall amend.
-Alex Morris @AlexMorrisWrite
