ANALYSIS: How Melbourne, Australia, eradicated Covid-19

How Melbourne eradicated Covid-19 Life is almost back to normal in Melbourne, Australia. Here’s how they did it. Dylan Scott Vox

In July and August, the Australian state of Victoria was going through a second Covid-19 wave. Local leaders set an improbable goal in the face of that challenge. They didn’t want to just get their Covid-19 numbers down. They wanted to eliminate the virus entirely.

By the end of November, they’d done it.

They have seen no active cases for a full four weeks. Melbourne, the state’s capital and a city with about as many people as the greater Washington, DC, area, is now completely coronavirus-free. ...

The Australian epidemic has also mirrored America’s in important ways. Once the coronavirus arrived in the spring, the country went into lockdown. When cases abated, some of those restrictions were eased — and, before too long, Covid-19 cases were spiking again. Each state was responsible for its own response, with the federal government playing an advisory role outside of obviously national issues like foreign travel.

In the second wave, Victoria was by far the hardest-hit state. Its case numbers were dwarfing those in every other state including New South Wales, home to the country’s other great metropolis, Sydney.

Policymakers dreaded an endless cycle of lockdown-reopening-lockdown — exactly the situation the US finds itself in. They realized that amorphous goals of “slowing the spread” or “flattening the curve” had been ineffective in mustering public support for the stringent mitigation measures that would be necessary to contain the virus.

So they went big. The state’s roadmap largely followed a policy proposal laid out in September by the Grattan Institute (a nonprofit think tank supported by the state and federal governments): “Go for zero.”

The goal was not just to slow Covid-19 down. It was to eradicate the virus. The state had gone into a stage 4 lockdown — most businesses closed, there was a nightly curfew, and residents were ordered to stay within five kilometers of their home — in August, and it was then extended in September, with the explicit goal of eventually reaching zero new cases.

“Ideally, lockdowns are only done once and done well,” the proposal’s authors, Stephen Duckett and Will Mackey, explained. “The benefit of zero is to reduce the risk of ‘yo-yoing’ between virus flare-ups and further lockdowns to contain them.”

They treated the threats to public health and the economy as intertwined, which most experts agree they are. ...

People will stay home and spend less if they are worried about the virus. The Grattan authors cited a study comparing Denmark (which established a lockdown) and Sweden (which took a more relaxed “herd immunity” strategy) and found that their economies suffered about the same in the early months of the pandemic. But later in the year, when Denmark had its outbreak under control but Sweden did not, unemployment claims were almost back to pre-Covid levels in the former but remained elevated in the latter. ...