One Case, Total Lockdown: Australia’s Lessons for a Pandemic World

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Tue, 2021-02-02 14:53 — mike kraft

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 it took for Perth, Australia’s fourth-largest city, to snap into a complete lockdown on Sunday. One case and now two million people are staying home for at least the next five days. One case and now the top state leader, Mark McGowan, who is facing an election next month, is calling on his constituents to sacrifice for each other and the nation.

“This is a very serious situation,” he said on Sunday as he reported the case, the first one the state of Western Australia had found outside quarantine in almost 10 months. “Each and every one of us has to do everything we personally can to stop the spread in the community.”

The speed and severity of the response may be unthinkable to people in the United States or Europe, where far larger outbreaks have often been met with half measures. But to Australians, it looked familiar.

The lockdown in Perth and the surrounding area followed similar efforts in Brisbane and Sydney, where a handful of infections led to steep ramp-ups in restrictions, a subdued virus and a rapid return to near normalcy. Ask Australians about the approach, and they might just shrug. Instead of loneliness and grief or outcries over impingements on their freedom, they’ve gotten used to a routine of short-term pain for collective gain.

The contrast with the United States and Europe — sharp at the start of the pandemic — has become even more marked with time. Fewer Australians have died in total (909) than the average number of deaths every day now in 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 developed a multilayered, or “Swiss cheese,” model of pandemic defense that has been widely circulated. “Everyone can learn from us, but not all are willing to learn.”

Australia is just one of several success stories in the Asia-Pacific. The region’s middle powers, including New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, are essentially getting better at managing the virus while the great powers of the World War II era are getting worse. ...

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