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The bubble of protection, which has kept Australia’s COVID-19 victims to fewer than 1,000, is no longer sustainable, says Greg Dore, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at the Kirby Institute in New South Wales, Sydney. The country needs to stop having fun and urgently accelerate the vaccination process to achieve public immunity as soon as possible, before which SARS-CoV-2 will no longer represent a greater risk.
“As soon as more adults are vaccinated, it will be possible to talk about public immunity and open up. The virus will infect. There will be new cases. There will be more serious people, but very few cases and very serious deaths,” says Dore.
Such a tolerant approach stands in stark contrast to the current situation in the country: here in Victoria, a two-week quarantine has now been announced to control the virus outbreak in Melbourne for the fourth time. There were 69 people with coronavirus there on Wednesday, the state health department said.
As of January 2020, 26 million. The country’s population registered just over 30,000. cases, but distributed only 4.5 million. vaccine doses, according to Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.
“This success has a price,” added Dore. He hopes the recent outbreak in Melbourne will serve as a warning and increase public vaccination.
Unprotected targets
Hong Kong, Singapore and other cities that have managed to control the spread of the virus through social and public health measures should also increase vaccination coverage to prevent local epidemics, says Jody Lanard, a risk communication consultant in New York.
“I am concerned that countries that are no longer catching COVID-19 are like unprotected targets that can be easily attacked by the virus. I am very concerned that the zero number of coronavirus cases is actually a tune bomb. We are just waiting for it to happen. something terrible, “says the expert.
States must prepare their populations for the return of the virus, Lanard says. “It just came to our attention then. Get them ready,” says the consultant.
Speaking to his citizens, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong alludes more and more subtly to the threat of massive events that could lead to a breakthrough, says the expert.
“And then you start talking about it bluntly so that when something bad happens, people aren’t too surprised. If people are willing to accept what may happen, it will be easier to manage the crisis ”, explains the risk communication consultant.
Singaporeans can expect routine, large-scale, quick, and simple testing to become “part of a new routine.” This means that people will have to learn to live with the virus. Importantly, in the new reality, COVID-19 will no longer dominate our lives.
“Most of our people will be vaccinated, and vaccination protection may need to be renewed every year,” Singapore’s prime minister told people on Monday.
Setting a zero-case goal for most countries, whose strategy was to eradicate the virus at all costs, was a proven tactic, says Peter Sandman, a risk communication consultant working with J. Lanard.
“If you’ve already won a game, now you need to convince people to collect your winnings. And in this case, the only way to do your part is to want to get vaccinated and open up to the world, ”says P. Sandman.
How tolerant COVID-19 cases will be from societies wanting more freedoms, such as traveling abroad, is still being considered, but such decisions cannot be made by the government or scientists alone, Sandman believes.
“No country wants to become a hermit in the 21st century,” said the expert.
Lose a war that you already won
The Tokyo Olympics were supposed to celebrate victory or, as Katsutoshi Kawano, a former commander of Japan’s self-defense forces put it, would become “proof that the world has overcome the virus.”
A part of the world is really succeeding (at least for now). But unfortunately not in Japan, where the number of Covid-19 cases has increased again. On Memorial Day weekend, Americans gathered for maskless parties and Japanese authorities extended the emergency in Tokyo and other major cities. It was less than two months until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
Many Japanese fear that the Games will turn into a super dealer event; Polls show that most citizens would like to postpone or withdraw them altogether. A prominent Japanese business leader even called the Olympics a “suicide mission.”
How did Japan do it?
Slow and guilty Japanese vaccination program. Only 2.3 percent. the country’s citizens are currently fully protected. Meanwhile, about half of the US population has already received at least one dose, as have about a third of Europeans.
© Zuma Press / Scanpix
Vaccination efforts by Japan’s other neighbors, including China, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which exemplified the virus last year, are also lacking.
The lack of rapid vaccination of the population has caused sudden and unexpected relapses in some cases with important economic consequences.
Unlike the United States, where face masks were found at the center of so-called culture wars, people in Asia-Pacific countries wear them with almost no complaint. They agreed to electronic monitoring of marine areas and global tests. They willingly suffered border closures and strict quarantine measures.
Thus, while mortality increased in the chaotic West, and especially in America (which remains the world leader in the number of confirmed deaths from coronavirus and infections), the disciplined and socially responsible countries of Covid Zero lived as usual, with their citizens attending. sporting events and shops, restaurants and bars. Until the US economy sank into a critical state, China was able to secure a Form V recovery.
Japan has never achieved zero infections, but last year it handled the pandemic much better than the West. Taiwan and Singapore have become exceptional countries, with only a few dozen deaths on record. Taiwan lasted a total of 253 days last year with no locally transmitted infections.
Now the region has evolved from precursor to binary. New York and London reopen, while Singapore and Taipei introduce partial quarantine. They were recently joined by Melbourne. May 24 The US State Department has added Japan to its “Level 4: Do Not Travel” list, although the measure is not expected to affect US participation in the Olympics. (Overseas viewers have already been banned and local fans are now in doubt.)
The obvious explanation for the delay in the Asia-Pacific region, initially impressive at the end of the pandemic, is a lack of vaccines.
In Japan, however, this is not even the main reason. The Japanese have millions of doses: they lack medical professionals and syringes. Similar logistical problems and obstacles hamper the implementation of the vaccination program elsewhere.
In a way, the societies that performed best during the initial waves of Covid-19 have fallen victim to their own success – they have been hit by subsequent floods of new strains of infection that are spreading around the world today.
How did this happen? Governments that ensured absolute safety for their populations had less incentive last year to stockpile vaccines, all the more so when they were seized by Western countries in an effort to reduce catastrophic deaths. Some have chosen to wait and watch Americans and Europeans turn into guinea pigs as they test the revolutionary Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.
The fear of blood clots that could be caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine has also stopped vaccination in countries like Australia.
Furthermore, citizens of Asia-Pacific countries may not have had the sense of urgency that people experienced in cities like Milan or New York, where tens of thousands of people died in the first months of the pandemic.
Some even fear vaccines more than the virus, despite clear evidence of safety. This phenomenon is also slowing down vaccination campaigns in the West.
Particularly risk-averse governments today face an acute dilemma: whether to continue the policy of controlling the pandemic on a case-by-case basis until the virus is eradicated, or to accept that Covid-19 will become endemic and live to a certain level. of the infection, as it will. Occidental countries?
A rigid approach for months would spell an economic recovery “setback”: quarantines followed by cautious openings. This is an expensive strategy, especially for financial centers like Singapore and Hong Kong, which live off international trade and travel.
The World Economic Forum canceled a meeting scheduled for August in Singapore, even though vaccination rates in city-states are roughly the same as in Europe.
As the pandemic continues in countries like India and Brazil, the largely unvaccinated Asia-Pacific region will remain vulnerable. No matter how advanced the region’s contact tracking technology is, no matter how sophisticated the artificial intelligence algorithms are, no matter how stringent the border controls are, the virus will always find ways to exploit human vulnerabilities.
In Taipei, he managed to overcome high-tech and penetrate the tea house in Wanhua District. In Japan, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government is determined to host the Olympics, although some hospitals are already overcrowded with patients. May 26, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper disagreed with his decision. “It is simply absurd to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo this summer,” the newspaper said.
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