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When the Queensland Prime Minister carried out his usual Covid-19 update on Friday, he couldn’t help but let a smile spread across his face.
“Now here’s a good one,” Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters. “I think everyone in Queensland will be happy about it.”
He went on to announce that Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium would host a capacity of 52,500 for the next State of Origin rugby league decider against New South Wales next week.
“The cauldron can be filled to 100% capacity,” he said.
In the midst of the pandemic, the idea of responsible leaders encouraging citizens to gather in large crowds to sit or stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers may seem like a case of extreme recklessness.
But in Australia, where the Covid-19 pandemic has been largely brought under control after months of lockdowns, border closures and strict limits on meetings, times like these are becoming increasingly common.
Last month, images of a crowded nightclub in Western Australia went viral, offering a surreal picture of pre-Covid normalcy even as Northern Hemisphere countries began to revert to lockdowns amid a growing number of cases. In Sydney, nearly 40,000 fans were present at the rugby league grand final last month.
The country has reason to be optimistic about its successes. On Friday, Australia had no new cases of the virus for the fifth day in a row. In Victoria, where a spike in the second wave of the virus forced Melbourne into a months-long shutdown and killed hundreds, Friday marked the fourteenth straight day with no new cases.
The closely observed downward trend of the virus has even sparked a new phrase, “donut day,” meaning a day without new Covid-19 infections, which has become synonymous with the country’s success in fighting the disease. pandemic.
In Victoria, the term has been adopted with particular enthusiasm. On October 26, State Prime Minister Daniel Andrews posted online a photo of himself posing with a glazed donut.
Wearing a black mask and the North Face jacket that has taken on quasi-religious significance to tired residents of his state as he gave daily press conferences for 120 consecutive days, he captioned the photo: “Today is a good day.”
It was the first time since June that the state did not register a new case, and buyers responded with clean the supermarkets of the snack. It also coincided with the first reversal of a severe Melbourne lockdown, which included a curfew, strict limits on travel and movement, and heavy police surveillance.
Andrews’ announcement that the city would begin reopening after 112 days was met with great excitement. At his daily press conference, an event that had become something of a morbid soap opera for Victorians, a reporter asked Andrews if he was “saying we can finally get on with the beers.”
He replied, “It could go a little higher on the shelf.”
Since then, the days of donuts have kept coming. Friday’s 14-day scoreboard brought Victoria’s state average to zero. In New South Wales, which has mostly averted major virus outbreaks since the nationwide shutdown in March, it has been a month since more than 10 cases were recorded.
In the rest of the country, the virus has almost completely disappeared. Strict border closures between states have separated families from each other and sparked an ongoing political clash, but have also meant that in states like Tasmania and Western Australia, life has almost returned to a pre-Covid state.
The country’s success in managing the pandemic stands in stark contrast to its Western allies. When Victoria recorded 723 new cases on July 29, the figure was roughly in line with 763 in the UK and 1,392 in France. Since then, Australia has gone in the opposite direction.
In the UK, a record 33,470 were infected with the virus on Thursday and 563 died as the country endures another grueling lockdown. The total death count from Covid-19 is now more than 50,000, although estimates that count all deaths in which the virus was mentioned on a death certificate put the figure at almost 67,000. France extended its lockdown for another two weeks after surpassing more than 50,000 cases a day in October.
In the United States under Donald Trump, more than 240,000 people have died from the virus and deaths from the virus have increased by 23% in fifteen days. On Thursday, the country registered another new record of 160,000 daily cases. Perhaps most irritatingly, the country appears to have no national plan to control the virus, as Trump continues to downplay its severity while trying to undermine the country’s elections.
According to Professor Jodie McVernon, an epidemiologist at the prestigious Peter Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia’s success compared to those countries comes down both to speed of response and willingness to listen to expert advice. Public health advisory panels in Australia were meeting daily to monitor the spread of the virus beginning in January, and the country’s leaders heard early advice to begin closing borders and introducing quarantine protocols for returning travelers.
“Basically Australia made the decision to try to keep this virus away for as long as possible,” he said.
“Given our proximity to China and the volume of travel between the two countries, we were probably in line to be an early adopter. So we decided that we were going to actively try to suppress the virus to keep it within the capacity of our healthcare system. “
Perhaps most importantly, McVernon said, politicians listened to health experts.
The same advice came from experts in the United States and the United Kingdom, but they took less definitive early action. They didn’t have that general coordination like we have here, where all the relevant state and federal governments sang from the same hymn sheet. “
With cases on the rise in both the United States and the United Kingdom, McVernon said the only real hope was to suppress the virus. But, he said, there were cultural factors that also played in Australia’s favor.
“Particularly in the United States now it is totally out of control. So they could do some things to suppress it, but it’s also about changing a population that will actively rebel at the idea of wearing a mask or doing any of these things that could limit its spread, “he said.
“Australians are pretty compliant in general, and we still have that level of social cohesion where these things can work.”
But Australia’s relative success in managing the virus has come at significant costs. The prolonged blockade of Victoria devastated the state’s economy and raised concerns about over-policing of disadvantaged and minority populations.
The prolonged and harsh restriction of civil liberties also sparked a wave of protests by anti-blockade activists fueled by a growing movement of conspiracy theorists, backed in some cases by far-right actors.
Melbourne Mayor Sally Capp told Guardian Australia that the city had been through “an incredibly difficult year.” While signs of normalcy were returning with the gradual rolling back of restrictions, he said it would be “a major challenge to revitalize Melbourne after the devastation caused” by the virus.
“Before the Covid-19 restrictions, more than a million people entered the city every day,” he said.
“Our daily pedestrian count has increased recently, but we are still roughly 69% below the same period last year, which means there are far fewer potential customers for city businesses.
“We work every day so that the economy of our city returns to the top and our cultural life vibrates again.”
The virus has not completely disappeared from sight. Tight limits on the size of gatherings still remain in Victoria and New South Wales, and despite an agreement among most states on Friday to ease border closures before Christmas, the issue continues to cause significant tension between state leaders.
McVernon says the biggest threat to Australia’s success against the virus can come down to complacency. She points to a measure that health officials call “reproductive potential” that looks at factors such as mobility to see how likely the virus is to spread.
“We have to accept that the longer we go without cases, the more the potential increases,” he said.
“But that is the goal of reaching this point of non-community transmission. The point is really how to maintain personal behaviors like hand washing and wearing masks. You want people to move again, but now you have a society that looks different. “
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