Severe recession, huge debts: Australia's Covid-19 strategy

New French Prime Minister Jean Castex recently said that any new lockdown will be targeted, and not imposed nationwide, if there is a major new corona virus outbreak. Many other countries (Iran is the latest example) have concluded that they cannot afford to shut down their economies again in the face of rising infections. Even in the UK and USA the public is increasingly resisting lockdowns.

By the end of the year those countries currently struggling with rapid rates of spread will have reached a high level of herd immunity, and much of the world will have started reopening from the pandemic. Meanwhile Australia, by keeping its borders closed until a vaccine is in place, will suffer continuing expensive international isolation. This will be seen as unsustainable in the long term, vaccine or no vaccine. Eventually, Australia will have to open up, and we will then probably then see an explosion in virus cases. Unemployment will soar further as Jobkeeper ends. A consolation is that treatments may be better refined by then.

There seems to be growing evidence that the herd immunity strategy will be the most successful in the longer term. Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, says Australia is adopting a "selfish" and "self-congratulatory" approach, which is misguided and will have negative long-term consequences. She said if the Australian government changed its approach and let the virus spread naturally, with intense protections for those most vulnerable, it would in the long term help protect all Australians from future viral threats. Eighty to 90 per cent of the population would get the virus only asymptomatically. The so-called "Swedish model" is generally considered to require at least a 60 per cent infection rate in the community to provide meaningful protection from spread.

The reason that Australia and (especially) New Zealand have had low rates of Covid19 infections to date is that our countries are international travel backwaters. While early restrictions on international travel consequently worked well for us to date, we will be heavily exposed if borders are opened up without an effective vaccine being available.

Given the amounts our governments are spending, we should be mindful of the effects of the flu compared with Covid-19.

Last year more than 800 people, median age notified 86 years, died in Australia from flu. There were 310,011 laboratory-confirmed flu notifications in total. All of this occurred without much publicity, panic, or excessive spending. This year by comparison there have only been 9797 Covid-19 notifications, and 108 people affected by the virus have died. The political reaction to Covid-19 has been one of panicked emergency, and a rush to copy overseas responses.

Future generations will look back at our governments needlessly wasting money and running up debts at an industrial scale (in one of the few examples of bipartisanship I can recall). The most shocking thing of all is that this gross waste of our public monies is being implemented by a supposedly conservative federal government.