It has taken the potential criminalisation of Australians desperately trying to return home for the penny to finally drop. Australia’s policy of COVID-19 elimination is unworkable and grossly unfair. Elimination by definition requires borders to be shut, quarantine to be continued and extraordinarily expensive tracing, testing and lockdowns to be maintained.
To this point, it was widely believed that the majority of Australians supported our elimination stance. The resounding election victory of Mark McGowan in WA and the narrower success of Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland seemed to support this. But a Lowy Institute poll (taken before the India criminalisation threat) suggested that perhaps Australians aren’t quite so naive after all. Of the 2000 people surveyed, 58% supported vaccinated Australians being able to freely leave the country (18% of whom supported no entry or exit restrictions at all).
The question of opening borders is one which requires a full understanding of the risks. As soon as the borders open without quarantine, we will likely have a number of COVID-19 cases and inevitably some deaths. But once the genuinely “at risk” members of the community are vaccinated, the likely number of fatalities will be less than the seasonal flu (which in 2019 killed almost 1000 people).
The key question then becomes: how many people need to be vaccinated to make that risk tolerable?
One of the most influential voices on risk levels is the Burnet Institute’s Brendan Crabb, for whom there seems to be no number of vaccinations that will be enough to ever open borders. Last week, Crabb suggested that unlike the flu, which kills hundreds of people every year, the community is “not going to tolerate severe disease and dying [and] in the absence of herd immunity … you will need some level of public health intervention, to run side by side vaccines. And probably for ever, as long as we have virus”.
Crabb has form. In December, he demanded a Sydney-wide lockdown, which never happened, and the outbreak was rapidly contained. He also criticised Singapore’s easing of restrictions in June last year — since then, Singapore has recorded a grand total of five COVID-related deaths.
Other health experts hold different views. The highly respected Peter Collignon and Greg Dore, for example, have both been far more measured on border closures and vaccine effectiveness. Dr Anthony Fauci last week suggested that for the US to return to relative normality, it would take daily COVID infections in the US to drop to about 10,000.
Real-life examples
While epidemiologists are often required to work under forecast model scenarios, we now have several real-life examples of the effectiveness of vaccines. Discounting the remarkable success of Israel (which used Pfizer), and the failure of Chile (China’s SinoVac), the best comparison for Australia is the UK (which mostly used AstraZeneca).
Despite less than 30% of UK residents being fully vaccinated with two doses, daily fatalities have dropped from 1250 per day to 15 per day. The UK, which was coming off a far higher base level of infection, showed that to reduce COVID-19’s lethality below flu levels, you merely need to vaccinate about a quarter of the population. In Australia, that will require about 13 million doses to be applied (or just over six million people vaccinated).
That means even with Australia’s horrifically slow vaccination rate, with just a minor improvement as mass-hubs become operational to 100,000 doses per day, we can reduce the risk of COVID death to less than the flu by mid-September. If we start vaccinating 200,000 people per day, we could get there by late July. (The rest of the developed world, specifically Europe and the US, will likely be completely open by June, tolerating a small number of deaths, like we do for hundreds of other illnesses.)
While a handful of epidemiologists may disagree, the UK evidence is clear.
Every year we happily tolerate appallingly high numbers of alcohol-related deaths, 15,000 tobacco deaths, and more than 1000 road deaths. We may just need to live with a thousand octogenarians dying from COVID each year too, if we want to stop treating citizens like criminals.
Adam Schwab is the co-founder of Luxury Escapes, a Melbourne-based travel company, a regular contributor to Crikey and a board member of Private Media, the publisher of Crikey.
The UK comparison leaves out the extremely relevant detail that the drop in infections also happened to coincide with widespread lockdowns, significantly overplaying the role that vaccinations alone had on infection rate
Similarly, the lack of a lockdown in Sydney meant that cases carried on for weeks instead of days (while also seeding an outbreak in another state), so this is at least a questionable definition of ‘rapidly contained’
The appetite for risk will certainly need to be increased in order to re-open our borders. Mounting your arguments in favour of this on suck shaky foundations does nothing to advance the cause
“suck shaky”. I like what you did there.
Agree with these comments. What surprised me was that our hotel quarantine system is based on only 1 to 2 percent of people passing through it having the virus and a much higher rate among people returning from India required that route be shut down.
The number of people actually catching the virus in the hotels is increasing; likely explanations are the unsatisfactory ventilation in hotels combined with the influx of more contagious mutations. The people returning from India are more likely to have the virus because they’ve been made to wait so long in India.
The use of hotels showed nothing was learned from Legionnaires Disease.
Inadequate, poorly maintained, cheap as chips air/con is perfect for spreading infection.
Whether on land, at sea or 30,000ft.
As a matter of interest, is everybody here on this forum aware that health care workers, pharmacy workers, doctors, and mass distribution workers and perhaps even Bunnings Stores if they become inoculation centres, collectively referred to herein as “vaccine inoculators” are liable if they failed to obtain Proof of Informed Consent by each and every person that has been vaccinated/inoculated
No, ‘Karen‘ tried that last year at Bunnings.
Agreed. “suck shaky.” And you tell ME to go back to High School and improve mE ANglEsH..huh!
Will the real Suck Shaky please stand up, please stand up.
Or just go away.
As fast & far as possible.
As Stan Freeberg doing “Day O!” was told by the beatnik bongo player, “Further man, I can still hear you“.
The British death rate from SARS-COV-2 isn’t due to Britain immunising 30% of its population (as Adam Schwab states) implying that a ridiculously low level,of immunisation is capable of producing herd immunity, but due to Britain continuing restrictions:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/covid-19-coronavirus-restrictions-what-you-can-and-cannot-do
Britain, for example, restricts weddings to 15 guests, which is fewer than Australia.
Yep, Adam’s attribution of the decline to the vaccinated percentage is ridiculously simplistic.
PS. The staged removal of restrictions isn’t scheduled to be completed until June.
Yeah I’ve had enough of his false logic and misleading use of stats.
As we have come to expect from Adam on this topic non sequiteur after non sequiteur. There is no reason why we can’t have everything open and still maintain elimination if we had effective purpose built quarantine. Hard for international tourism, but fine for everything else.
Jackson, I find that claim rather ridiculous. Our hotel quarantine has worked as effectively as anywhere in the world. IF we build remote centres, do you really think that next pandemic they would actually be manned as quickly and efficiently as occurred with the use of existing major hotels at the airport cities of returning citizens? Obviously no quarantine system will ever be perfect, part due to human failings. Perhaps our government could better put its money into providing quarantine style ventilation in our major hotels where necessary.
Schwab’s opening sentence is false –
“Elimination by definition requires borders to be shut, quarantine to be continued and extraordinarily expensive tracing, testing and lockdowns to be maintained.”
With effective quarantine, borders can remain open, lockdowns would not be required and elimination is possible (in all but arrivals).
The moment I heard of the virus escaping China and moving globally, I envisaged using remote camps to process arrivals. Howard Springs has not had a single case of escaped infection.
The Feds have had ample time to construct purpose-built facilities on which no cost would be too great as the consequences of the hotel virus (and The Ruby Princess) escapes have been billions.
The Feds failed to do this for the fear of having the responsibility and the cost, and they have blown it. No jobkeeper etc needed – you can build a lot of quarantine for the billions wasted.
Using hotels in CBDs for a highly infective virus may be good income for the owners but totally unsuitable for isolation. Blind Freddy could see that a mile off.
Many countries have not closed their borders, and few, even today, have used hotel quarantine. Those that do have only recently introduced it and have less restrictive rules than Australia, but then again they have much less containment of the virus to protect. Presently, the rate of virus transmission within the Australian hotels is increasing as a result of poor ventilation and the influx of more contagious strains. For a country with virtually no community transmission, the combination of purpose-built quarantine accommodation and rapid, methodical vaccination (now a forlorn hope and missed opportunity) seems optimal and obvious. I’ve seen no reports of the virus getting out of the Howard Springs quarantine.
Our elimination policy seems to working remarkably well for something that is allegedly “unworkable”.
No, Schwab, I do not wish to so cavalier as to live the deaths of thousands of octogenarians- one of whom happen to be my mother. Pull your head in, son!