Australia has almost eliminated the coronavirus — by putting faith in science



By A. Odysseus Patrick
November 5, 2020 at 4:16 a.m. EST


SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House has reopened. Almost 40,000 spectators attended the city's rugby league grand final. Workers are being urged to return to their offices. Australia has become a pandemic success story. The nation of 26 million is close to eliminating community transmission of the coronavirus, having defeated a second wave just as infections surge again in Europe and the United States. No new cases were reported on the island continent Thursday, and only seven since Saturday, besides travelers in hotel quarantine. Eighteen patients are hospitalized with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. One is in an intensive care unit. Melbourne, the main hotbed of Australia's outbreak that recently emerged from lockdown, has not reported a case since Oct. 30.

Meanwhile, in the United States, 52,049 people are hospitalized and 10,445 are in an ICU, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer effort to document the pandemic. America's daily new cases topped 100,000 on Wednesday, and its death toll exceeds 234,000, a staggering figure even accounting for its greater population than Australia, which has recorded 907 deaths. "I never thought we would ­really get to zero, which is amazing," said Sharon Lewin, the ­Melbourne-based director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, which provided forecasts in February that formed the basis of the Australian government's response. "I've been going out nonstop, booking restaurants, shopping, getting my nails done and my hair cut."

As North America, Europe, India, Brazil and other regions and countries struggle to bring tens of thousands of daily infections under control, Australia provides a real-time road map for democracies to manage the pandemic. Its experience, along with New Zealand's, also shows that success in containing the virus isn't limited to East Asian states (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) or those with authoritarian leaders (China, Vietnam). Several practical measures contributed to Australia's success, experts say. The country chose to quickly and tightly seal its borders, a step some others, notably in Europe, did not take.

Health officials rapidly built up the manpower to track down and isolate outbreaks. And unlike the U.S. approach, all of Australia's states either shut their domestic borders or severely limited movement for interstate and, in some cases, intra­state travelers.Perhaps most important, though, leaders from across the ideological spectrum persuaded Australians to take the pandemic seriously early on and prepared them to give up civil liberties they had never lost before, even during two world wars. "We told the public: 'This is serious; we want your cooperation,'?" said Marylouise McLaws, a Sydney-based epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales and a World Health Organization adviser.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australia-coronavirus-cases-melbourne-lockdown/2020/11/05/96c198b2-1cb7-11eb-ad53-4c1fda49907d_story.html

Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
December 19, 20208:01 PM Updated a day ago

Sydney isolated from rest of Australia as COVID outbreak grows

By James Redmayne

4 Min Read

SYDNEY (Reuters) -Sydney was isolated from the rest of Australia on Sunday after all of the country’s states and territories imposed travel restrictions on its residents as a coronavirus cluster in the city grew to around 70. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) sent a stern ‘do not come to us’ message to Sydney, the country’s most populous city of more than five million people, warning its residents they would be quarantined for 14 days if they arrived.. “If you are not an ACT resident and have been in greater Sydney...our message is simple: do not travel to the ACT,” the ACT health department said.

The states of Victoria and Queensland, and the Northern Territory, banned people arriving from Sydney as of Monday. Queensland police will reintroduce road checkpoints at the New South Wales (NSW) state border to help enforce the new declaration of greater Sydney as a COVID-19 hotspot.

South Australia state imposed a 14-day quarantine for Sydney arrivals on Sunday and banned travellers from affected suburbs. The island state of Tasmania took similar steps on Saturday. Western Australia state imposed a hard border closure.Travellers from elsewhere in NSW, where Sydney is the state capital, will require documents showing they are not coming from the affected Sydney suburbs if they wish to cross state borders.

About a quarter of a million people in Sydney’s northern beach suburbs where the outbreak has occurred have been put into a strict lockdown until Christmas Eve. “If we can lockdown here and get rid of it, fantastic and everyone else can be free,” Rachel Buxcon, a retired northern beaches resident said. “But if it extends, then we’re all in it together.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-australia-idUSKBN28U017