'A wicked enemy': how Australia's coronavirus success story unravelled
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Version 0 of 1. Weeks ago, Australia was the envy of the world. Now it has more than 3,000 active coronavirus cases and Melbourne is in lockdown. What went wrong? Less than a month ago, Australia was the envy of much of the world. With daily new coronavirus cases in the single digits, it was feted as part of a group of “first mover” nations - countries like Taiwan, Singapore and New Zealand that acted decisively to quash coronavirus. In mid-June, after three months of tight restrictions and differing levels of lockdown, life was not quite back to normal, but as politicians liked to stress, it was almost Covid-normal. Restaurants, gyms and beaches across the country opened again, and in the southern state of Victoria residents were awaiting the day when premier Daniel Andrews would say they could “get on the beers” and return to the pub. Travel was also back on the cards. There was talk of a bubble between Australia and New Zealand, and interstate border restrictions were on the verge of being eased. But then, as a sunny autumn rolled into winter, infections began slowly rising in Melbourne. Just weeks later, the country has more than 3,000 active cases and daily new case numbers that are almost as high as the UK - with less than a third of the population. Five million residents of Melbourne have been thrown into their second lockdown, with no real sense of when it might end. Face masks are mandatory. Police patrol the Victorian state border. And the death toll is climbing. So what went wrong? ‘I’m scared of this. We all should be’ On 19 June, at a routine press conference, Victoria’s deputy chief medical officer Annaliese van Diemen announced that seven cases had been linked to security guards working at the Stamford Plaza hotel in Melbourne, where travellers were held under Australia’s mandatory 14-day quarantine rule for international arrivals. The group were believed to have breached social distancing rules while socialising. Andrews said the source of the transmission could have been as fleeting as sharing a cigarette lighter. He warned the country was facing a “wicked enemy”. Day by day the cases continued to rise, until there were dozens linked to two hotels. A judicial inquiry into the outbreak this week heard that many if not all of the thousands of new cases in June and July could be linked back to the quarantine hotel outbreaks. The inquiry will be focused on the state government’s decision to use private security contractors, who in turn used sub-contractors, some with reportedly as little as five minutes in training, while in other states, police were on guard. Initially, the authorities launched a testing blitz on hotspots and issued a stay-at-home order – later beefed up to a police-enforced lockdown - for 3,000 residents of nine Melbourne public housing towers. But the cases kept coming. On 7 July Victoria recorded 191 new coronavirus cases, enough to prompt Andrews to announce a city-wide lockdown for at least six weeks. “I know a lot of people aren’t scared because this feels like something happening to other people in other parts of the world,” Andrews said. “But you should be scared of this. I’m scared of this. We all should be.” Now, over two weeks since stage three lockdown commenced, there are 4,213 new cases of coronavirus reported in Victoria alone, with 30 deaths. A total of 201 patients are in hospital, with 41 in intensive care. Australia hit a new record of 484 cases in one day on Wednesday. Melbourne residents now must wear a mask when outside home, or face a $200 fine. On Friday, six more deaths were recorded, and 300 new cases. Andrews said the army would be deployed to knock on the doors of those positive cases who had not answered the phone to contact tracers. This week, Andrews revealed nine in 10 people who had symptoms before getting tested in Victoria did not isolate before their test, and more than half did not isolate while waiting for their results. Many of them continued to work because they needed the money. But Andrews said a debate on the insecure work for many of those affected could be had later. The return of Covid-19 has hit harder than the first wave. Michael, a healthcare worker in Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north, said it felt like every minor decision in his life held great importance, and that was exhausting. “It’s like you never get a chance to really recharge your battery, there’s always something worrying on the news,” he said. “I hate it.” And the outbreak is spreading across the country. The state of New South Wales restricted entry for people from Victoria, dramatically closing the border between Australia’s two most populous states for the first time since the 1919 flu pandemic. But it wasn’t enough to stop an outbreak linked to the southern state spreading through a popular hotel on an arterial road, and resulting in dozens of new cases at locations across metropolitan Sydney and beyond. So far New South Wales has resisted returning to a harder lockdown, with case numbers much lower than Victoria, and more success in tracing cases to known outbreaks. On Thursday the government announced the nation’s biggest deficit since the second world war, reaching $86bn (£48bn) in the last financial year, and forecast to blow out to $184bn in 2020-21. The numbers of new cases in Victoria are stabilising, but victory is a long way away. Andrews warned: “We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that even with stability, that will mean some people die, that will mean that some people are gravely ill, and it will mean based on recent international evidence that some people will not shake this like a common cold, they will have lasting impacts.” |