SYDNEY, Australia – A case. A young security guard in a quarantine hotel who tested positive for the coronavirus and had minor symptoms.
That was all it took for Perth, Australia’s fourth largest city, to enter a complete block on Sunday. One case and now two million people will stay at home for at least five days. One case and now state leader Mark McGowan, who faces an election next month, asks his constituents to sacrifice themselves for each other and for the nation.
“This is a very serious situation,” he said on Sunday when he reported the case, the first that the state of Western Australia found out of quarantine in almost 10 months. “Each of us has to do everything we can personally to prevent it from spreading in the community.”
The speed and severity of the response may be unthinkable for people in the United States or Europe, where much larger outbreaks are usually resolved with half measures. But to Australians, it looked familiar.
The blockade in Perth and the surrounding area followed similar efforts in Brisbane and Sydney, where a handful of infections led to a sharp increase in restrictions, a subdued virus and a rapid return to near-normality. Ask Australians about the approach and they can just shrug. Instead of loneliness and sadness or screams for violations of their freedom, they got used to a Covid routine of short-term pain for collective gain.
The contrast with the United States and Europe – clear at the beginning of the pandemic – has become even more pronounced over time. Fewer Australians died in total (909) than the average number of daily deaths now in Britain and the United States.
“We have a way to save lives, open our economies and avoid all this fear and boredom,” said Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland who developed a multilayered model, or “Swiss cheese”, of pandemic defense that has been widely publicized . “Everyone can learn from us, but not everyone is willing to learn.”
Australia is just one of several success stories in Asia-Pacific. The region’s medium powers, including New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, are essentially improving in managing the virus, while the great powers of the Second World War era are getting worse.
The center of trust, if not gravity, continues to shift eastward, especially as China roars back to life. With successful public health, some argue, comes not only wealth and more stable economies, but also national pride and the practical experience that mutant viruses require.
“I’m not sure if we’re being looked at with enough interest,” said Mackay.
Australia’s geographic isolation offers a great advantage. Even so, it took several decisive steps. Australia has strictly limited interstate travel, while imposing the quarantine of hotels for international arrivals since last March. Britain and the United States are only now trying to make quarantine mandatory for people who come from critical points in Covid.
Australia also maintained a strong contact tracking system, even when other countries basically dropped out. In the case of Perth, contact trackers had already tested the man’s housemates (negative so far) by the time the blockade was announced and placed them in a 14-day quarantine at a state facility. Authorities also listed more than a dozen places where the security guard may have touched or breathed someone.
Australia’s fight against the coronavirus has not been perfect. The Perth case illustrates a persistent weakness – several outbreaks have been linked to the quarantine of hotels, including one in Melbourne late last year that led to a 111-day block. Strict border rules have caused difficulties for many people, including thousands of Australians lost abroad.
But evidence of the country’s success has been growing for months, and has been shaped since December less by the complete absence of the virus than by a series of quick responses that suppressed small outbreaks.
Before Christmas, it was the beaches of northern Sydney, which were blocked when some cases arose, then a few dozen. Vacation plans were ruined, as anyone from Greater Sydney was prevented from traveling to other states. The test went off. There were few complaints and it worked: the city of five million inhabitants spent two weeks without a case of community transmission.
Brisbane followed suit in early January with a brief block after a cleaner in its hotel quarantine system was infected with a highly contagious variant of the virus first identified in Britain. It was the first known appearance of the mutation in the Australian community, and the authorities acted quickly. Annastacia Palaszczuk, Queensland’s chief official, which includes Brisbane, announced the blockade 16 hours after the positive test.
“Doing three days now can avoid doing 30 days in the future,” she said.
Brisbane is now back to normal Covid, like all of Australia besides Perth. Across the country, offices and restaurants are open, with rules that require physical spacing. Masks are recommended, but not mandatory. And big meetings are underway: the Australian Open, after facing a series of challenges from infected arrivals, hopes to accommodate 30,000 tennis fans a day when it starts on February 8.
Dr. Mackay, who worked closely with Australian government officials, called this “the hammer and the dance”.
“The blocks give everyone who is looking for contact and public health a chance to catch their breath, to make sure they interview everyone, that nobody forgets something – and that allows them to actually stop the broadcast,” he said.
Europe and the United States seem to prefer, in their words, “the incomplete blockade”. He said they put a lot of faith in vaccines, failing to recognize that their impact on transmission would be glacial, not instantaneous.
Much of Europe in particular points to tiredness and then to failure. An analysis of 98 countries’ responses to the pandemic by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, found that many European countries topped Covid’s performance ranking a few months ago. Britain, France and a few others are now closer to the bottom, along with the United States.
“They didn’t go far enough,” said Hervé Lemahieu, a Lowy researcher originally from Belgium who led the study with Alyssa Leng. “When they made gains, they relaxed very early.”
As of Monday afternoon, no other infections had been found in Western Australia. Within the enclosed area, residents adapted quickly. Masks purchased months ago were put to use. Workers in nursing homes called each resident’s families to review the protocols.
Allan Thompson, an investment banker in Perth, said he was one of many who rushed home on Sunday to do their part.
“You know that John Prine song – ‘It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown,'” he said. “To paraphrase that, we’re only half an inch in water and we don’t think we’re going to drown. We think we will overcome this. We know that goodness comes from doing the right things for the right amount of time. “