WE MUST GO HARD ... AND ALSO GO EARLY
THE Australians who ransacked our supermarkets for canned food and — yes — toilet paper might be the smart ones, after all.
Yes, Australia has had “only” 256 cases of coronavirus. But that’s exactly why we should buy in food and ban a lot more travel and gatherings. That’s because even with so few cases we’re already running out of protective equipment and testing kits, forcing the Chief Medical Officer to beg doctors to start rationing.
Meanwhile, the number of new cases jumped nearly 20 per cent on Saturday. It seems Australia is seeing almost the exponential growth that overwhelmed Italy.
Think: three weeks of 20 per cent more cases every day brings us — hypothetically — to nearly 10,000 cases. Even at a mortality rate of just 1 per cent, that’s 100 Australians killed, with the winter flu season still to come.
It could be even worse. If we’re already running short of protective equipment and testing kits for doctors, what will we be running out of in three weeks? In a month?
Some people will complain that I’m being alarmist. Doesn’t Australia’s death toll so far — just three elderly people — show the virus isn’t as deadly as claimed? Haven’t we slowed the spread better than most?
But we have the same virus that’s hitting other countries, and there’s no reason to think it could not hurt us the same way. In most European countries the spread also started slowly but then exploded.Just three weeks ago, only seven Italians had died from the coronavirus; now it’s more than 1400.
Yes, countries can get the spread under control. Check out China (if its figures can be trusted). It’s now recording day after day of fewer than 20 new cases. But see also what China had to do for that success: bans on travelling, bans on working, compulsory detention of the sick, cities in lockdown.
See what some other countries are now doing: bans on nonessential shopping and bans on non-citizens crossing the border.
Yet in Australia we saw three people on the weekend test positive for a virus they’d been free to fly in from overseas. We can crack down hard today or crack down hard later to stop a lot of people dying. Today is easier.