STORMS FROM COVID’S ROLLING WAVES
Unlike Australia, we need a real exit strategy.
Australia’s COVID-ZERO bubble has burst. “(Lockdowns) cannot go on forever. This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said at a news conference on Monday in Canberra. “It will end when we start getting to 70 per cent and 80 per cent (vaccination).”
In theory, this is an uncontroversial and inevitable position: Having kept COVID-19 more or less at bay, and accepting that this virus and its mutations will be with us for the long haul, Australia will eventually have to reopen and hope the vaccines keep working their magic.
In practice, however, it calls the country’s entire strategy into question.
For starters, only a quarter of Australians are fully vaccinated. At the current rate, it would take 17 weeks to get to 80 per cent. That’s assuming there’s enough supply, which there is not, and assuming 80 per cent of Australians are willing to get vaccinated, which is considerably more than the 64 per cent a survey of 2,400 Australians conducted in April and May found.
In the meantime, it’s all going pear-shaped. In New South Wales, case counts are five times higher than they have ever been, at 10 per day per 100,000 population. That’s hardly catastrophic: British Columbia is currently at 12, Alberta at 18. But the situation could get a lot worse: case counts more than doubled in just nine days ending Thursday, and with a proper lockdown in place: Sydneysiders aren’t allowed more than five kilometres from home; only one
member of a household is allowed out at a time to shop for essentials.
Melbourne, too, is back in lockdown — its sixth. There’s a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. (In Sydney the curfew is currently confined to the poorer, immigrant-rich western suburbs.)
Months after we learned surface transmission really isn’t much of a concern, playgrounds are off-limits.
For months, many Canadian public health experts insisted Australia’s COVID-ZERO approach should be Canada’s as well. Never mind the practical impediments. (Australia’s economy does not rely on 110,000 truck drivers crossing the border every week.) And never mind that many of the things Australia did are literally inconceivable here.
In July last year, Victoria Police locked 3,000 residents of nine Melbourne public housing towers in their homes for 14 days, 24 hours a day, with no notice.
Australian police officers routinely arrest scores of anti-lockdown protesters at a time; Canadian police officers escort anti-lockdown marches around town on their bicycles.
Australia can certainly claim remarkable success on the very important metric of keeping people alive: At 38 deaths per million population, it has fared better than all developed nations except Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand. But Australia’s draconian lockdowns will likely impose a far greater social toll than Canada’s. That’s precisely what Covid-zero’s proponents claimed the approach would prevent.
“At the end of the COVID-ZERO path lies safety and long-standing freedom, whereas, on the other path, freedom will be fleeting, and will certainly result in an ongoing roller-coaster of restrictions,” three Calgary doctors wrote in a Herald oped in February.
The Aussies have been stuck on that roller-coaster for months. And now they’re trailing most of the world on vaccinations. And a lot of people are angry: An Essential Research poll published Aug. 17 found just 37 per cent of folks in Victoria and 34 per cent in New South Wales approving of their state governments’ pandemic performance, down from 65 per cent and 69 per cent in March.
All that said, Australia at least had a plan and stuck to it. It’s more than many Canadian governments, certainly the one that recently vacated Ottawa to hold a pointless election, can claim. The federal Liberals’ appalling record has been to dismiss things other countries are doing as unnecessary, misguided and possibly racist, until late on a Sunday night, and then adopt them as matters of urgent priority on the Monday morning.
The provinces have hardly been better, particularly Ontario. The latest whispers out of Queen’s Park suggest Ontario will soon follow Manitoba, British Columbia and Quebec in adopting a vaccine passport system. If it does, the government will have no good answer to offer as to what took so long.
Vaccine passports are the solution du jour. They are certainly defensible, but they’re not a slam dunk (although they are a blunt incentive for people to get vaccinated). A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published this week suggests the Delta variant reduces the effectiveness of vaccines (specifically Pfizer and Moderna) against infection from 91 per cent to 66 per cent, and a preprint study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin, also published this week, suggests vaccinated and asymptomatic people can have just as much live Delta-variant virus in their nostrils, just waiting to be transmitted, as unvaccinated people.
That’s the bad news. The good news: A Public Health England study published in June found Pfizer was 96 per cent effective in preventing hospitalization even from the Delta variant, and Astrazeneca 92 per cent.
There’s a complex discussion about risk and freedom to be had from those findings, all of which could be overturned by future study or future variants: To what extent is an unvaccinated restaurant patron only risking his own health? How much risk to the vaccinated are we willing to tolerate in the name of not effectively forcing medical procedures on unwilling people?
Don’t take my word for it. Take Justin Trudeau’s. In May, online broadcaster Brandon Gonez asked the prime minister if it was conceivable that people who can’t or choose not to get vaccinated would be barred from a Toronto Raptors game.
“I’m really worried about that,” Trudeau replied. He said he understood the potential value of such policies “as a motivator” to get needles in arms, but asked: “What do you do with someone … who for religious or deep convictions decides that, no, they’re not going to get a vaccine?”
“We’re not a country that makes vaccination mandatory,” Trudeau confidently concluded.
He was right. Most environments in this country where vaccination is theoretically mandatory — in public schools, for example — offer no-questions-asked exemptions. It’s nauseating to see Trudeau, in campaign mode, now stumping for mandatory vaccination for airline and interprovincial train passengers, dismissing the idea of religious or conscientious objections, and claiming it’s all “about protecting our young people,” all for political gain.
Whatever we think of vaccine passports, we should be intensely leery of politicians proposing to limit people’s freedoms because it’s popular. We should demand coherent explanations, based on the best data available, and we should demand the sort of exit strategy that Australians, unfortunately, now lack.