A strange dynamic has emerged as power is transferred away from Canberra and to state and territory leaders amid the pandemic. The idea of a national approach to COVID-19 rules has largely been shattered as leaders, emboldened with new emergency powers and popularity among their constituents, implement rules and restrictions even if it goes against national advice.
NSW has started setting its own goalposts, with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian openly discussing a strategy of living with the virus, flagging potential freedoms for fully vaccinated residents, such as being allowed to visit pubs and bars, in regions with high vaccination rates and low case numbers.
This is the first clear pathway to freedom Australians have had. While the federal government’s vague four-stage plan flags eased restrictions when 70% of the adult population is vaccinated, it doesn’t provide further details.
But NSW’s plans have caused a rift with WA which wants to keep case numbers at zero even when Australia reaches 80% vaccination, further muddying a national approach.
From elimination to suppression
The federal government has long called Australia’s approach to COVID-19 one of suppression instead of elimination. The National Cabinet’s goal is “no community transmission” under its suppression strategy while less than 70% of the adult population is vaccinated. This strategy was agreed to by all state and territory leaders, despite McGowan’s comments.
Associate Professor in Epidemiology at La Trobe University Hassan Vally told Crikey with low vaccination numbers combined with the Delta variant, aggressive suppression was the only option.
“The flaw in the thinking is there’s a choice between having zero cases or a little bit and it’s not,” he said.
“It’s like a bushfire. Either you suppress really aggressively to get to zero or have NSW’s situation where they are locked down anyway and still not bringing it under control.”
But as more and more of the population get vaccinated, Australians will have to shift their focus from COVID-19 case numbers to cases of hospitalization, severe disease and death as markers for success. Iceland is a successful case study of this: While infections are reaching the second-highest levels since the pandemic began, the country hasn’t recorded a single death since late May.
The appetite to do this depends largely on how exposed a region has been to the virus. WA and New Zealand haven’t faced the same outbreaks Victoria and NSW have.
But suppression among a population with low vaccination rates is a dangerous game with the Delta variant, Chair of epidemiology at Deakin University Catherine Bennett told Crikey.
“You only have to miss one person and that can be the chain [that creates a cluster],” she said.
“As is the case in Victoria, chances are the virus has been in the community for a while. If you miss the first case or one missed contact, the virus bubbles along under the surface and by the time it appears, you can’t quite link every person together.”
But, she stressed, the Delta variant wasn’t spreading at its usual reproduction rate of each infected person transmitting the disease to five or six others but had a reproductive rate of less than two in Sydney — meaning social restrictions were working.
“Especially with a vaccinated population, you should be able to manage the disease in the community and keep cases down,” Bennett said.
NSW is setting goalposts
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said eliminating COVID-19 in the state was “almost impossible” with restrictions and lockdowns likely to remain in place until November, even when the state achieves 80% vaccination rates.
Last month, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard conceded “at some point, we’re going to a stage where we’re going to have to accept that the virus has a life that will continue in the community”.
WA Premier Mark McGowan has baulked at the idea of living with COVID-19, arguing that WA’s border will stay shut to NSW until there’s zero transmission — even after the state achieves 80% vaccination rates.
This is a similar approach to New Zealand, which will keep pursuing an elimination strategy even after its borders reopen.
Will other states have to follow suit?
Greater Darwin and the Katherine region, all of NSW, Canberra and Greater Melbourne are currently in lockdown, each stemming from Sydney’s outbreak (with the NT in lockdown after an international traveller exited quarantine in Sydney, though it’s not known if he picked up the virus during transit or was still infectious when he left quarantine).
If other states like WA continue to pursue an elimination strategy, they’re likely to have to pursue more aggressive restrictions than other states, Vally said.
“It’s possible states operate like a separate country in terms of the control they have over their policies and who crosses the border,” he said.
“It’s not ideal to have different states following different strategies. It would hold us back and it would make life more complicated and difficult.”
Both the NSW Coalition and the Federal Morrison Coalition have always had the aim of let it rip and been deliberately negligent and indifferent.
It is only the Labor Premiers and the Liberal Premiers of Tas and SA that have stopped them from achieving the goal of flooding the nation with covid as did their counterparts in India, USA and the UK and Brazil etc.
Eventually with the assistance of a variant resulting from the mantra of let it rip in India, the NSW Coalition had the means by which they and Morrison could achieve their goal.
Through their mutually agreed but undeclared goal combined with deliberate criminal negligence – the refusal to build purpose built quarantine facilities, to vaccinate staff and the inmates of their mates’ private aged care facilities, refusing to enforce or even mandate adequate public health measures, Morrisin and his twin Berjiklian have achieved the goal set by business.
A 7 week delay to lockdown the state means the rest of the nation – largely unvaccinated due to Morrisin outsourcing the vaccine to mates and privatising its delivery, is now facing a tragedy that need not have occurred, but was always going to occur with the Berjiklian Morrisin Team
It was always going to happen, regardless with who was running the show, as it has literally occurred everywhere else, other than NZ. get vaccinated, move on.
What rot. This sh*tshow belongs to one man, and that man is lazy Scott, the part-time PM.
Unfair to lay it all on Scomo, even if he failed to deliver what he promised. Don’t forget the NSW Govt (Berjiklian or Hazzard) allowed airlines to make their own arrangements for air crew to transfer to hotel quarantine. That’s how the unmasked, unvaccinated limo driver was exposed. Elsewhere, air crew are transported just like passengers with dedicated hotel quarantine transport.
Exactly right – I believe we are witnessing the rise of a cohort who “like covid” for some reason. Possibly underachievers with multiple strange axes to grind.
….. You mean like – Morrison, Frydenberg, Dutton, Berejiklian, the Murdoch press et al, who thought they could use it, up to a month or so ago, to bash the Labor states for their “mishandling” of it?
You and your maniacal uninformed brigade of Coalition megaphones don’t even acknowledge that the reason why we have more deadly variants is precisely due to your indifference to the lives and health of others and your putting your own personal freedom to be a fuwit above the lives and health of others, that mentality is feral and rogue and you are as dangerous as any variant, you and your Coalition mates and idiots
Hey MAD, freedom crazies such as yourself will be impressed by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, being able to keep his order banning mask mandates in place for now. Freedom rules for fucw…ts who are conservatives
But Australia is NSW (Newcastle, Sydney, Wollongong), and NSW is Australia.
Anywhere else doesn’t count or probably doesn’t even exist.
At least that’s what I infer from the media.
Really? I thought there we were six states, three internal territories, and seven external territories.
“We will never get back to Covid Zero, if the strategies aren’t changed,” says Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, epidemiologist and expert in infectious diseases at UNSW Sydney. She finds it “perplexing” that the government had not listened to the science and employed more robust methods against the virus.
“You can’t keep employing the same strategies and thinking you’re going to get a different result,” she says.
“Today [Wednesday] is the 47th day of lockdown. We have had 5857 cases, and on average a death every second day. And I think this deserves a change in strategy, not giving up on this.”
A year ago, Berejiklian’s approach was widely accepted. Scott Morrison argued that Australia might have to learn to live with some community transmission, because lockdowns were so damaging to the economy. The same argument about economic cost was being pushed by the Business Council and other employer groups, and by many in the media, particularly the Murdoch media.
“That was the conventional wisdom that shaped some people’s thinking – not Grattan’s, I might add, but many people’s thinking,” says Stephen Duckett, a former secretary of the federal Health Department and health program director at the Grattan Institute.
But several things have changed over recent months. Vaccines, for one. “And there’s been Treasury modelling, which says, ‘Oops, we now realise that lockdowns are a better strategy.’ ”
And then we have MAD and his/her mania chanting monotonously and predictably the Coalition freedom line.
You are wrong there. Sydney doesn’t care about Newcastle or Wollongong.
Well, I’m sure they think very highly of you.
Honestly, the puerility of some of the comments in Crikey over the last few days has really demonstrated what the actual struggle here is. The one against stupidity, so adeptly displayed by numerous people.
I thought they were now both an extension of Sydney – somewhere Sydneysiders can live that’s only a train ride away from the CBD and still has beach access.
“Only a train ride away from the CBD”.. Have you ever caught a train to Newcastle? The train line still has track alignments from the late 1800s. Be prepared for many hours of travel. You may as well say that Perth is “just a train ride away from Sydney”. One day we might have a train service that actually IS a service, but not today.
The train does the trip at around 60km/h or slower.
You could always take the F3… sorry, that’s Newcastle speak for the M1… It’s like a 110 km/h terrifying dodgem track with huge B-doubles as moving barriers.
Actually, I’m glad we’ve got the impenetrable sandstone country between us and Sydney, otherwise Sydney would have swallowed us whole. Wollongong also has the escarpment to keep Sydney from swamping it.
WA’s Mark McGowan may have been the premier that told Gladys and ScoMo that he would not be getting with the program, but don’t think for one moment that the other state premiers weren’t quietly nodding in agreement. Do SA, Queensland, Tasmania or even Victoria think that they want to be like NSW? I can only think that NSW believe the only solution for their political heat is to mess the rest of the country up just as badly.
I believe that the population of NSW will explode if the other state maintain backwater policies.
In your earlier post you wrote “People who get trapped in an elimination state (or country) will consider their options”. Here in WA they are doing that, and I’ve yet to hear anyone say they either feel trapped or want to move to NSW. NZ, with its political independence from Australia, and control of its own covid strategies, is the far more enticing option.
Really, they shut down Auckland for one case there today. It gonna really hurt when they realize they can’t beat this. It will be the strategy that uproots the Ardern government.
You posture around here with nothing more to offer than the Scdwabber line, begone.
Better get used to it.
Thanks to lnp incompetence Sydney isn’t getting out of lockdown soon.
Merry Christmas.
Your beliefs are every bit as uninformed as those for whom you are sprouting bullsh….here.
Your backwater fellow losers are determined to make money as the expense of everyone else. Your nonsense is responsible for the Indian variant, UK variant, South Africa variant and the Brazil variant and those that will emerge in nations and states that espouse your death dogma. Wherever the freedom of a few imbeciles overrides the science and medical advice the result is death, disease, long covid, pain, heartache, loss. Your fellow freedom fools are a deadly virus in themselves.
The NSW government’s “strategy” for dealing with delta is analogous to feds’ strategy for dealing with climate change.
Gladys takes her instructions from the construction and property industries, Morrison from the fossil fuel brigade.
Efficacy wise it’s a tight battle.
And the housing and grog/gambling parasites in Clubs NSW and the AHA, the scandal ridden Coalition donating RSL, and the crime infested money laundering casinos who, under the NSW Coalition, enjoyed the closure of competing businesses within a large radius of their money laundering facility.
Shredder wanted to slip the economy into first and ‘let ‘er rip’ – and then wanted all the other states to donate vaccines to her when it backfired, to cover up for the fall-out from her “Clayton’s Lock-down” – on the grounds of what she called a ‘national emergency’, while she refused to own up to the large part responsibility for that national emergency.
She is no different from Trump or Johnson