It is an open secret that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has managed to cow fellow Liberal NSW, Premier Gladys Berejiklian, into submission and that she alone of the state and territory leaders now follows his personal position of open state borders and the economy over all other considerations during this global pandemic.
The fallacy that communities, states and the nation can safely learn to live alongside SARS-COV-2 has already been played out in the United Kingdom and the United States of America with catastrophic effect.
Four days out from Christmas Day 2020 and the U.K. has already recorded 67,503 deaths from COVID-19 within the last 11 months and the U.S.A. 316,749 deaths within the last 12 months.
Because Australian states and territories have largely resisted embracing that dangerous fallacy, nationally the country has only recoded 908 COVID-19 deaths in the last 11 months and New South Wales 55 of these deaths.
However, this could change in a heartbeat.
This was Head of the Biosecurity Research Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Medicine, Professor Raina MacIntyre, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on 20 December 2020 on the subject of the current Northern Beaches COVID-19 cluster:
“Forty new cases today may become 120 new cases by Christmas Day. Half of them will have no symptoms and the rest will have mild symptoms so will carry on as normal. The peak infectiousness of this virus is very early in the infection, before symptoms appear, making Christmas Day a ticking time bomb.
People infected today and tomorrow may travel half-way across Sydney for the family Christmas lunch and maybe to another household for dinner, possibly infecting a minimum of 360 new people. The 360 people infected on Christmas Day will be at their peak infectiousness on New Year’s Eve, and could infect more than 1000 others. We could be looking at 3000 cases by January 8. You could not plan a disaster more perfectly if you tried.....
If we do not act urgently, Christmas Day will be a super-spreader, followed by the mother of all super-spreading events, New Year’s Eve. The exhausted NSW public health team may begin 2021 with the largest COVID-19 epidemic the state has ever faced.
The idea of “living with a bit of COVID-19” and soldiering on is a falsehood because of exponential growth of epidemic infections. The health system is the weak link – it is the first part of society to break during pandemics. When hospital and ICU beds are full, health workers dead, ill or quarantined, all other medical care becomes compromised. Even in the Ruby Princess-related outbreak in Tasmania, more than 1000 health workers were quarantined, forcing a hospital shutdown.
Every city that has laboured under the misapprehension that they can carry on with a bit of community transmission has been forced into lockdown when the health system collapsed.....
Mandating masks across greater Sydney will make a difference, especially as people flood shopping malls in huge numbers for Christmas shopping. Without a mandate, we can expect 30-50 per cent at most to wear masks compared to 100 per cent with a mandate. Making masks compulsory early in an epidemic will prevent many more infections and deaths than one issued at the peak.....
Distorted messaging and hygiene theatre have seen people frantically washing hands and wiping surfaces but remaining unaware of masks and ventilation to reduce airborne transmission, which is the dominant mode of spread. Further, 80 per cent of spread occurs indoors.....
If this epidemic has not dwindled to single-digit numbers by Christmas, we need to ban indoor gatherings on New Year’s Eve, including dance parties, nightclubs, pubs and restaurants. If we don’t, these businesses may face even longer closures in the months ahead, as occurred in Melbourne with a three-month lockdown.
Finally, we must prepare and protect our health and aged care workers. More than 7000 health workers had died of COVID-19 by September globally, and Australian health workers had three times the risk of COVID-19 compared to the general community. We should not wait until 3500 of them are infected (as occurred in Victoria) before providing them better respiratory protection. We should be using the precautionary principle and recognising that the occupational health and safety of health workers lags far behind other industries.
All planning must consider the exponential growth of epidemics, the role of social mixing and movement in transmission of SARS-COV-2, the calamitous timing of New Year’s Eve within one incubation period of Christmas Day on, and the magnitude of risk this poses. At the same time, we must aim high and aim for herd immunity through vaccination so we do not have to face this situation again.”
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