Caleb Bond: Our schools have taken coronavirus more seriously than the government
Coronavirus is serious enough for China to shutdown a city. Meanwhile, Australia can’t even gets its story straight or manage one plane load of potential carriers, writes Caleb Bond.
Opinion
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No one saw the coronavirus coming – and some seemingly still haven’t cottoned on to just how serious it is.
Some schools on Monday took the initiative to email parents telling them to keep their children away for 14 days if they’d just been to China. Sensible stuff.
But then Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan gets on radio and says children need only be quarantined if they’ve had contact with somebody with coronavirus.
Now, I’m no doctor, but isn’t that the point? We don’t know who’s been in contact with the virus.
At last count it had already killed 106 people in China – including one in Beijing.
Health Minister Greg Hunt has declared the illness has the potential to reach pandemic proportions.
Just think of how many Australians would have visited China in the past fortnight, and vice versa, who could have been carrying the virus.
How about the plane that departed Wuhan just four hours before the place was quarantined, later landing in Sydney, where passengers were given the once-over to make sure they weren’t about to keel over?
Not everyone is going to show strong symptoms and not everyone is going to die. But it seems a little lax to just let a plane full of people who’ve come from coronavirus central walk free with few questions asked.
This is a virus so serious that China has shut down an entire city.
And the fact it can take two weeks for symptoms to show makes the halting of its spread far more difficult than most illnesses. Someone harbouring coronavirus could have potentially travelled to multiple countries or states and encountered hundreds of people before they have any idea they’re sick.
It’s not about being alarmist or over-the-top – it’s simply about taking reasonable precautions to stop the spread of a disease.
You obviously can’t stop all movement, even though it’s just about the only thing that would end the spread of coronavirus.
But you can do small things to ensure its spread is slowed and minimised – including quarantining planes from Wuhan and staying away from groups of people if you’ve just come back from China.
The fact the Federal Government would actively choose and encourage people to do otherwise seems bizarre.
There are already five confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia and six people in SA are awaiting test results.
In times of crisis or concern, reassurance from the Government and authorities can go some way to alleviating people’s worries.
In this case, some of our schools have shown more initiative than the Government.