Miranda Devine: Will Australia learn lessons from Spanish flu epidemic?

Covid-zero is not sustainable. At some point, Australia will have to live with the virus and there’s no avoiding the pain that entails, writes Miranda Devine.

Canadian economist Joshua Gans has pointed out a fascinating historical parallel to Australia’s current pandemic predicament.

During the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that swept the world, Australia pursued the same isolationist policy it did last February. It shut its borders and kept out the virus.

It made perfect sense.

According to John Barry in “The Great Influenza”, Australia was the only country in the world that escaped the scourge that year.

Canadian economist Joshua Gans.

Staff preparing a Pfizer vaccine dose. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty

But then, in late December 1918, a troopship carrying 90 infected soldiers arrived and the disease escaped quarantine, writes Gans in his latest “Plugging The Gap” newsletter.

This mutation of the virus was less lethal than the one that had ravaged the rest of the world. Fatality rates were about a third of the US and a quarter of Italy.

But it still caused havoc. Two million people were infected (40 oer cent of the population) and 15,000 died from what was called “Black Death”.

Unlike Covid, tragically, it was young people who were the victims.

“Schools, theatres, dance halls, churches, pubs and other places of public congregation were shut,” writes Gans.

“Streets were sprayed, special isolation depots were established, and people were compelled to wear masks in public. Movement by public transport was restricted and state borders were closed, with quarantine camps established at border crossings …. The pandemic caused disputes between all the states and [with] the Commonwealth over border closures and … quarantine, interstate transport links, and the [isolation] of returning servicemen. Eventually, cooperation between the states and the Commonwealth was abandoned, with each state imposing its own conditions and organising its own containment policies.” The point Gans draws from history is that it was impossible to keep a respiratory virus out of Australia, even in 1919.

Ambulance and staff outside Depot, Balmain Town Hall in 1919. Source: collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/1DrLEyb9

“Even as the pandemic waned elsewhere, Australia remained vulnerable. You are either a complete fortress — for years — or you aren’t.’’

In other words Covid-Zero is not sustainable. At some point, like everywhere else in the world, Australia will have to live with the virus and there’s no avoiding the pain that entails.

Not now, with vaccination rates so low, but when everyone has been jabbed who wants to be, the borders will have to be opened and the virus will go to work. The elderly and others at risk can be protected by the jab from death and hospitalisation. Everyone else can choose to be vaccinated or develop natural immunity.

Fear of the unknown is the worst but, in America, vaccines have tamed the beast and people now are coming to accept the existence of another endemic virus.

We’ve done the same before in Australia. We will do it again.