Miranda Devine: Australia left behind in global Covid fight

We must come to terms with the fact coronavirus may never be eradicated, writes Miranda Devine.

Since I’ve been living abroad, I’ve refrained from judging Australia’s actions when it comes to the pandemic. It has been hard being isolated from family and friends, especially over Christmas, but most Australians seem happy that the border is closed, because they have been able to live semi-normally, ­especially in Sydney, while watching cities like New York suffer terribly from the virus.

But now, as Sydney goes into lockdown, New York is springing back to normal. Broadway came to life on Saturday night after 471 dark days, with a sold-out Bruce Springsteen show. “I am here tonight to provide proof of life,” The Boss said to a theatre packed with 1721 maskless, vaccinated merrymakers.

Restaurants and bars are chock-a-block, tourist buses are back in force and Times Square is crowded again – (although that might change if people keep getting shot there, as happened Sunday, for the third time in two months). People are planning summer holidays to Paris and Hvar, with no quarantine necessary for the vaccinated, and Delta Airlines providing a $50 home test kit required for re-entry.

The mask signs in the elevator of my apartment building are still up but, since two-thirds of adults in the city are fully vaccinated, almost everyone goes bare-faced. It is a relief to walk around without a mask in the heat and humidity.

Last summer, cloth masks were unbearable and even the light disposable ones quickly became sweaty and unpleasant. It’s nice to be able to smile at people and have them smile back.

After 15 months of masking, we have discovered that eyes really are not the window to the soul. They don’t tell you much at all. Now that people can see each other’s faces, maybe the acrimony and misunderstandings of the past year can be avoided.

The usual fear merchants are talking up the latest Delta variant – or “scariant” as the wags call it – but if NY Governor Andrew Cuomo dec­lared the city had to lockdown for two weeks, most people would probably ignore him, especially as research emerges suggesting lockdowns didn’t actually save lives.

The point is that New York is over Covid and is getting on with life.

Australia is just postponing the ­inevitable day when it, too, will have to learn to live with the virus.

People walk dogs at an empty Sydney Opera House which is closed due to Covid-19. Picture: Getty

Singapore bowed to reality, this week declaring that the new normal is to treat Covid like the flu and other endemic diseases.

“The bad news is that Covid-19 may never go away. The good news is that it is possible to live normally with it in our midst,” Singapore’s trade minister Gan Kim Yong, finance minister Lawrence Wong and health minister Ong Ye Kung wrote in an editorial in the Straits Times. “We can’t eradicate it but we can turn the pandemic into something much less threatening, like influenza or chickenpox, and get on with our lives.”

Singapore acknowledges that eradication is impossible. It will stop the obsession with daily case numbers and no longer will require travellers to quarantine. Of course, the vaccine is essential to living with Covid because, while breakthrough cases are still possible, it prevents deaths and hospitalisation and greatly reduces the risk of infection. You can see that starkly in the so-called “super spreader” party in West Hoxton, one of the events which triggered the latest lockdown in NSW. Of 30 attendees, the only ­people who did not get infected were the six who had been vaccinated.

Even in the enormous, unwieldy, bureaucratic US, 53 per cent of the population has had at least one shot, while 46 per cent are fully vaccinated, according to the latest figures from Our World In Data website.

That compares to Israel’s full vaccination rate of 60 per cent, and the UK’s 48 per cent. Australia’s 4.8 per cent is woeful, ranking 49th of 50 comparably wealthy countries. In New York, which bore the brunt of the virus early on, 72 per cent of the adult population is partially dosed and 64 per cent fully vaccinated.

New York’s elderly have embraced their ticket to freedom, with a whopping 79 per cent of people aged 65 to 74 fully vaccinated. Since the young and healthy generally don’t get sick from Covid and an estimated 20 per cent of Americans already have natural immunity, the vaccination rate has been enough to beat back the virus.

Cartoon: Terry Pontikos

It doesn’t appear to be a seasonal phenomenon either. A good metric is that last weekend, hospitalisations in New York dipped to 351, lower than at any point last summer, when the city was all but closed.

This is what fuels the confidence New Yorkers have in taking to the streets and defying the fear that has ruled their lives for more than a year.

By contrast, Australia’s laggardly take-up of vaccines is a terrible own goal. Without even natural immunity, the population is a sitting duck.

Whereas Americans used to look at Australia with admiration for its handling of the pandemic, the latest lockdown has flipped attitudes to ­incredulity. “CRAZY,” texted one Australia-phile friend, after Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s latest pronouncements. “Australia has gone from ahead of the curve to woefully behind it.”

Not to belabour the point, but it was foolhardy of the Morrison government to put all its eggs into two baskets — a local vaccine abandoned by the University of Queensland and AstraZeneca. So, when things went wrong with the AZ supply, there was no backup plan, other than keeping the border shut while waiting pati­ently behind the rest of the world for a dribble of leftover vaccines.

The Prime Minister has not properly owned up to this folly or proposed a solution. Voters will forgive an honest error, honestly admitted, but they will not abide evasions.

The latest Newspoll shows a dawning realisation of the significance of the botched vaccine rollout, with Morrison’s approval rating for his handling of the crisis dropping to 60 per cent from 70 per cent in April, down from 85 per cent a year earlier.

Rather than waiting for the latest secret shipment of some unspecified quantity of Pfizer doses, where is the urgency on the part of the government to secure an adequate supply of vaccine immediately?

Sure, the decision to keep the border shut until mid-2022 appears to be popular, judging by the Newspoll last month which showed 73 per cent of Australians supported the decision, particularly older people who seem selfishly content to sacrifice the young. Morrison last week implied the closure could last even longer.

But this cynical political calculus could turn around to bite the government on the eve of an election as more Australians realise the rest of the world has left it in their wake, and that all they have done is postpone the ­inevitable reality that Covid is here to stay. Elimination is a fool’s errand. Zero transmission is a fantasy.

The sooner Australia faces up to reality the better for everyone.