Fear mustn’t dictate Australia’s coronavirus response
China may be one of Australia’s biggest trade partners, but keeping people safe in the face of the coronavirus must be the main motivator of the government’s decisions, writes Peta Credlin.
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Everyone feeling on edge about the coronavirus should be reassured that our government has taken stronger action to prevent its spread than just about anyone else even though the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese basically claimed reopening Christmas Island to house quarantined Australians airlifted home from China was a stunt.
It is not. And around the world, countries like Britain are doing the same. That doesn’t mean that more can’t be done though.
This is a very serious situation and if human-to-human transmission readily starts to take place outside China, the world could easily face the first pandemic since Spanish flu killed up to 50 million people in the immediate aftermath of the Great War.
To date, despite earlier concerns about SARS and Avian flu, a true global pandemic has not eventuated, but unlike bird flu (as an example), there is no coronavirus vaccine (used to prevent infection) or antiviral medication (taken once infection has occurred).
That’s why Australia’s CSIRO has joined the global push to discover a medical treatment for coronavirus. I interviewed one of the lead scientists on my programme on Friday and he’s talking six months from treatment discovery, to testing, to human trials.
Dr Trevor Drew also made the point that the seemingly low rate of deaths per infections (around 2 per cent) could be misleading because of the potential for new diseases like this to evolve rapidly and become more potent, or deadly. So far about 10,000 people have been infected, more than half in Hubei province, China. About 250 have died so far, mostly older people, but many are still sick.
The problem is that the disease seems to be spreading rapidly within China; and, after originally passing from animals to humans through a wet market in the city of Wuhan, it’s plainly now passing from human to human.
Initially, it was thought that only sick people could pass on the infection but there’s now some evidence that people can be infectious before symptoms appear.
So far, no one seems to have died with coronavirus outside China and the challenge is to try to stop it becoming sufficiently widespread for human-to-human transmission to take place widely outside Hubei province.
Using the draconian powers available only in a communist state, the Chinese government has more-or-less locked down the 60 million people living in Hubei. The question is whether this has happened soon enough with credible reports of mass departures out of Hubei (domestically and overseas) before the lockdown.
The Morrison Government has already stopped flights from Hubei to Australia. The other flights from China to Australia, that’s 167 per week or nearly 10,000 people a day, are still coming in.
So far, because Hubei itself is in lockdown, our government is only asking people from Hubei, who have invariably now been out of the province for more than a week, to isolate themselves at home (which as we saw in Melbourne this week, is virtually useless).
Those coming directly from Hubei, however, the Australians on the Qantas charter that’s expected in the next day or so, will have to go to Christmas Island for two weeks’ compulsory quarantine.
The question for us is when to impose a period of quarantine on everyone coming out of China; and when to stop the planes coming out of China altogether. It’s fraught because, these days, not only is China by far our largest trading partner: but with about a million visitors a year; it’s also our biggest source of tourists, and with about 160,000 Chinese in our universities, it’s our biggest source of export education too. All of these students are about to come back within days for the start of the new academic year.
In my view, it’s important to err on the side of caution. If a similar outbreak had occurred in Australia, it’s almost certain that China would have suspended flights between our countries. After all, the Chinese routinely suspend shipments of our beef, seafood and dairy products citing (invariably unspecified) health risks.
This week, the Australian Medical Association attacked the government as ‘inhumane’ for quarantining returnees on Christmas Island; and the Queensland Premier attacked the government for allegedly failing to pass on enough information, even though her own senior health officials have been part of the national health crisis committees that have been meeting around the clock since the outbreak began. Both these attacks backfired because the Australian community, while not panicked, certainly shares the government’s concern and there’s a high level of trust in the Coalition’s management of our borders; be it people smugglers or risky disease.
But how much more now needs to be done? The government says that it’s ready to ban flights from other parts of China the moment it becomes apparent that the disease is widespread there. But that would raise the issue of how to get back from China the up-to-20,000 expats thought to live there, plus the 40,000 or so Australian citizens thought to be there at any one time. Then the government would need to decide how to quarantine them, given that the numbers would be vastly too big for Christmas Island. Of course, the states could be asked to provide facilities and, if they failed, some of the other mothballed detention centres for illegal immigrants could be put back into service. Rather than make false claims and throw around blame, perhaps the Queensland Premier should be at her desk doing this?
The World Health Organisation, while careful not-to-be-critical of China (why is that?), has declared a “global emergency”. This is because even the two per cent death rate the Chinese claim for coronavirus is still 20 times that of standard seasonal influenza that kills thousands in Australia alone every year. And that’s assuming that the Chinese figures are believable.
Having been inside the federal government during the most recent outbreak of deadly ebola in West Africa during 2013-2014, I’m confident that no two ministers would be more conscious of their first duty to protect the country than Borders Minister Peter Dutton and Health Minister Greg Hunt. Halting all flights from China, as Dutton has hinted, would be a big call but if it was me, all flights would be grounded. Indeed many global carriers have already done this and the risk for Australians travelling anywhere at the moment is that because flights out of China are still coming here, our airlines could be being used to get out of China and then onwards, on flights to the US or Europe for example, where most of us would benignly believe, in flight, we could have less risk of coronavirus than on a Beijing or Shanghai bound journey.
It all adds up to another big test for Morrison Government and already its critics have made it political: the AMA, Albanese and Palaszczuk.
One thing’s for sure: we must never let short term cash considerations, or the fear of upsetting Beijing, put the safety of Australians at risk.
Not now, not ever.