Terry McCrann: Victoria wins Covid crown as death toll overtakes NSW

Victoria will finish 2021 with more Covid deaths than any other state, undermining Dan Andrews’ claims that his tough lockdowns delivered better outcomes than NSW’s lighter touch.

States that slammed their borders shut have managed to lead relatively normal and unlocked-down lives. Picture: Simon Dallinger

It’s official. Victoria has seized back its Corona Crown.

Victoria has now recorded more Covid-related deaths – 581 — since its latest wave of the pandemic began in late August than the 580 deaths recorded in NSW in its wave which began six weeks earlier in early July.

With 44 Covid-related deaths in Victoria over the past week – an average of six a day compared with just six in NSW, or one a day — it means Victoria will finish 2021 just as it did 2020, having recorded more Covid deaths than any other state.

Indeed, Victoria will almost certainly once again record more Covid deaths in 2021 than the entire rest of Australia put together.

That’s to say, Victoria with just 25 per cent of the national population will have had more than 50 per of the Covid deaths.

Premier Daniel Andrews claims his tougher lockdowns delivered better outcomes than the lighter touch in NSW. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

In 2020, of course, as a consequence of the disaster in aged care, Victoria recorded 90 per cent of all Covid deaths in Australia – 820 in Victoria to 89 in the other five states and the two territories combined.

Now clearly, even with those numbers in Victoria, the outcome in Australia has been a spectacular success compared with just about every other country.

The two we most like to compare ourselves with – the US, which has had 815,000 Covid deaths and still counting, and the UK, which has more than 146,000 deaths and embarked on re-imposing restrictions. Australia just 2084.

The evidence of what’s happened in NSW and Victoria over the past two months fundamentally undermines Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ claims that his tougher — indeed more brutal, lockdowns — delivered better outcomes than the lighter touch in NSW of former premier Gladys Berejiklian and now Premier Dominic Perrottet.

Remember Premier Andrews boasting in July that we’d “seen off Delta” and would do it again?

Remember Premier Andrews justifying his “go early, go hard” – sixth – lockdown in August on the basis that “we didn’t want to end up like NSW”?

More broadly, the one absolutely indisputable thing that both the overall Australian experience, and that of individual states, since this nightmare erupted in February 2020 proves is that border closures work.

The three states with the toughest border closures have had the fewest deaths. Picture: Simon Dallinger

You can argue over the effectiveness of lockdowns – and whether the costs, in health alone to say nothing of the financial, economic and personal pain, are worth it; whether masks work, social distancing, sanitising, and all the rest.

But the one thing that is simply indisputable, is closing the border AND having strict quarantine for arrivals that had to be allowed – quite simply, keeping the virus out – worked.

And it certainly and especially worked, until the vaccines arrived and got into arms.

The border closure worked at the national level – the Morrison government banning flights from China back in February 2020 and the flights from everywhere else shortly after.

And border closures worked at the state level.

Just look at the deaths. The three states that have had the toughest border closures are WA with nine deaths; Queensland with six deaths and SA with four deaths. That’s through the entire pandemic.

Extraordinarily, when you look around the world, Queensland has recorded just one Covid death so far this year; WA, SA and Tasmania all had none.

Border closures have most critically worked in terms of the single toughest and most important trade-off, border closures versus lockdown, once the virus arrived.

Just contrast Victoria, the state that’s had the most, the longest and toughest lockdowns not just of any in Australia but indeed in the entire world – adding to something like eight months of the 19 months of the virus so far – with WA, which has had the toughest and longest border closures not just of states in Australia but arguably in the entire world also.

Yet Victoria has also had the most deaths, followed by NSW, which had the loosest borders through the pandemic.

States that slammed their borders shut have managed to lead relatively normal and unlocked-down lives. Picture: Simon Dallinger

Those states that slammed their borders shut – and especially the two at the opposite ends of the country, Queensland and WA — have managed to lead relatively normal and certainly unlocked-down lives behind those borders.

That has been critically important not just in narrow Covid terms, but in broader health terms.

Hospitals and doctors in those two states have been able to operate normally.

With “non-essential” operations and check-ups for life-threatening diseases, such cancer and heart disease, “postponed”, until health problems – and future what should have been avoidable deaths — have banked up in Victoria, and to a lesser extent in NSW.

The benefit of state border closures has also been critically important in broader economic and personal terms.`

Yes, Queensland locked out not just foreign but Australian tourists from other states; but at least tourism operators still got local Queensland tourists in a normally functioning economy.

In Victoria for much of the time, tourism operators lost all three – foreigners, other Australian AND locked-down fellow Victorians.

Just ask a coffee shop owner in Perth and in Melbourne, which would they prefer – eight months of lockdown or a closed state border and an open state economy?

This lived reality will also have very significant political implications as we move through 2022.