Americans slam Australia’s Covid policies as their own epidemic spirals out of control

The US is eclipsing Australia’s entire Covid death toll every day, but that hasn’t stopped some Americans from taking aim at our policies.

COMMENT

The coronavirus killed 1700 Americans yesterday.

I know we’re 18 months into the pandemic, and all the statistics tend to blur together, but stop for a moment and really, seriously consider what that means.

Seventeen hundred people dead in 24 hours. That’s more victims in a single, routine day than Australia has suffered throughout the entire pandemic.

Each of them was somebody’s son or daughter; someone’s best friend; a brilliant and irreplaceable human life snuffed out years or decades too soon. Many of the dead have left behind grieving parents, spouses and young children.

History is not going to remember the horrific death toll from September 9, 2021. It won’t even register in the context of a pandemic that has killed 4.6 million people and counting, 670,000 of them in the US alone.

Here’s what history might remember: the indifference. The selfishness. The warped priorities of a nation that never treated this once-in-a-century crisis with the seriousness it demanded.

I bring up the United States’ failure, again, because in recent weeks a bunch of Americans opposed to lockdowns and other public health measures have taken it upon themselves to lecture Australia about its Covid policies.

In their view, the fact that Australians have made immense personal sacrifices to protect each other from the virus is a bad thing.

This map shows the rate of Covid cases in each American state at the moment. Red is bad. Black is worse. Picture: Mayo Clinic

Let’s run through some examples.

“Heretofore an honourable member of the free world, Australia ‘has lurched into a bizarre and disturbing netherworld of bureaucratic oppression in the name of public health,” wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry, denouncing Australia’s “Covid lockdown mania”.

“Covid is a serious illness, and no country has gotten everything right. Australia has proven, though, that dispensing with key elements of advanced liberal society in the hopes of total victory over the virus is foolhardy and wrong.

“Australia isn’t going to become a dictatorship, but this period in its national life stands as a warning for how easily core freedoms can erode, in even a well-established democracy.”

“I’m not saying they should rise up against the government, but there’s some crazy s*** going on there right now,” said mega-popular podcaster Joe Rogan.

“Folks, people die from heart attacks in staggering numbers every year. You’re not making the government force people to exercise.”

Heart attacks are not infectious, but I digress.

“Normal, psychologically healthy adults see the Covid camps in Australia and think, ‘My God, that’s tyrannical madness,’” said conservative radio host Buck Sexton.

“Australia has Covid concentration camps,” said author and columnist Tim Young.

“This is about control, not health.”

Some of America’s most prominent TV hosts labelled Australia a “Covid dictatorship”.

And you might have already seen the viral meme posted by the Texas Freedom Coalition, which described Australia as “the world’s largest prison”.

“Pray for Australia. It’s almost unbelievable what is happening there,” the group said.

Scott Morrison, warden of the world’s largest prison. Apparently. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

Let’s stipulate to the obvious, that lockdowns suck and everyone will be relieved when none of the strict measures currently in place across Australia are necessary anymore.

But spare us the overblown rhetoric. Tyrannical madness? Concentration camps? Oppression? If you want to see actual oppression, look at China, or North Korea, or the fate Afghanistan will suffer under Taliban rule.

Lowry, easily the most thoughtful among those mentioned above, accused Australia of “dispensing with key elements of advanced liberal society”. He was referring to things like freedom of movement, and he’s not without a point. Some individual rights have been temporarily curtailed to protect public health.

But there’s another key element that any functioning society requires: mutual obligation. Yes, we all have individual rights, but we also have responsibilities to one another. Every liberal democracy tries to strike a balance between those two things.

Covid is an extraordinary challenge. So many actions that are usually harmless, like large gatherings, are now dangerous. In normal times, breathing on someone might give them a whiff of your bad breath. Now it might give them a lethal disease. The calculus has changed.

So Australia has adopted a perfectly reasonable strategy, one that should be easy enough to grasp even from the other side of the Pacific: contain Covid as much as possible until enough people are vaccinated to mitigate the risk it poses.

The guiding principle here is that your desire to do whatever you want is not more important than protecting the lives of those around you. In the face of this extreme threat, your obligation to your community outweighs some of your freedoms. Most Australians seem to instinctively understand this, which is why they’ve been willing to endure lockdowns.

The alternative is to go the American route: lift the restrictions and hope for the best.

And look at the respective results. Australia’s Covid death toll is 1066. For the entire pandemic. More Americans than that died on Thursday. At the peak of its third wave earlier this year, the US was losing more than 3000 people per day.

Which of these two countries has failed? The one whose people have come together to confront the threat of Covid, making tough sacrifices, or the one which has allowed hundreds of thousands of its citizens to die needlessly in the name of freedom?

Daily cases in each country. Note the current spike in Australia. You can see it if you look very closely. Picture: Our World In Data

Daily Covid deaths. Gee, I wonder which country got its strategy wrong? Picture: Our World In Data

America is a far bigger country, of course, so here is the data showing cases per million people. The difference is still stark. Picture: Our World In Data

And here we see deaths per million people. Picture: Our World In Data

The US is currently averaging 150,000 new infections every day. Its daily death toll is 1200. Hospitals across the country are swamped with unvaccinated patients and running out of ICU beds. Health workers are buckling under the strain of witnessing so much death.

Meanwhile, grown men and women are still throwing tantrums on planes because they’re being asked to put a piece of cloth on their face.

It is a slow motion trainwreck, and it has been for most of the past 18 months.

The Covid vaccines have been free and available to all adults in the US since April, yet more than a third of the country’s population remains completely unvaccinated. Australia’s vaccine rollout, which started so glacially, is now somehow on track to overtake America’s.

State leaders, Democrat and Republican, are at their wit’s end trying to convince people who think the vaccines are an affront to their personal freedom to take them. Just as they struggled to persuade their constituents to social distance and wear masks last year.

And Joe Biden’s latest attempt to increase vaccine uptake by mandating them for federal employees and hospital workers, and requiring large employers to either get their workers vaccinated or test them weekly, has been met with unhinged hostility.

Some conservative politicians are openly urging Americans to disobey the mandates and remain unvaccinated. That is to say, remain completely unprotected from the virus that could kill them.

Given the dire situation in their own country, you’d think our American friends would have a touch more humility.

How many of their countrymen have to die after ignoring public health advice, their bodies riddled with Covid and souls heavy with regret, before they get it through their heads that this is not about tyranny, or government control, or whatever the latest nonsense culture war talking point is? It’s about saving lives.

Why am I, a foreigner, angrier about 670,000 dead Americans than half of the US itself?

Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates will affect about two-thirds of American workers. They haven’t gone down particularly well. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

Maybe it’s because I can vividly recall a time when death on this sort of scale was met with horror instead of indifference.

Twenty years ago, when terrorists destroyed the twin towers, I was a middle school student in St Louis, Missouri. Obviously I was too young to understand the full ramifications of that tragedy at the time, but I do remember the convulsion of grief and disbelief that swept across the country.

Three thousand people dead in a single day. It was unthinkable. Americans were overwhelmingly united in their resolve to stop any such loss of life from happening again, which is why their government launched a global war on terror and reordered its entire national security apparatus.

It was all done in the name of protecting Americans’ lives.

Where is that resolve now? Where has it been throughout this pandemic? Here we are two decades later, suffering the 9/11 death toll multiple times per week, and millions of Americans still think public health restrictions – not the virus – are the true enemy.

Australia did exactly what a mature, serious country should do in this situation, confronting the pandemic directly and minimising loss of life. Pragmatism won out over ideology.

Unlike some countries, we got our priorities right.

Sam is news.com.au’s US correspondent | @SamClench