Australians need to brace for the reality that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better when it comes to the coronavirus crisis.
Because the curve has flattened as successfully as it has leading into this Easter long weekend, I sense optimism all around me that we may have gotten through the worst of this virus.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me explain why.
Just over 6,000 Australians are confirmed as having contracted the virus. Roughly half those numbers have recovered from it. Just over 50 people have sadly died from it, mostly older Australians.
Even if we assume no one else within the 3,000 cohort of people still fighting the virus passes away, which some surely will, that’s still a mortality rate of roughly 0.8 per cent. In other words, just under one person dying for every 100 people who contract the virus.
Globally, that’s a very good outcome. It is a sign our hospitals are coping and we are testing widely. But where do we go from here?
It is highly unlikely we eradicate this virus altogether, even with strict lockdowns. And we know a vaccine is going to take at least 12 months to materialise, probably longer.
Which leaves us with no good options.
Either we stay in a total lockdown, decimating the economy and driving us all stir crazy. In which case the number of cases still climbs but slowly. Or we lift restrictions and more people contract the virus, with (if our health system continues to cope) nearly one in every hundred of us who do dying from it.
If you stretch these realities out over the year ahead, for every 10,000 people who get the virus, nearly 100 will die. For every 100,000 we lose nearly 1,000 lives. If one million people contract it, best case on the current mortality rate 8,000 souls vanish.
Herd immunity requires at least 60 per cent of the population contracting the virus. That’s 15 million Australians. Do the maths.
We have only been seriously dealing with the spread of this virus for weeks, not months. And over 6,000 people already have contracted it. Stretch that time frame out to months, or a full year, and hundreds of thousands of us will catch it. That means thousands of deaths.
Suddenly it becomes easy to see why it is way too early to declare victory over this virus merely because we are bending the curve.
Peter van Onselen is political editor at Network 10 and a professor of public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
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