Coronavirus: Islands in the ocean of disease
We are a single nation facing a lethal and fast-moving contagion. This is the map we have needed to see for months.
This is an important map of Australia. It shows local government areas with and without confirmed coronavirus cases. Today, Australia is divided by a “corona line” that separates the affected and unaffected parts of the Australian continent, marked blue and yellow respectively.
The first confirmed case of the coronavirus in Australia was identified in Melbourne in the last week of January. This was a local man who had returned to Australia following a visit to China.
By the middle of this month, just 10 weeks later, the virus’s presence was confirmed by health authorities in municipalities that collectively contained more than 24 million people.
The unaffected (yellow) parts of Australia, though geographically extensive, contain a population of just 834,000. The coronavirus is now uncomfortably close to the vast majority of the Australian people. Yet there are relatively few deaths, meaning that Australians must be particularly adept at social distancing.
Our experience with the coronavirus hasn’t been as deadly as other nations but it has spread with lightning speed to the populated parts of the continent.
Yet, until today, we haven’t seen a national map showing the virus’s spread.
The reason is that the system of reporting coronavirus cases varies from state to state.
Tasmania and the Northern Territory, for example, do not release data showing the number of cases by municipality or small area. In Queensland, cases are tagged to health regions — groups of municipalities — which have had to be unpicked to build this national picture.
Then there’s the issue of timing: the case/no-case data for each state in this map relates to different dates between April 9 and April 14.
Yet we know from newspaper reports that Tasmanian cases have surfaced in Hobart, Launceston and Burnie and that Northern Territory cases have surfaced in Alice Springs as well as in Darwin.
Managing a pandemic surely involves mapping the geography of a disease that moves effortlessly across state borders.
We are a single nation facing a lethal and fast-moving contagion; we needed to see (a more complete version of) this map weekly from, say, mid-February onwards. That way, we could respond directly to the contagion’s spread. We need co-ordinated data collection and a national mapping capability in situ before the next pandemic.
The coronavirus arrived in Australia via our globally connected capital cities, then radiated outwards: first up and down the eastern seaboard, then to the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range.
Yet despite the completeness of the contagion’s spread, the map also shows something glorious: distinctive “islands of resistance” poking through an otherwise blue sea of infection.
Places such as the NSW municipalities of Kyogle (population 9000) northwest of Lismore, Walcha (population 3000) east of Tamworth, and Oberon (population 5000) south of Bathurst, as well as others, have remained COVID-19-free for some reason. Or at least this was the case a week ago.
Is this sheer luck or is there something about these communities — their hilly aspect, their distance from Sydney, their civic-mindedness — that enables them to hold out against the threatening forces of the surrounding contagion?
In Victoria and South Australia it’s a similar story with municipalities such as the shire of Colac Otway (22,000) and the district council of Robe (1500), and several others, which by the middle of this month also had managed to keep the coronavirus hordes at bay.
It raises the tantalising prospect of there being havens, places on the inside of the contagion line, that have remained free of infection for 10 weeks (and hopefully longer) during a global pandemic.
On the other side of the continent, it’s a different story. There the contagion has spread up and down the coast from Perth before moving inland to the wheatbelt and to places such as the shire of Cranbrook (1000) and to the nearby city of Albany (38,000).
I have a theory about this.
The coronavirus is like a bushfire that is brought in through capital cities by well-to-do travellers, tourists and visitors, and occasionally, lamentably, by cruise ship passengers.
From there it spreads by business and social connection to our biggest provincial cities and from those it again radiates outwards. The coronavirus spreads from treetop to treetop, from big city to big city, infecting communities that then join up to form a furious front of infection.
But this map shows not only the spread of the coronavirus, it also reveals two communities living side-by-side within the Australian continent.
Inside the corona line, inside the blue zone, there is global, knowledge-worker, prosperous, better-educated, better-connected Australia that is directly exposed to the pandemic’s infection.
Outside the corona line, in the yellow zone, there are the Outback and the marginal lands supporting the smaller and remoter communities of Australia. The communities here are less connected, less educated, less prosperous but ultimately they are also less likely to be exposed to the effects of a global pandemic.
The age profile of the two communities shows evidence of a rite of passage in that 20-somethings seem to abandon the interior and shift to “exciting” coastal cities. A larger component of socialising 20-somethings clustered together in big cities increases the scope for the spread of coronavirus.
Nevertheless, the map also reveals a unique quality that has helped Australia manage a contagion that is spread by close association. And that is the sheer scale of the continent and the distances between settlements. There may well be one or two infections in many of the blue-zone municipalities, but this still leaves plenty of scope for locals to keep their distance from one another.
And even in our bigger cities, outside the packed city centres, the vast majority of the population is hunkered down in separate houses on separate blocks of land in our uniquely spaced-out version of suburbia. The way we live and the scale of the Australian continent have helped reduce our collective exposure to this contagion.
The coronavirus has spread effortlessly in Manhattan, Milan, Madrid and Wuhan, but when it gets to Australia’s wide brown plains the contagion simply peters out and gives up.
In a 21st century that may well be marked by global pandemics, the remote and lightly populated Australian interior will surely be viewed differently by city types sick of lockdowns and uncertainty.
Australians have pursued sea change and tree change; perhaps in the 2020s they’ll start looking in the direction of the corona line in search of safety, community and opportunity connected to a resurgent agribusiness sector.
Our experience with the coronavirus and a better understanding of the fragility of supply lines, plus the breaking of the drought, may finally turn our attention inland.
Not so much to the dry Outback but perhaps to the closer provincial cities that offer amenity, community, affordable housing and more personal space.
In one sense the map showing the corona line is an aid to healthcare workers managing resource allocation in a time of contagion.
But it is more than this.
The map defiantly shows that we Australians have the resources, the space, the civic compliance and the collective willpower to survive a global pandemic.
Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group. Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.
• A map that appeared with the original publication of this story indicated the municipalities of Burke, Doomadgee and Pormpuraaw had one or more cases of COVID-19. In fact, none of the three municipalities has any confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
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