America’s coronavirus disaster a lesson for Australia

The US has passed a disastrous inflection point in its battle with COVID-19, as has the world. Both developments have potentially calamitous consequences for Australia. The consequences look to be pretty bad for Donald Trump as well.

The US infection rate is now consistently more than 60,000 a day. The daily rate had been declining from late April but started to rebound in mid-June. That rebound is accelerating.

The daily death rate, which had continued to decline even as new cases picked up, has also started to rise.

Florida reported 15,000 cases in a day.

The rise in US deaths, with 140,000 fatalities already, in the midst of its semi-chaotic, nationally unco-ordinated response, contradicts the preferred narrative of those who say the virus has always been wildly exaggerated.

Given that death is a lagging indicator after infection, it is likely the big wave of new cases the US is seeing in the south will see a further rise in deaths, even though much has been learnt about how to protect people in aged-care facilities.

The global figures also rebut the idea the virus is really just like a bad flu season.

There were 200,000 new infections worldwide on Monday, with nearly 600,000 dead so far and some 60,000 patients in serious or acute condition. All these figures are massively understated as so many Third World countries have little testing capacity.

The most obvious implication of the US mess for Australia is that Washington will remain transfixed with this problem for the rest of the year.

America can do more than one thing at a time, but this internal situation heavily limits its effective geo-strategic leadership.

If COVID-19 is not sorted out by early next year, that’s a security disaster.

There is another big implication for Australia as well.

What is happening in the American south could easily be the future of Melbourne, Sydney or any Australian city.

The US response has been chaotic and deeply sub-optimal, while our experience has mostly been very good.

But as the Melbourne outbreak shows, and now Sydney’s smaller outbreak, the virus can easily get away from you. It always has the potential to grow exponentially. It doesn’t only kill old people, it kills young people, too. Many who recover are left with long-term, sometimes permanent, damage to lungs or other organs.

From the point of view of the virus, it has gone from success to success, growing and expanding rapidly.

Australia’s earlier flattening of the curve, before the curve really got going, was extremely unusual internationally.

The Americans flattened the curve for a while, too. One of the reasons it didn’t last was Americans quickly got tired of social distancing. This was exacerbated by the disputes among their state and national leadership.

The latest spat between Trump and his former chief adviser, Anthony Fauci, is emblematic. Trump claimed, bizarrely, that 99 per cent of cases in the US were harmless. Fauci contradicted him.

Everyone has made mistakes, in the US and all over the world, but Trump’s ill discipline, and the squabbling over even basic questions such as whether to wear a mask, has seriously hurt the US.

We don’t have that. But one of the biggest factors in the US virus resurgence is Americans stopped practising social distancing. They got bored.

As anyone who goes to an Australian shopping centre can observe, the same thing is happening here. It could yet have the same results.

Maybe we will all be Floridians some day.