Wooley: Close our schools and get tough on isolation now

CHARLES WOOLEY: Top Tasmanian doctors call for a total shutdown before it’s too late

CHECK-IN: Arrivals to Hobart Airport register travel details and contacts. Picture: MATT THOMPSON

The hardest decision.

Inexorably both Prime Minister Morrison and Tasmanian Premier Gutwein are being drawn by the gravity of events into the hardest of places: a very un-Australian form of totalitarian control.

Pubs, clubs, restaurants, cinemas and sporting venues are effectively closed. There’s nowhere to go now but home and even there the Premier has warned Tasmanians, “Don’t replace drinks in the pub with drinks in the backyard.” Clearly as things get worse (as they assuredly will) the old expression ‘three’s a crowd’ will become law.

Events at home and abroad now impel our leaders towards a kind of unthinkable Chinese style authoritarianism. Albeit that this is action that perhaps should have been taken weeks ago.

Cruise liners discharging COVID infected passengers into the general community and the failure of some people testing positive to be serious about self-isolating has prompted two leading Tasmanian doctors, Rob Walters and Anthony Eaton, to announce, “It is now too late for advice. The time has come for compulsion.”

Our medical experts are the ones who will confront the terrible price of tardiness. Eaton and Walters fear our overworked hospital doctors might soon be confronted with the very worst battlefield triage, “having to decide who gets treatment and who is left to die”.

To slow the spread of COVID the two doctors want to see everyone testing positive confined to government subsidised accommodation, such as the hotels that are currently empty. The Government’s acquiring the use of inner-city student accommodation at the old Fountainside hotel is step in the right direction, according to Anthony Eaton and Rob Walters.

But more must be done, they say, to isolate the infected from the general community. “There is no time to waste if we are to save Tasmania from the Italian and American scenario,” says Dr Eaton.

“Confinement of the infected and a complete social lock down.” That is the leading urologist’s prescription. His recommendation: “Shut down everything and stop worrying about the economy. If we don’t come to grips with this now, there will be no economy.”

Dr Walters, one of Hobart’s most experienced GPs, also has little faith in the policy of unsupervised self-isolation.

“As a GP I know that compliance with medical suggestions related to health is generally poor (about 40 per cent adherence) and sadly this will prove to be the same here. It is almost impossible for someone to effectively self-isolate in a family home.”

Dr Walters’ bitter medicine is that government must not be reticent about “wielding the big stick to avert disaster”.

Still, it is understandable that state and commonwealth leaders have procrastinated. The most onerous action any democratic leader can contemplate is to restrict the traditional rights and liberties of the people in their freedom of movement and conduct of business. It is no small matter to assume reserved autocratic powers in the interest of an assumed greater good. Even when the reasons are blindingly obvious.

Walters and Eaton say we now have no choice but to contemplate a new Australia governed by the kind of arbitrary powers this nation has never seen in peacetime.

They say the growing weight of medical evidence suggests now is not the time to dither.

“Every day is a day too long,” said Anthony Eaton while Rob Walters insists that “Hours wasted today could mean months extra coming out of the crisis the other end.”

Eaton and Walters also call for the immediate closure of schools to all but the children of people in medical and essential services.

“It is problematic in that some kids might be seen to be safer in care of their teachers than at home. But we believe students in large groups represent a breach of the most sensible medical guidelines for containment of the disease. The sooner we close schools, hopefully the sooner we can re-open them.”

The two Tasmanian doctors are not unsympathetic to Premier Gutwein’s political quandary and they praise Tasmania’s nation-leading initiative of border control.

But they say, “We need to go harder ... and right now!”

That’s a sentiment that will find favour with the majority of Tasmanians who want to see a firm hand on the tiller.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian journalist.