What Australia’s new lockdowns reveal about a ‘zero Covid strategy’

While the UK and US continue to loosen their coronavirus restrictions, Australia – once the envy of the panedemic world – is clamping down, with half of Australians now back in lockdown.

The country’s “zero Covid” strategy, which aims to keep out all cases of the virus through strict travel controls and mandatory hotel quarantines, appears to have reached its limit as the highly contagious Delta strain slipped through the nation’s defences and began spreading in the community.

Why zero Covid?

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Since the pandemic began, Australia has seen just 924 deaths and 34,611 infections, the majority of which came in the country’s first and only wave between July and September last year. This all-time tally is lower than the deaths and infections the UK experienced each day at the peak of its second wave in January.

Even taking into account the UK’s much larger population, its position as a critical hub for international air travel, and its densely packed urban centres, the bare facts of these comparative death tolls underlines the early success of Australia’s zero Covid approach.

Where else has it been attempted?

Australia is not alone in seeking to suppress the virus completely.

Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, China and New Zealand have all attempted to bring the virus to heel through “elimination” strategies, which involve getting daily new cases close to zero, then keeping the number extremely low by quarantining arrivals, conducting extensive testing, and intermittently requiring strict social distancing.

These efforts “saved them from the devastation seen in places such as the United States and Europe, where healthcare systems neared collapse and hundreds of thousands died”, The Atlantic says. And the approach also appears to have had a positive impact on the countries' economies.

In a recent article published in The Lancet, researchers found that not only were there fewer deaths in countries that opted for elimination, but “evidence suggests that countries that opt for rapid action to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 – with the strong support of their inhabitants – also better protect their economies and minimise restrictions on civil liberties compared with those that strive for mitigation.”

Is zero Covid a long-term solution?

The philosophy of attempting to remain wholly virus-free has undoubtedly saved lives, but it has also led Australia into “a cul-de-sac of perpetual lockdowns with little prospect of early relief”, The Telegraph says.

In part, the island nation has been a victim of its own success, the paper adds: “Since the number of cases was low in Australia while the rest of the world was ravaged by Covid, the government in Canberra decided that an urgent vaccine programme was unnecessary. This has proved to be a serious mistake now that the Delta mutation of the virus has taken hold.”

Indeed, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison took the view that vaccination was “not a race” – a phrase he used repeatedly at the start of the country’s halting vaccine rollout. But, according to Bloomberg “Delta’s rapid spread has shown it is very much a race”.

With just a fraction of the vaccine coverage of the UK and the US, “Australia must continue to suppress the virus zealously – and that means lockdowns when even a few cases emerge – or risk overwhelming a hospital system that’s never had to contend with a real onslaught of infections,” the news site says.

Australia’s problem is that its public policy approach to Covid “hasn’t significantly shifted from the settings of 2020”, say University of Sydney researchers Tim Soutphommasane and Marc Stears on The Conversation.

“Covid-19 will be with the world for at least the foreseeable future (and) experts tell us it will become endemic,” the experts add. “The challenge then is to learn to live with the virus effectively, protecting public health while restoring freedoms and reconnecting with each other.”

What will happen next?

Zero Covid has lost some of its lustre in recent months, as many countries that have pursued the strategy have struggled.

Taiwan, once a success story in countering the virus, has only just emerged from more than two months of partial lockdown, having failed to vaccinate its population quickly enough – just 33.6% of Taiwanese people have had a single dose and only 1.7% are fully vaccinated.

In a bid to bring the virus under control, different countries are currently pursuing a variety of strategies – but almost all of them rely on vaccination.

The UK has unrolled an impressively swift vaccination programme and is also widely deploying rapid antigen home testing. France, meanwhile, is taking a firmer line on mandating the jab with a bill that requires a “health pass” to enter restaurants, bars, trains and planes.

In the US, president Joe Biden has introduced a $100 (£72) reward for people who get vaccinated and a door-to-door campaign that will see health workers going to people’s homes to counter misinformation and try to convince them to get the vaccination.

After months of vacillation, Australia’s government has finally conceded that it too must vaccinate rapidly, though the timings of its roadmap remain nebulous. And, in the interim, the country is continuing to tighten its lockdown and quarantine system to get back to zero Covid.

“Track, trace, isolate and quarantine remain very important parts of the program,” Morrison said in a press conference last week, adding: "It is too hard to say what the situation will be down the track.”

There are too many unknowns before we can understand life as normal, but that’s certainly where we are heading.”