Opinion: Eradicating the virus completely while enforcing strict border controls is the best way to restore economic activity.
That’s a long time to be living a severely restricted life. It is also economically very unattractive. Even for activities that are permitted, businesses would know that if infection rates drift up, they may be shut again. This is unlikely to breed the confidence that is essential to business investment. And most of the businesses that are shuttered for so long are unlikely to restart – imposing big longer-term economic costs.
But even if it proves impossible to stamp out the virus, the additional few weeks of current restrictions would leave Australia better set up for a Goldilocks scenario, which is much easier to execute if a country starts with 10 new cases a day rather than 100. And whether it is because we moved early, our culture of compliance, or clean air, it looks like infections are falling faster in Australia than in almost any other country.
This risk of resurgence can also be minimised by relaxing restrictions gradually. An undetected infection is unlikely to pass through an unbroken chain of asymptomatic carriers: sooner rather than later it will infect someone who does show symptoms. If we relax restrictions gradually, then a re-infection is unlikely to gather steam. And the longer we live in a country with no infections, the more sure we can be that there are none to find.
We might well impose fewer restrictions on passengers from countries that also successfully eliminate the virus – not immaterial given that in 2019 about 28 per cent of Australia’s international students and 14 per cent of our international tourists came from China. And indeed, more people might come from China if other potential destinations still had many COVID-19 cases.Perhaps the most widespread – and insidious – objection to the strategy of elimination is to assume it is impossible.
And there are intelligent ways to pursue an elimination strategy. We should start with an Australian state that has already reached no infections, and has tight controls over its borders – most likely to be South Australia, Western Australia, or Tasmania. If it works, that would gives us more confidence to broaden the strategy to other states and territories. If it doesn’t work, we could learn how to do better.
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