sick political game played on an even more insane ignorant public
Why does Australia keep locking down?
Notwithstanding the availability of elaborate plans, Australia’s capacity to manage a pandemic was in practice very weak when COVID-19 struck. Choking under austerity, most states progressively eroded their public health capabilities in the 2010s. Sydney’s contact tracing capacity was, in 2019, modelled to be too weak to manage even an initial outbreak of 100 cases under some scenarios. No national pandemic “war game” took place after 2008. The National Medical Stockpile, meant to maintain essential supplies for emergencies, stocked only $10.76m of personal protective equipment.
Under these circumstances, the New South Wales and Victorian governments lobbied the federal government and other states for a nationally coordinated lockdown in March 2020, fearing a health system collapse as witnessed in Italy. Although the immediate crisis was averted by means of border closures and lockdowns, the hollowing out of state capacity has continued to hinder Australia’s pandemic response. A thread running through Australia’s two major policy failures — quarantine and vaccination — is that in both systems and processes had to be constructed nearly from scratch, and in both, governments’ initial inclination had been to rely on private contractors to deliver essential services, producing woeful outcomes. As hotel quarantine continues to fail, leaking the virus into the community, and vaccination rates remain low, many officials and experts argue that we have no choice but to lock down to prevent large-scale outbreaks.
