SUCCESS

'A Wicked Enemy': How Australia's Coronavirus Success Story Unravelled

 © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Sandra Sanders/Reuters

Less than a month ago, Australia was the envy of much of the world. With daily new coronavirus cases in the single digits, it was feted as part of a group of “first mover” nations - countries like Taiwan, Singapore and New Zealand that acted decisively to quash coronavirus.

In mid-June, after three months of tight restrictions and differing levels of lockdown, life was not quite back to normal, but as politicians liked to stress, it was almost Covid-normal.

Restaurants, gyms and beaches across the country opened again, and in the southern state of Victoria residents were awaiting the day when premier Daniel Andrews would say they could “get on the beers” and return to the pub.

 © Provided by The Guardian Cafes in Melbourne’s Degraves street open for dine-in customers in June. Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Travel was also back on the cards. There was talk of a bubble between Australia and New Zealand, and interstate border restrictions were on the verge of being eased.

But then, as a sunny autumn rolled into winter, infections began slowly rising in Melbourne.

Just weeks later, the country has more than 3,000 active cases and daily new case numbers that are almost as high as the UK - with less than a third of the population. Five million residents of Melbourne have been thrown into their second lockdown, with no real sense of when it might end. Face masks are mandatory. Police patrol the Victorian state border. And the death toll is climbing. So what went wrong?

 © Photograph: Sandra Sanders/Reuters A man wearing a protective face mask walks past a closed Luna Park in Melbourne.

On 19 June, at a routine press conference, Victoria’s deputy chief medical officer Annaliese van Diemen announced that seven cases had been linked to security guards working at the Stamford Plaza hotel in Melbourne, where travellers were held under Australia’s mandatory 14-day quarantine rule for international arrivals. The group were believed to have breached social distancing rules while socialising.

 © Provided by The Guardian Victorian Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen. Photograph: James Ross/AAP

Andrews said the source of the transmission could have been as fleeting as sharing a cigarette lighter. He warned the country was facing a “wicked enemy”. Day by day the cases continued to rise, until there were dozens linked to two hotels.

A judicial inquiry into the outbreak this week heard that many if not all of the thousands of new cases in June and July could be linked back to the quarantine hotel outbreaks.

The inquiry will be focused on the state government’s decision to use private security contractors, who in turn used sub-contractors, some with reportedly as little as five minutes in training, while in other states, police were on guard.

Initially, the authorities launched a testing blitz on hotspots and issued a stay-at-home order – later beefed up to a police-enforced lockdown - for 3,000 residents of nine Melbourne public housing towers.

But the cases kept coming. On 7 July Victoria recorded 191 new coronavirus cases, enough to prompt Andrews to announce a city-wide lockdown for at least six weeks.

“I know a lot of people aren’t scared because this feels like something happening to other people in other parts of the world,” Andrews said. “But you should be scared of this. I’m scared of this. We all should be.”

Now, over two weeks since stage three lockdown commenced, there are 4,213 new cases of coronavirus reported in Victoria alone, with 30 deaths. A total of 201 patients are in hospital, with 41 in intensive care.