The A$320 billion Australian COVID-19 mistake?
The graph below shows Australian cases of COVID-19 by date of disease onset broken down between Overseas (Imported) cases in blue and Local (including under investigation and unknown) in green. The red and purple lines are exponential fits during the respective initial growth phases. The black line is the time varying reproductive number, calculated using an algorithm that explicitly takes account of imported cases. Its scale is on the right. The crosses along the bottom, date axis, are the dates of various government interventions as outlined in the table below the graph.
Australia is a unique island-continent and as such the closure of international borders and the suppression of the imported cases has been key to getting the exponential growth under control, noting that every imported case has the potential to produce local cases. Analysis of the epidemiology of COVID-19 in Australia requires special treatment of imported cases. This appears not to have been done in research guiding the Australian governments' actions. Taking account of imported cases, the reproductive number may well have fallen below 1 around 16 March.
The heavy handed hibernation of the economy, at a possible cost of A$320 billion, is very likely over-kill. The panicked reaction of State Governments in imposing draconian impositions on civil liberties, late in the list of restrictions, almost certainly is. The Australian governments need to engineer a clever exit from hibernation and try to claw back some of the hundreds of billions of expenditure, drawing on research from across the globe as represented in the links that will be added opposite.
This analysis is aimed at provoking discussion and thought about how Australia got to where it is with COVID-19 and how we are going to get out of it. The author (Nick Birrell) is not an expert in this field but hopes that appropriate expertise will be applied to the exit question given that seemingly too little appropriate expertise was applied to the entry. Source attribution and some notes on methodology can be found below the table.
Created 12 April 2020 0130 UTC Last updated 25 May 2020 0255 UTC
News :
3 April Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk:
"We’re not even on the curve yet....
The peak could be in July, August and
September..."
12 April The Honourable Annastacia
Palaszczuk: "...it is clearly evident
that
Australia is indeed flattening
the COVID-19 curve."
16 April Government release modelling of R(t)
similar to Kintan's
