Pretzel Logic

It's too early to call it, but it's not too early to predict it.  Elimination. Not suppression. Not 'flattening the curve'. Elimination. Gone. None left. Move along, nothing to see here. In the past week Western Australia has recorded just 8 new cases of COVID-19, with three days of no new cases. The earliest cases into WA were almost exclusively via cruise ships and incoming flights - both of which have manifests of passengers making it relatively easy to trace others on the ship or plane who may have been infected. This, and the government's quick reaction to close the borders and restrict even intrastate travel created an early and effective 'Fortress WA'. The critical importance of this early tracing and quarantining is explained by Michael Baker , a professor at the University of Otago's Department of Public Health in Wellington who sits on the New Zealand government's COVID-19 Technical Advisory Group.  "The virus usually...

The most isolated capital city in the world is not a bad place to sit out a global pandemic. As of April11, Western Australia has recorded just 506 confirmed COVID-19 cases, the vast majority of which are overseas travellers or cruise ship passengers.  At this stage at least, community transmission is very low and should continue to remain so under the social distancing provisions that have been applied. The Labor state government is doing an excellent job in preventing the spread of the virus, locking down the state border and prohibiting all but essential intrastate travel. So the odds are that we in Western Australia could have this Coronavirus fully beaten – as in eliminated – well before any other state in Australia, let alone the other countries of the world. But what happens then? How do we maintain our virus-free, hermetically-sealed corner of the world while we wait for the vaccine to be developed so the rest of the world can catch up? Sadly, our international ...