Wear Your Mask - COVID-19 Thread II

[robkelk]

How Australia succeeded in lowering COVID-19 cases to near-zero

The approach has largely worked. The nation's recorded cases peaked at 739 on Aug. 5, but since then the count has dwindled steadily and most Australian cities have gone weeks without a single new case.

It has come at the cost of a million jobs nationwide and thousands of now-failed businesses. But it was worth it, says Dr. Nancy Baxter, who runs the University of Melbourne's School of Population and Global Health.

"You can't have a well-functioning economy with a raging pandemic. It's not an economy versus lives," she told CBC News.

Baxter is a Canadian who moved to Melbourne just before that city entered its first lockdown. She now worries about her friends in Canada, where the approach to the pandemic has been very different.

"Hearing what's happening in Ontario, it's pretty shocking … It just seems like what's happening is the public health officials are telling the government one thing, it's not what they want to hear, so they just kind of have changed the policy to just basically admit defeat and say they're going to let the epidemic just run wild in Ontario."