No one knows what a full-scale 2020 pandemic would look like, but the plain-speaking, long-serving German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the coronavirus could infect 60 to 70 per cent of the German population. The most important task, she said, is slowing the spread of the pandemic, gaining time for people to develop immunity and preventing the contagion from overwhelming national health and welfare systems. "We have to understand that many people will be infected," Merkel said.
Different containment policies, combined with the efficiency of detection and treatment, are already having a significant impact, reflected in sharply differing rates of infection and mortality. At this stage, the death rate is more than five times as much in Italy compared with South Korea, although these comparisons should be treated with some caution as they include what may turn out to be faulty assumptions about reasonably equal accuracy in detection data.
Unlike many other countries, Australia does have extensive documentation concerning a remarkable local precedent of contagion containment. This is shown in the record of the Spanish flu in NSW. Peter Hobbins, a medical historian, a principal historian at Artefact Heritage Services, and an affiliate of the history department at Sydney University, has made a special study of the 1919 Spanish influenza outbreak in Australia. The emergence of the coronavirus pandemic follows a "broadly" similar pattern, he says, "but in an era of vastly increased government surveillance".
"Previous pandemics travelled more slowly but they also had profound consequences," he says. The issues raised by containment measures are also similar – that is, "you may need to implement some measures of isolation. How do you as a society balance the need to protect the community against the rights of an individual in a liberal political system?"
Quarantine laws
Much of Hobbins' research is based on the extensive documentation collected by a 1920 royal commission in NSW appointed to investigate the efficiency of the state's anti-influenza medical regime. In previous decades rising fears of contagions arriving from Asia led to pressure building among the various colonies to introduce uniform quarantine laws, Hobbins says, to the point where it was a significant influence on the Federation movement.
The Spanish flu, which developed during the final months of World War I in 1918, was kept at bay for some crucial months in Australia, largely due to extremely tight quarantine restrictions, according to Hobbins. In NSW there were also "massive restrictions on public assembly", and music halls, schools and Sydney University were closed, and pubs were open for just minutes at a time. Victory parades were also cancelled and people were obliged to wear face masks on public transport or face heavy fines.
It is premature [to conclude] that because the virus originated in China, this is a bad news story for China.
— Hugh White, strategic studies expert
"Whenever they relaxed the restrictions, the influenza would go up," Hobbins says. Overall, the tight quarantine restrictions kept out the pneumonic plague, or Spanish flu, for a few months. By contrast, in New Zealand, where Spanish flu started infecting people from October 1918, the mortality rate was 2 per cent. In NSW it was a quarter that rate, or 0.5 per cent, with about one-third of the population infected.
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Moving to the current emergency, the NSW government has estimated that 1.5 million of its citizens will be infected in the first coronavirus wave, and the week's end was marked by more closures, restrictions and, in general, moves towards a lockdown in Australia. At the same time, the Federal Government is counting on avoiding a recession by injecting $17.6 billion of stimulus into the economy, with $11 billion to be spent before the end of June.
So, how bad will it get?
According to Hugh White, an emeritus professor in strategic studies at the Australian National University, "we must objectively recognise there's a wide range of outcomes" possible from the depredations of the pandemic. "It is very premature [to conclude] that because the virus originated in China that this is a bad news story for China," he says. Some commentators have suggested this could be Chinese President Xi Jinping's "Chernobyl event", which is good news for the West.
However, White says China "seems to have handled this reasonably well", as its infection rate is stabilising. He says it is "quite possible" that China's ultimate performance will compare favourably with that of Western countries such as Italy or the US, where an already chaotic Trump administration has failed to come up with a coherent national domestic containment plan. By comparison, claiming the coronavirus pandemic is "undermining" Xi Jinping "would be a very premature judgment to make", he says.
Brake on globalisation
He also says the pandemic is going to be another brake on globalisation because of "very complex, very interconnected supply chains".
"We're not going to go back to a whole series of autarchies, but it does appear at least seriously likely that the inability of Western countries to respond to the coronavirus may be a factor in delegitimising the system of government we have in the West.
"If you ask yourself what it will do to the credibility of governments like the US, it is potentially very significant," White says.
It makes it less likely that the US will respond effectively to the Chinese challenge in the western Pacific. And, as a result, strategically it could lead to the formation of two distinctive spheres – the US-Europe, and a China-dominated western Pacific, including Australia, with not much interaction between them.
Meanwhile, an Australia traumatised by a destructive bushfire season, is now confronting the COVID-19 emergency with a containment, treatment and $17.6 billion economic stimulus plan. The nation that re-emerges may or may not be "stronger", as Prime Minister Scott Morrison promises, but it sure will be different, and so will the world.
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