Zero-Covid is wishful thinking if Australia wants to rejoin the world

As former Australian foreign minister and High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer wrote in last week’s magazine, almost all Australian states, like neighbouring New Zealand, are determined to eliminate Covid-19 at all costs.

At the beginning of this year, Australia seemingly had defeated Covid. Total numbers of people infected, out of 25 million, were in the few thousands, with related deaths in the hundreds (mostly in care homes). Even now, with a major Delta variant outbreak across our two biggest states, New South Wales and Victoria, less than a thousand Australians have died from or with Covid, almost all elderly or people with other health complications.

Currently, Greater Sydney and Melbourne, and regional New South Wales and Victoria, are in various degrees of lockdown. Some of Sydney and all of Melbourne are under night-time curfew – something that has never occurred in Australia before, even under threat of Japanese invasion in 1942.