How Andrews is not following medical experts

Despite persistent hopes from Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton, and new laws mandating face masks – very uncomfortable for me – in public places from this Thursday, there is still not the slightest sign that Victoria’s COVID-19 disaster will abate in the future. Most lockdowns have ultimately succeeded in getting case numbers down, but, two weeks in, this lockdown is the first to fail to achieve this.

In their daily morning speeches, Premier Andrews and Chief Medical Officer Sutton may well believe that compulsory masks in public will finally produce a decline in case numbers two weeks after the lockdown began and with outbreaks developing in “open” areas of Geelong and its surrounding rural shires. Two weeks later is when the decline really set in last time round, so one might not be too pessimistic at first sight.

However, the problem is that, ever since the crisis emerged, it has become clearer and clearer that Andrews has not been adequately following the best medical advice ever since the Cedar Meats outbreak at the beginning of May. At the end of May 2020, medical experts advised Andrews to wait until the end of June before easing restrictions by such moves as gradually opening cafés, libraries and swimming pools. However, pressure from business and peer pressure from other states where the virus was properly eradicated overwhelmed Andrews and caused him to ease restrictions when COVID-19 was still active in the Victorian community. Nevertheless, the first two weeks of eased restrictions looked promising for Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “suppression” strategy, as numbers fell below even what they were in the last part of the first lockdown.

Then, of course, disaster struck, as botched hotel quarantine allowed the virus to escape and spread far more rapidly than it did the first time. When Premier Andrews initially announced lockdown measures in March, SARS-CoV-2 cases in Victoria were almost all from foreign sources. However, Andrews continued trying merely suppress the virus in “hotbeds”, whilst movement of and contact between employed people spread COVID amongst Melburninans at an exceedingly rapid rate. Even when Metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire returned to Stage 3 lockdown two weeks ago, as the World Socialist Web Site demonstrated, so many businesses were kept open that the virus spread within the community exactly as beforehand – with extreme rapidity.

Apart from the WSWS – which my mother and brother view as a completely unreliable source – there have been others who have called for closure of many more businesses. Professor Tony Blakely – upon whose research the WSWS article is based – was the first to argue that Andrews should not follow the “suppression” strategy of Scott Morrison, and should aim for elimination by:

1. Strong and decisive leadership with strategic clarity. 
2. Convening an advisory group of experts in the elimination strategy and COVID-19 public health response.
3. Closing all schools until the daily rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection without a known source falls. 
4. Tightening the definition of essential shops to remain open.
5. Requiring mask-wearing in indoor environments where 1.5m physical distancing cannot be ensured.
6. Tightening the definition of essential workers and work. 
7. Requiring mask-wearing by essential workers whenever they are in close contact with people other than those in their immediate “household bubble”.
8. Ensuring financial and other support to businesses, community and other groups most affected by more stringent stay-at-home and lockdown requirements. 
9. Further strengthening contact tracing to ensure the majority of notifications (and their close contacts) are interviewed within 24 hours and placed in isolation if necessary.
10. Extending suspension of international arrivals into Victorian quarantine

Apart from requiring mask-wearing, Andrews refuses to do this, because businesses would lose profits vis-à-vis the current situation where they effectively operate as if there was no lockdown, and workers would feel very insecure if they did not know when they might return to having an income.

The present lockdown is the first in the world to completely fail to reduce numbers, and the economic and mental costs to lower class Melburnians will be severe if this failure continues indefinitely, which is virtually certain, despite the fact that many workers accept having to work in an unsafe environment to get food on their tables. The WSWS policy of expropriating bosses – or a more moderate policy requiring workers to be paid full wages until whenever is four to six weeks after the last new case – is in many ways just, but unspeakable to mainstream parties largely funded by big business. Any other policy based around closing all businesses except medicine or food stores risks workers losing jobs and sustenance permanently, although it has worked in countries with larger welfare systems than Australia possesses. The present policy, with continual extreme community transmission and no return to normal until antiviral treatments be developed, risks severe political reaction, although no election is due until late 2022.

The world’s first failed lockdown, part II

The catastrophic news of 428 (four hundred and twenty-eight) new COVID-19 cases in Victoria is both painful and extremely revealing.

Even Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton, speaking on ABC television, is now implicitly admitting that this current lockdown might prove the first in the world to entirely fail to reduce numbers. Sutton said he expected COVID-19 numbers to begin to fall on or before nine days into the lockdown. However, COVID case numbers appear to be on an upward trend more rapid than ever before, especially when one factors in that only ⅔ as many tests were conducted today as had been conducted during the first few days of the lockdown.

What this suggests is stark. The possibilities are to say the least alarming.

• It is first of all clear that far too many services are permitted to open when there exists anything other than absolute safety against the spread of the virus as per the World Socialist Web Site, let alone the present risk
• It may be that COVID-19 is spreading so rapidly within Melbourne that even operation of essential services cannot be done without extreme risk of continual spread
• for instance aged care workers often have to travel from the western suburbs to the Sandringham and Frankston corridors
• there exists extreme risk of spread from surfaces touched (even unintentionally) by these aged care workers, especially if they do not have time to clean them
• It could be that Melbourne’s populace is so frustrated there exists a non-negligible proportion that is unable to adequately comply with even present relatively lenient rules

The possible futures are equally stark:

1. Continuation of present Stage 3 lockdown with more and more rapid rises in case numbers
2. Shift to Stage 4 lockdown with all services except food and medical shops closed – with public works postponed or cancelled wherever not technically impossible, and tradespeople allowed to work only on demonstrably urgent maintenance
3. Shift to hard lockdown with people excluding law enforcement and medical workers not allowed outside home even for shopping – and nonresidents allowed inside residence only for COVID testing or demonstrably urgent maintenance

Plans 2) and 3) have long-term hope of reducing case numbers as the present lockdown clearly never will. Nevertheless, even if either 2) or 3) can finally reduce Melbourne’s COVID-19 case numbers, being judged successful – “successful” meaning the reopening of non-essential services with absolutely no recurrence of COVID-19 (whether to exclude externally acquired cases constitutes another issue) – is another matter.

It is certain that 2) or 3) will need to be adopted in Melbourne as case numbers skyrocket and skyrocket under the existing Stage 3 lockdown, despite Premier Andrews and Chief Medical Officer Sutton defensively saying that case numbers might be much larger without the Stage 3 lockdown. I have the most extreme scepticism, however, that even if case numbers under the adoption of scenario 2) or 3) do finally start falling, that it will produce a successful second reopening. For one thing, the World Socialist Web Site has demonstrated that demands of big business were a major cause of the premature reopening that has left Melbourne in its present state of explosive COVID-19 spread. For another – and I am in no way immune to this myself – Melburnians would be even more frustrated with a more rigid lockdown than they were with the Stage 3 autumn and current lockdowns.

As the World Socialist Web Site and many leading epidemiologists have demonstrated, for a truly successful reopening COVID-19 must be completely eliminated, or at least reduced far below the level of 8 cases per day in Victoria during the week before the first failed easing of restrictions.

In the present situation, sad to say, even if a hard lockdown were imposed now, it would take minimally eight weeks (until 12 September) before that hard lockdown could be ended with COVID-19 eliminated from Melbourne. A Stage 4 lockdown imposed today would take minimally ten weeks (until 26 September) for an analogous result. I have extreme doubts Melburnians would accept such stringent restrictions for so long, and doubt they would accept them even should they fail so badly as the present Stage 3 lockdown has. Moreover, unless COVID-19 is completely eliminated, there is the danger it would come back even more quickly after a severer and/or longer lockdown than observed in the autumn. The Melbourne public embraced its new freedoms with eagerness when restrictions were eased at the end of May, and they would undoubtedly do so more eagerly if they were eased from a more rigid level this spring or summer. Thus, whilst a long-term plan to end the present skyrocketing COVID-19 growth, get cases down to a sustained zero, and reopen Victoria is needed, presenting it to the public and carrying it out successfully appears quite impossible even in the long term.

The world’s first failed lockdown

After mild hopes that case numbers in Victoria would start to reflect the effects of the lockdown now a week old, today’s case numbers – 317 new cases – demonstrate some stark realities:

1. that present lockdown restrictions, whilst effective in the first outbreak and stronger than what was required anywhere else in Australia, are utterly unable to reduce infections in Melbourne under current conditions of spread and abundance
2. that this will become the first occasion anywhere in the world where a lockdown of non-essential services will fail entirely to reduce the rate of COVID-19 spread, let alone reduce actual case numbers
3. that unless a much more rigid “hard lockdown” is imposed, which will mean no one leaving their home at all even for shopping, numbers will rise and rise and rise and rise with no limit whatsoever except whatever is imposed by Melbourne’s population numbers
4. that the World Socialist Web Site are absolutely correct that the elimination of profit in quarantine is absolutely urgent – though they do not understand the actual importance of having quarantine
5. that the present inquiry into botches of quarantine is certainly to prove severely inadequate to bring the perpetrators to justice. This logically would require both severe financial penalties and substantial prison terms given the effects their spread of the virus is having upon employment opportunities for workers and the general public’s health
6. that the World Socialist Web Site are absolutely correct that there should be no reopening unless it be absolutely safe, meaning zero risk of new infections. Epidemiologists have ever since April said that absolute safety would mean easing restrictions only after minimally six weeks with no new cases
7. that when reopening does come – which even with a much harder lockdown would not be until several months into next year – testing of the population must be absolutely continuous to prevent one single undetected case from spreading

When the lockdown was imposed on 7 July, it was hoped that at this time case numbers would start to fall or plateau, as was admitted in today’s new by Chief Health Official Brett Sutton. The 317 new cases today puts paid to any prospect that the present lockdown is remotely adequate to even plateau new case numbers, let alone cause them to fall.

The reality is that only by a complete lockdown of the entire Melbourne public that does not allow them out of their homes for any purpose could there possibly be a reduction even in the long term. Such a measure would be exceedingly unpopular with a public already strained by three months of present-level restrictions.

The Andrews Government refuses to admit that its policies ever since the present outbreak began on 17 June have been a complete failure, and wishes to have the public believe there exists a minimal probability that present lockdown restrictions will some day lead to a reduction in numbers. However, this may not be the case if the public does not abide by the rules or if the operation of essential services leads to constant rapid transmission in public workplaces, food shops, or aged and medical care centres. These are centres of uncountable large outbreaks at present, and there exists the possibility that basic sustenance of life in aged care centres means workers will continuously transmit cases. Many aged care centre workers live far from where they work, and even with a rigid lockdown it may be impossible to stop continual spread unless the workers can either be given medical grade personal protective equipment or be accommodated in their workplaces. Under this scenario, unless those be absolutely required and paid for by the government, reduction in case numbers may be impossible in any time span.

The utter failure of Victoria’s government – and the consequences for everyone

The news that Victoria had 127 new cases – easily the most on record – this morning, after I half-joked that the figures would be much, much higher, was of itself no alarm given that I had been told that cases would rise due to outbreaks in a number of housing blocks in Flemington and North Melbourne. The alarming thing is that a mere sixteen of the new cases are due to testing in those above-mentioned housing blocks, leaving 111 – fifty percent more than yesterday – cases from community transmission.

What this shows is that government moves to merely lockdown affected or “hotspot” suburbs are an utter failure. At present rates of community transmission, Victoria will be receiving over 1,000 new cases by next week (13 July), assuming testing rates remain unchanged.

Premier Andrews, if he were serious about containing COVID-19, would accept that would have to implement a strict Stage 4 – stricter than the past autumn lockdown – with a law forbidding any revision until minimally four weeks (28 days) after the last new case. The rate of community transmission is so high at present that even under such a strict lockdown it is certain to take several weeks longer than other Australian states have taken to eliminate community transmission. If we base our calculation upon New South Wales, who took two months to largely eliminate community transmission, it would take minimally four months before Victoria would have passed four weeks with zero new cases every single day.

Four months from now would be early November, and after the frustration of the autumn lockdown, a much severer lockdown for twice as long or longer would be intolerable for most Victorians including myself. Nevertheless, if coronavirus is ever to be contained in Victoria there is clearly from recent figures absolutely no alternative except locking down until four weeks – or longer – after the last new case. Rigid rules that require any incoming traveller to test negative before being released into the community are also absolutely essential. This would have to be backed up by the severest punishments both personal and financial for those who breach these rules or who allow anyone positive to COVID into the community. As it stands, Stamford and Rydges must pay the entire economic cost to those placed out of work and financial support – their negligence is what has placed Victoria in its current predicament, and they must pay to get it out. New South Wales has conclusively demonstrated it is possible to open up without risk of a second, worse wave of infections. If Victoria eliminates COVID-19 adequately – which it had quite simply failed to do when it began to open up in June – it can if its quarantine is good enough reopen very quickly a second time with absolutely zero risk of recurrence.

As things are, one can only conclude that Victoria’s people and politicians are too frustrated to do what is needed to contain COVID-19 beyond an epidemic that could easily be much worse than any in Europe or North America. The radical left have shown all along that there is the money to defeat COVID-19 if the super-rich were made to pay for it. The present epidemic in Victoria is entirely or almost entirely the fault of wealthy hotel owners’ profit seeking leading them to cut costs in quarantining returning travellers, so the Trotskyist solution of seizing their profits and locking up their bosses without trial can appear absolutely just. Even if we do not fully accept the radical views of Socialist Alternative or the World Socialist Web Site, there can be no justice for economically displaced Victorians until these hotel companies pay in full for the damage they have caused. If they did pay the full costs of their negligence, it would be easier for Victorians already displaced from work for several months to tolerate twice as long a period out of work – but with the knowledge that when they were back at work they would be at zero risk of this happening for a third time.

The present government path of targetted lockdown is proving an utter failure. Either the government will have to rescind its current policy and adopt a Stage 4 lockdown until four weeks (possibly more) after the last new case to permit a rapid, zero-risk reopening, or it will continue its present failed policy of locking down more suburbs and seeing the virus spread for month after month with continuously increasing cases. Whilst the former policy is already unnecessarily painful – with unbotched quarantine Victoria would be already at the stage of a rapid and complete reopening with zero risk of recurrence – it will cost everybody less in the long term except for the super-rich businessmen who can make profits out of their negligence, and will mean Melbourne ending its COVID-enforced isolation from the rest of Australia much sooner.

Why a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation should be Australia’s goal

Tonight, when I was having dinner with my brother and mother, my brother made a stern criticism of my talk about Australia’s sorry greenhouse gas emissions record, revealed by this table from the Climate Change Performance Index. Baḥrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkmenistan are major omissions owing to their very high per capita emissions, but the table is still useful even with them omitted and many countries with low total and per capita emissions included.

The position of Australia at the absolute bottom of this list must constitute utter shame for every Australian. Writers like Tim Flannery, Thomas Aquinas McMahon, and Gordon Orians and Antoni Milewski have shown that Australia’s ecology is:

1. shaped by soils that – at least amongst Quaternary landmasses – are uniquely ancient, weathered, nutrient-poor and vulnerable to erosion
1. the unique vulnerability to erosion is caused by extreme texture contrasts
2. these in turn are caused by clay accumulation in deep subsoil after 300 million or more years of topsoil leaching
3. most of this leaching occurred in much wetter and hotter climates than found in the Quaternary
2. demanding of extremely low energy consumption by native fauna, and extremely low nutrient requirements for native flora
3. demanding of extremely large territories for native fauna due to the extremely low density of nutritious food and the absence of nutrients that allow effective digestion of cellulose
4. in the case of aquatic organisms, shaped by uniquely high variability in runoff due to extremely low runoff coefficients and absence of baseflow where it is found in similar climates elsewhere
1. this is due to much greater absorption of water by native vegetation compared to similar climates elsewhere on the globe
2. in turn this high water absorption and low runoff component of moisture budgets is due to the need for deep, dense roots to absorb nutrients from ancient soils

These features, especially (2) demand that Australia have by far the world’s lowest per capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, not excluding the poorest tropical African nations. They also demand logically that Australia be ranked as incomparably the world’s best country in terms of climate change performance. Both of these stand exactly opposed to Australia’s uniquely bad and worsening performance over the past three decades. An acceptable performance – even factoring in that many of the highest-performing countries could reasonably have been omitted – would have required Australia completely decarbonise so early as 2005.

Following on from groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation, and the Democratic Socialist Party, I have long assumed that by expropriating the wealth and profits of Australia’s major corporate greenhouse emitters, rapid and total decarbonisation of Australia would prove easy to plan and execute, chiefly by transferring from cars and coal to renewable energy and electric mass transit, complete cessation of land clearing, and large-scale revegetation of degraded farmland with native flora.

However, this evening, my brother said I had severely neglected the impact of the meat industry, and said I did so because I enjoy eating meat despite its major impacts via greenhouse gas emissions and using Australia’s uniquely scarce water resources. Consider that the volume of water carried by all mainland Australian rivers south of the Tropic of Capricorn – draining around four and a half million square kilometres – is only four-fifths that carried by the Kaladan, a river draining an area half the size of Tasmania.

I have long held that the environmental impacts of food grown abroad are negligible vis-à-vis analogous food grown in Australia because:

1. water resources overseas average around fifteen times as intense per unit area as the water resources of Australia south of the Tropic of Capricorn
2. required storage sizes for the same total draft in the same climate in Australia are (approximately) 7.3 times as large as for Europe, East Asia, the Americas or New Zealand
1. in fact, because of Australia’s high evaporation rates during dry spells due to advection of dry air from the interior, the figure of 7.3 times larger is most definitely an understatement
3. soils in the Enriched World (extratropical northern and western hemispheres) and the younger parts of the Tropical World are almost all under 10,000 years old and are rapidly replaced when eroded or damaged by new soil
4. in contrast, the topsoil of Australia was mostly formed over 300,000,000 years ago during the Carboniferous and is not replaced if eroded or damaged: instead, the landscape is permanently denuded, gullied and/or salinised
5. Australia’s oceans have – according to on old atlas that I was given by one of my father’s sisters – less than one-tenth the animal plankton density of seas in the same latitudes of Europe, East Asia, or the Americas
6. the requirements of Australian soils for the nutrient elements in which they are severely deficient compared to all other present-day landmasses can produce ecologically dangerous eutrophication during large floods, and also make land unsuitable for native flora and fauna
7. Australia’s native trees are extremely efficient at storing carbon in the absence of large-scale bushfires, vis-à-vis shorter-lived and more easily browsed Enriched and Tropical World trees
8. climate change has already substantially aridified Australia’s major agricultural areas, and as it further does so, larger areas of sub-marginal land of high conservation value might be cleared
1. ironically, this last point is most likely to be an issue if global warming makes present conservations reserves unsuitable for the species they were proclaimed to protect

These differences are much more severe for animal foods (including fish) than for annual plant foods, and much more for annual plant foods than for perennial plant foods. Contrary to the implicit attitude of many vegetarians, non-meat animal foods are equally or more unsustainable in the Australian environment as meat itself. Milk production uses more water and nutrients than meat, and fish is so unsustainable in Australia’s warm, oligotrophic oceans that many Aboriginal groups developed absolute taboos against fish eating, but not against meat. Australia is indeed so nutrient-poor that any population density above 0.1 people per square kilometre cannot be ecologically sustained by local nutrient resources unless the diet be de jure and de facto vegan. This means no animal foods would be eaten whatsoever and that law and/or custom also mandate no animal foods be eaten. The pre-industrial human history of Australia (see here), however, reflects that a vegan diet based on local resources would be impossibly poor nutritionally.

Contrariwise, in the Enriched World production of animal foods has exceedingly small comparative impact, so veganism becomes of itself a form of consumerism that helps divert food production into more fragile lands.

The only real argument against a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation of Australia is transport energy costs. Whilst these must not be dismissed, I have generally thought that with major improvements to fuel efficiency of ocean and rail transport, and even of intercontinental air transport, these problems could certainly be overcome to a substantial degree, and that even if they were not entirely overcome the gains in terms of conservation of Australia’s land and elimination of emissions from land clearing would make it justifiable.

The complete protection of Australia’s ancient soils and uniquely structured ecosystems would give a completely new and much truer image of Australia to outsides – an image of a continent whose ecological and even climatic structure is much closer to (if not perfectly representative of) the Earth during its predominant geological history as an ice-free oligotrophic planet. This history is not known to most of the world’s population, and is not well-understood even by ecologists, but that it needs to be known there is no doubt.