I’m beginning to get a little concerned about the the advice the Australian government is getting. The official travel page says that there are problems with
Mainland China
Iran
Italy
Republic of Korea
and that people arriving from
Cambodia
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Japan
Singapore
Thailand
should also be self-aware.
But where is the USA on that list? Those lists don’t seem to reflect the actual number of cases arriving in Australia, which has recently included a lot of people who had been visiting the USA. And… they are clearly worried about our tourist industry, and some big events coming up, and I’d like to think that they aren’t throwing us under the bus.
I decided to stay in Japan. I can’t complete vital work projects if I am quarantined. So I can’t take that risk either going to Australia or coming back to Japan from Australia. I also don’t want to put my family at risk of infection. Bad timing, but if isolation is the best recourse then I’ll play my part in protecting against the international spread.
The Gran Prix has been canceled. The government held the line until there were people waiting at the gate, the teams blinked first, and the organization canceled the race. I think it’s pretty obvious that the government didn’t want to pay compensation for canceling the race.
NZ has announced 2-week self-quarantine for all arrivals. I’d be happy with just 3 day self-quarantine – it looks like that would catch a lot of the incoming cases, without much pain.
As people have been pointing out, cancelling when all the visitors were already here was just dumb. They’re not going to just sit in their hotel rooms - they’ll be out in the wider community doing stuff, and having just as much person-to-person contact as if they’d done it all together at the race.
When you look at the actual cases in Australia, and when they were exposed, it looks like a 3 day quarantine would have actually eliminated most of the problem. Part of this is simple mathematics: the typical incubation period is around 6 days, and number of different people you have been exposed to who could have given you the disease decrease proportionately to how long it’s been: at 13 days it’s only the people you met 13 days ago or longer that could have given you the disease, which is a smaller and smaller number of people. The actual effect of the quarantine decreases with each day.
Personally, I think they should have just banned un-quarantined travel from the USA long ago, and failing that a 5 day quarantine – and it’s nice to see that Norman Swan agrees that travel restrictions for the USA should have been introduced along with Italy and Iran. But a 3 day self-quarantine for travelers from the USA would have eliminated most of the problem.
Anyway, the NZ 14-day self-quarantine regulation for incoming travelers immediately provoked the same rule in Aus. Some may claim that was just parallel medical advice, but it looks like politics to me.