South Australia Opens its borders to Delta

Thursday November 24

A quick look at the ABC News website showed that there are now 60,000 people who have been approved to enter SA from the Covid states of NSW, Vic and ACT. That is a hell of a lot of people. The population of Adelaide, the capital of SA is about 1.3 million. 60,000 represents nearly 5% of this.

It would be interesting to know the demographics of the 60,000. What states are they from? What age groups are there? How many are children under 12? Children under 12 are not eligible to be vaccinated.

I have heard quite a number of planes arriving today. Planes have been few and far between over the last 2 years. How many people arrived today. A wild guess is at least 1000.

2 people who arrived today tested positive for Delta. One was a man who had it a few months ago and apparently not infectious. Maybe he had long Covid. The other was a young girl who was sent back to Victoria with her parents. Her South Australian grandparents are isolating. Hopefuly they will recover soon.

Australia has 3 states with significant case numbers of Covid. These are Vic, NSW and ACT. NT has a few cases and is touch or go. The so-called non-Covid states are SA, WA, Queensland and Tasmania. SA is the only non-Covid to have opened up. The other states ave adopted a more cautious attitude. The question is why has SA opened up when the other states have not?

One possibility is that WA and Queensland are ALP states while SA and Tasmania are Liberal states. Tasmania is an island and as such opening up is less relevant. The PM Scott Morrison has always been opposed to state border closers. He has said he wants all the state border restrictions removed by Christmas. That way families with members across sates can be together for Christmas and it is good for business.

Early in the pandemic there were 2 types of strategies that were considered. There was the suppression strategy which has basically designed to reduce the spread of Covid while keeping businesses and everything else open while having a minimum of restrictions. The idea was to tolerate some infections while trying to stop cases get too high. This strategy was favoured by Scott Morrison, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Bolsonara and others. As became clearer later, this strategy was not successful.

Early in the pandemic, in March 2020 when cases in Australia were doubling every 2-3 days, Scomo, as he is affectionately called, told everyone to go to the footy. Like many national leaders he did not have a good understanding of epidemiology. Forunately, he wisely realised this and left the decision making about restrictions up to people who did.

Since ample Covid vaccines have become available in Australia, has reverted to promoting his original strategy and has been constantly badgering , intimidating and haranging state premiers to follow suit. SA is a Liberal state, so doubt the SA premier is more likely to fit in with the PM than the premiers of ALP states.