Australia and New Zealand Contained COVID-19. How Did They Do It?

13 min readNov 20, 2020

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OnNovember 1, the world recorded over 573,000 new cases of COVID-19 and 7,512 deaths. The U.K., with nearly 25,000 new cases, entered a four-week lockdown. France, which had gone into a lockdown two days before, recorded nearly 50,000. The U.S., in the frenzy of the final week of a presidential election, recorded 100,000 new cases in a single day for the very first time while reports were coming out of the virus’ “uncontrolled spread” in over 40 states. Canada, where the pandemic was more contained, still recorded 3,457 new cases. Much of the northern hemisphere is facing a grim winter.

Half a world away, the story was surprisingly different.

On the same day, the first of November, Australia, a country of around 25 million people, recorded five new COVID-19 cases and no new deaths. New Zealand, with around five million people, recorded two new cases and no deaths. Even more surprisingly, Australia and the U.K. had been in a similar situation three months earlier. Back on July 30, Australia recorded 721 cases against the U.K.’s 846, an alarming figure given the U.K. has two and a half times as many people as its former colony.

How did Australia and New Zealand contain the pandemic?

For starters, they enjoy certain natural advantages. Both countries are geographically isolated, without international land borders. Both have dispersed populations and a low overall population density. Australia is around the size of Europe or America’s contiguous 48 states, with fewer people than the Netherlands or Texas. New Zealand is a little smaller than Italy or Nevada, and has a similar population to Ireland or Alabama.

Another factor is that both countries came into the pandemic with solid economies and relatively low public debt. Prior to 2020, the Australian economy had not been in recession since 1992. Both had sound public health systems.

But both also built on their advantages with the effective use of temporary lockdowns, combined with longer-term measures such as masks, mass testing, and contact tracing. In the Australian state of Victoria, in particular, the virus was contained even after community transmission became widespread. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see both the costs and benefits of their respective strategies.

New Zealand’s Elimination Strategy

When the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in New Zealand on February 28, 2020, the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern was coming to the end of its first term in office and facing an election in October. Ardern knew that, whatever approach her government took to managing the virus, she would not need to wait long to know the voters’ verdict.

On March 19, as the total number of cases jumped from 20 to 28, New Zealand closed its borders to non-residents. But the virus was in the community and cases were soon growing exponentially in all parts of the country. On March 25, the government decided to take advantage of New Zealand’s small size and geographic isolation to go for a strategy of complete elimination.

Unlike most other countries, New Zealand would not try to contain the virus and “flatten the curve” (mitigation), but rather eradicate it altogether (elimination). It was both a high-risk and high-reward strategy. High risk because it would require a strict, sustained, nation-wide lockdown, potentially provoking a devastating blow to the economy, all the while providing no guarantee the virus would be completely eliminated. But high-reward because if it succeeded all restrictions would be removed and life could return to normal.

The government decided to take the risk. As the editorial of the New Zealand Medical Journal argued on April 3, “…COVID-19 is not pandemic influenza. The potential to contain it has not been adequately appreciated.”

On March 25, New Zealand went into a nation-wide lockdown, one of the toughest imposed anywhere in the world. All non-essential businesses, including take-out restaurants, were closed. Gatherings, including weddings and funerals, were banned. People were limited to a “bubble” of close contacts and their local area. “I say to all New Zealanders: the government will do all it can to protect you” the prime minister said in a national address. “Now I’m asking you to do everything you can to protect all of us.”

The hard lockdown continued until April 27, when the government began to ease restrictions. Over the next month, the number of cases dropped to zero. On June 8, the government declared that COVID-19 had been eliminated and removed all internal restrictions.

Unsurprisingly, the lockdown had an immediate economic cost, with the country’s GDP contracting 12.2 percent in the March-June quarter, compared to an average fall of 10.6 percent across the OECD. But New Zealand did better economically than the U.K., which saw a drop in GDP across the same period of nearly 20 percent.

There have been further outbreaks of COVID in New Zealand, mostly connected with New Zealanders returning from overseas. One outbreak in Auckland in August forced the city back into lockdown.

In general, though, the elimination strategy has worked. Since the start of June, New Zealand has been surprisingly (by world standards) normal. Anyone watching international rugby on TV in October saw scenes of packed stadiums without a mask in sight. A total of 25 New Zealanders have died of COVID-19 to date.

Australia’s Suppression Strategy

The situation in Australia has been more complicated. Most of the domestic COVID-19 response fell to the governments of the six states and two territories, which are responsible for policing, healthcare, education, and front-line disaster management.

When the country’s first COVID-19 case was recorded in Melbourne on January 25, the Labor Party was in government in Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and the Australian Capital Territory, and the right-of-center Liberal-National Party Coalition in government in New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, and federally.

Australia was still coming to terms with a devastating bushfire season up and down the East Coast. However, once the seriousness of the pandemic became clear, the federal government formed a national cabinet incorporating the leaders of all nine governments on March 13 and closed its borders to non-residents on March 20. To the satisfaction of most Australians, the parties showed a willingness to co-operate, although partisan faultlines re-emerged as the crisis dragged on.

Australia now faced the same choice as New Zealand — suppress the virus or eliminate it? In contrast to its neighbor, the Australian national cabinet decided that the elimination strategy was too risky. Instead, Australia would pursue a strategy of “aggressive suppression,” aiming to identify and isolate all cases.

From March 15 onwards, the state and territory governments began introducing restrictions similar to those in North America and Europe. The federal government introduced a series of economic measures to support businesses and employees through lockdown. There were two peaks — 537 new cases on March 22, and 528 on March 29 — after which numbers steadily fell. Total active cases peaked at 4,935 on April 4.

From March 24, states began to close their borders to non-residents and compel interstate arrivals to quarantine. This was easier than it would have been in countries like the United States or Germany, as Australia’s state borders rarely run through or near metropolitan areas. The states then went on a testing blitz, administering tests to more than half a million people between them by the end of April. The federal government launched an app to more easily trace contacts of positive tests. Australia took a hit of around 9 percent of GDP in the March-June quarter, similar to the United States and less than the OECD average.

Between external and internal border closures, lockdowns, quarantine, testing, and contact tracing, the pandemic had been heavily suppressed by May. By the start of winter, there was effectively no community transmission in Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia, the Northern Territory, and the Australian Capital Territory. Restrictions began to ease across the country. Then the strategy appeared to go completely off the rails.

Containing Australia’s Second Wave

International travelers returning to Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, were quarantined in hotels for two weeks where they were guarded by private security contractors hired and managed by the state of Victoria. We will not know exactly what went wrong with the scheme until an inquiry hands down its final report in December, but the Victorian government has given hints. Premier Daniel Andrews spoke of “his very clear suspicions” that “a number of staff who, despite knowing about infection control protocols, have decided to make a number of errors.” Whatever happened, there was unacceptably close contact between security guards and quarantined travelers, and this allowed COVID-19 to spread into the community.

The state of Victoria, and the Melbourne metropolitan area, where most Victorians live, saw a second wave of cases. In particular, the government struggled to deal with the spread in Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs, with large non-English-speaking populations. By late July, COVID-19 was out of control in the city — and worse, it was spreading in care homes for the elderly. On July 7, the Victorian government sent the Melbourne metropolitan area, home to more than five million people, back into hard lockdown.

Melbourne’s 112-day lockdown was one of the longest and strictest of 2020. Unlike in New Zealand, take-out restaurants remained open. But during the peak of the Melbourne lockdown, residents could not be more than five kilometers from their homes nor leave their homes between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. except for a few established reasons, nor could they be outside for exercise for more than an hour a day. Face masks were made mandatory in public and visiting other people in their homes was banned. Strict border controls were imposed between Victoria and neighboring New South Wales and South Australia, and Melbourne was wrapped in a “ring of steel” — a series of military and police checkpoints to restrict access to and from the city.

As in New Zealand, the hard lockdown drove cases down. Australia’s second wave peaked at 721 new cases on July 30. Most were in Victoria, but some stubborn community transmission remained in New South Wales, particularly in metropolitan Sydney. From there, the cases began to trend downwards. On Monday, October 26, the residents of Melbourne celebrated (as far as restrictions allowed) “doughnut day” — zero new cases for the first time since June. By November 17, Victoria had recorded 18 straight days without known community transmission of the virus. With improved contact tracing and the ability to isolate outbreaks, the Victorian government was comfortable lifting restrictions. Victoria is currently transitioning out of its remaining restrictions towards “COVID normal.”

To other parts of the world, some aspects of the Australian lockdown have seemed over the top. Earlier this morning, a tweet that showed an interaction between a woman and the police went viral because it conveyed excessively restrictive guidelines.

Then again, thanks to the effectiveness of the hard lockdowns, the states are in the process of re-opening their borders, and a travel bubble is being established between Australia and New Zealand.

Lessons

The pandemic is far from over, and the experience of 2020 has shown us that outbreaks can happen anywhere and at any time, even in places where the virus had been brought under control.

New Zealand has come as close to eliminating COVID-19 as is possible in a pre-vaccine world. A number of other countries and territories have done so, including Iceland, but none more populous.

Australia has not eliminated the virus, and the national cabinet remains committed to a suppression rather than an elimination strategy. However, it is clear individual states and territories are pushing for effective elimination. If Australia succeeds, it will be by far the largest and most populous country to eliminate the virus. At the time of writing, 907 Australians have died of COVID, a death rate of 35 per million people. That is enviable compared to Europe, though significantly worse than countries like Singapore, South Korea, and China, which managed early and effective control and death rates of 10 per million or less. But no city outside China managed to bring a second wave under control as effectively as Melbourne did. By comparison, the Chilean capital of Santiago was locked down for six months, but Chile remains one of the world’s worst-hit countries with over 700 deaths per million.

Australia and New Zealand showed that hard lockdowns can bring the virus under control in the short term. The lockdowns were both expensive and politically challenging, and both countries saw anti-lockdown protests (and in Victoria, an anti-lockdown lawsuit). In politics, the English-speaking world is an American colony, so these protests closely followed similar events in the U.S. (as did Black Lives Matter protests in June). However, New Zealanders and Australians both generally approved of their governments’ performances.

On October 17, the Ardern Government in New Zealand was re-elected in a historic landslide. Governments in the Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory, and Queensland faced voters in 2020 and were comfortably re-elected. Opinion polls showed strong approval for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. In spite of their happy-go-lucky reputation, Australians are among the most rule-abiding people in the world. Australia has compulsory voting, mandatory bike helmet laws, and restrictions against public drinking and smoking which would not be tolerated in many European countries.

But lockdowns, even if they work, are a temporary fix. The future of COVID-19 control in Australia and New Zealand, as in the rest of the world, lies in measures such as social distancing, targeted risk-based restrictions, prudent use of masks, and contact tracing.

Australia and New Zealand made use of their geographical, political, and economic advantages, but their governments also responded effectively to the crisis. Their response to the pandemic was praised by Anthony Fauci. Then again, COVID-19 is a wicked enemy, and any celebration of victory over it is premature. After I finished this article, South Australia was pushed back into a six-day lockdown to attempt to contain an outbreak in its early stages. But our understanding of how to fight it keep improving, which leaves open the prospect of a brighter future worldwide.

Australia and New Zealand Contained COVID-19. How Did They Do It?

New Zealand’s Elimination Strategy

Australia’s Suppression Strategy

Containing Australia’s Second Wave

Lessons

Written by Healthinfo