How to Succeed Against COVID-19 By Really Trying

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Australian journalist Richard Glover presents ten reasons why Australia’s campaign against COVID-19 has fared reasonably well. Here they are:

1. The bush fire experience
2. First Nations people must be given power to run their own response
3. States matter
4. It helps if people follow the rules
5. It’s important to reach across the aisle
6. You don’t have to choose between “saving lives” and “saving the economy”
7. People trust the health system
8. Make use of the police and military
9. Mobilize communities
10. Be an island

He touches on critical differences between Australia and the United States but refrains from pointing them out explicitly. I don’t know whether that’s from discretion, ignorance, or he simply takes Australia’s circumstances for granted. I’ll point some of them out much more explicitly:

1. Don’t have a long land border.
2. Be small. Australia’s population is more than an order of magnitude smaller than ours. That doesn’t just mean that the problem facing them is one-tenth as complex as the problem that faces the U. S. It means that the problem they face is 1/1000^th as complicated as the problem we face.
3. Have higher social cohesion. Australia is much more linguistically, culturally, religiously, ethnically, racially, and economically more homogeneous than the U. S. These things matter.
4. Have a government that’s worthy of trust.
5. Give partisan and political advantage a lower priority. When those are the highest priorities everything else takes a backseat.

All things considered when you take into account the enormous handicaps under which we’ve labored, we’re not doing too bad.

As much as we may need to rebuild our material infrastructure, there is an astronomically greater need to rebuild our societal infrastructure which we’ve been tearing down faster than it can be rebuilt over the period of the last 50 years.