This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

Australia should immediately close schools and cancel mass events, the federal opposition has said, arguing the “public health emergency” requires urgent, even “draconion” action.

Shadow cabinet minister Bill Shorten said Australia needed to implement social distancing “not in weeks and months but in days”.

“The only way to make sure this pandemic is not worse than it otherwise could be is to have more drastic social distancing measures,” he told Sky News.

“Singapore and Japan and parts of China, they are putting in more draconian reactions. As a result it would appear that some of their pandemic numbers are not going to be as bad as other countries who are doing too little too late.”

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Shorten demurred on the question of Melbourne’s Formula One Grand Prix, saying it was “starting already today”.

Enforced “social distancing” – the closure of schools, universities, workplaces and cancelling of mass events – appears inevitable in Australia.

Quick guide Coronavirus advice for Australia Show Hide What are the common symptoms of Covid-19? Fever

Dry cough

Fatigue

Muscle aches and pains When should I get tested? The current national advice is to get tested if you:

are experiencing the symptoms above, and

have travelled overseas recently (within the past 14 days); or

have been in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 Help lines The national coronavirus health information hotline is 1800 020 080.

The federal health department has a coronavirus health alert website. The state health department websites and contact numbers are:

NSW – 1300 066 055

Victoria – 1800 675 398

Queensland – 13 HEALTH or 13 432 584

South Australia – 1300 232 272

Western Australia – 1300 62 32 92

Tasmania – 1800 671 738

ACT – Business hours: 02 5124 9213, after hours: 02 9962 4155

Northern Territory – 08 8922 8044

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, has been the most forthright in forecasting this, saying earlier this week, “we are going to reach a phase where there is such significant transmission of this virus … that we will need to take extreme measures”.

“Part of that plan is the inevitability that we will get to the point that rather than one school being closed, all of our schools will be closed,” he said.

“Rather than people simply distancing themselves and quarantining themselves, we may have entire sectors, entire workforces, where people are working from home.”

But public health experts are arguing governments around Australia need to be enforcing these measures sooner, rather than waiting for the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic to worsen.

Quick guide Coronavirus advice for Australia Show Hide What are the common symptoms of Covid-19? Fever

Dry cough

Fatigue

Muscle aches and pains When should I get tested? The current national advice is to get tested if you:

are experiencing the symptoms above, and

have travelled overseas recently (within the past 14 days); or

have been in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 Help lines The national coronavirus health information hotline is 1800 020 080.

The federal health department has a coronavirus health alert website. The state health department websites and contact numbers are:

NSW – 1300 066 055

Victoria – 1800 675 398

Queensland – 13 HEALTH or 13 432 584

South Australia – 1300 232 272

Western Australia – 1300 62 32 92

Tasmania – 1800 671 738

ACT – Business hours: 02 5124 9213, after hours: 02 9962 4155

Northern Territory – 08 8922 8044

They have warned consistently that Covid-19 has the potential – unchecked – to spread exponentially “gradually, and then suddenly”.

Successive bodies of research suggest the sooner social distancing measures are implemented the more effective they are, and that leaving them too late can have catastrophic consequences.

China – the centre of the global pandemic – had suffered more than 114,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 to the end of February 2020.

But modelling by population mapping group WorldPop at the University of Southampton suggests that figure would have been 67 times higher – more than 7 million infections – without interventions such as early detection, isolation of the infected, and travel restrictions.

But if the interventions could have been brought in a week earlier, 66% fewer people would have been infected, the analysis found. The same measures brought in three weeks earlier could have reduced cases by 95%.

“From a purely scientific standpoint, putting in place a combination of interventions as early as possible is the best way to slow spread and reduce outbreak size,” Prof Andrew Tatem, at the University of Southampton, said.

The WorldPop models simulated different outbreak scenarios in cities in mainland China. The models reveal how combinations of interventions, and when they are introduced, affects the speed and transmission of the disease.

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“Of the three types of intervention we looked at, the early detection and isolation of cases likely had the strongest impact, and this is something that seems to have been in place early and been done effectively in the UK, compared with other countries such as the US,” Tatem said.

“The other two types of interventions – social distancing and travel restrictions – I think do need to be looked at seriously in the coming days.”

The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that early detection and isolation of cases had the largest impact in reducing cases. It also found that social distancing, such as cancelling large public events, working from home and closing schools, were predicted to have a much greater impact on containing the virus than travel restrictions.

The chief executive of the Grattan Institute, John Daley, said of the countries with more than 100 confirmed cases of Covid-19, there were two distinct “camps emerging: countries that saw an exponential and uncontrolled spread of the disease (such as China, Italy and Iran), and those who have maintained a managed caseload (Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong).

He said Australia would need to act soon to keep its caseload manageable.

Italy was slow to implement containment measures, and their enforcement has been weaker. The virus has spread exponentially in that country.

“It took Italy around two weeks to go from having fewer than 100 diagnosed cases of coronavirus to having nearly 10,000 cases,” Daley said.

“The health system in the richest part of Italy is now struggling to cope with the load. The terrifying maths of exponential growth can see pandemics spread very, very fast. The rate at which the virus spread in Italy is not an outlier – it spread at a startlingly similar pace in Iran, South Korea and China.”

Daley said Australia could choose to enforce social distancing measures now, or be forced to later on.

“Australia can slow or stop the spread of the virus now by adopting social distancing measures that will have a real economic cost. One alternative is to adopt social distancing measures later with an even higher economic cost. The other alternative is to let the virus run its course, which will probably have a very high human cost in shortened lives, particularly of the elderly, and carries the risk of significant social breakdown.”

Other countries are beginning to forcibly impose social distancing measures already.

Denmark went from 55 coronavirus cases on Monday to 514 by Wednesday. The government has ordered all kindergartens, schools and universities to close for a fortnight and public servants in non-essential roles to stay home.

Spain has so far confirmed 1,646 cases of the virus – 782 of them in the Madrid region – and 35 deaths. Nurseries, schools and universities closed on Tuesday and will remain shut until 23 March.

India has suspended all tourist visas until 15 April in a bid to slow the import of the disease. All arrivals into Israel are required to self-quarantine for 14 days, and the Italian government has ordered all retailers, except for food stores and pharmacies, to close.

Controversially, the Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix is still set to go ahead – unchanged – this weekend despite three team members from the McLaren and Haas teams being quarantined with fever symptoms. The next grand prix, in Bahrain, will be held behind closed doors, and China’s race has already been postponed.

“We have taken an extraordinarily big risk in order to hold a car race,” Daley said.

“This risks taking us from a situation where we had virtually no community transmission to one where we are forced to shut down a lot of community activities to prevent a lot of people from dying.”

Melbourne anaesthetist Dr Pieter Peach said Victoria needed to cancel the Grand Prix. “This is a public health emergency in the making that we can stop,” he said online. “340,000 people congregating and taking Covid19 home to their families. We will be snowed under in our hospitals trying to save your lives with limited resources.”

He said the experience of Italy’s delayed response to the Covid-19 outbreak demonstrated how quickly the pandemic could spread.

“Inaction is not an option. I understand there are economic implications on either side, but frontline clinicians like myself are going to be the ones dealing with the horrific scenarios our Italian colleagues are warning us to avoid.”

The president of the Australian Medical Association Victoria, associate professor Julian Rait, said the organisation did have “reservations about such a large public gathering being held during the escalation phase of this epidemic”.

The director general of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said his organisation had “called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action.

“We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.”

Tedros said all countries could still alter the course of the pandemic within their borders, and, as a consequence, globally.

“If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission.”

Tedros said several countries had demonstrated that the virus could be suppressed and controlled.

“The challenge for many countries who are now dealing with large clusters or community transmission is not whether they can do the same – it’s whether they will. Some countries are struggling with a lack of capacity. Some countries are struggling with a lack of resources. Some countries are struggling with a lack of resolve.”

The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, is poised to move Britain to a critical new phase of the coronavirus action plan on Thursday, paving the way for social distancing, a day after the UK recorded its biggest single-day increase in Covid-19 cases.

The UK government’s Cobra emergency committee is expected to approve a decision to move the UK from a “contain” phase of coronavirus response to “delay”.

The delay phase of the plan involves much of the same advice to people as the contain phase, including washing hands, quarantining and testing.

But the government’s coronavirus plan also states that possible actions include “population distancing strategies such as school closures, encouraging greater home working, reducing the number of large-scale gatherings”.