The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Besha Rodell, a columnist with the Australia bureau.

This past week, I’ve had multiple stressful dreams involving my friend Debbie, who lives in Atlanta. I couldn’t figure out why until the most recent dream, in which Debbie was in Melbourne, stranded because international flights were suspended due to the coronavirus.

“That’s OK, you can just stay with us until this is over,” I told her.

I woke up awash in calm until I realized that Debbie isn’t here, she’s still in Georgia, along with many of my other closest friends. (My first newspaper job was in Atlanta, where I lived for six years.) Debbie has an autoimmune disease that makes her especially vulnerable to coronavirus.

And as of this coming week, Georgia — with a death toll of 837 as of Thursday — is relaxing its quarantine measures well ahead of expert-advised timelines, drawing criticism even from President Trump.

Meanwhile, in Australia, our extreme social distancing and lockdown measures appear to be working. This week, Damien Cave reports on Australia and New Zealand’s “rapid suppression of the coronavirus outbreak,” with only a handful of new cases reported each day:

The results are undeniable: Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve. Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,674 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world. New Zealand’s own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million.

This stands in stark contrast to the dark news coming in from the U.S.A, where more than 42,000 people have now died from coronavirus, a figure that will likely be tragically out of date by the time you read this.