Stuck in Sydney

Australia’s low vaccination rate

After five weeks of a tightening lockdown, they were not the words Sydney residents wanted to hear: the leader of New South Wales announcing another month of restrictions and telling the state to prepare for things to get worse. There was further anguish at the daily Covid case numbers, rising daily, despite strict stay at home measures.

As Gladys Berejiklian, the premier of New South Wales, told Sydney its

lockdown would continue until at least the end of August, many residents of Australia’s largest city wondered if life would return to normal the end of the year. “We know we’ve put in the hard yards for five weeks and we don’t want to waste all the good work that we’ve done by opening too early and then having the virus spread again,” said Berejiklian.

The complex, changing rules have added to a sense of confusion and exhaustion. The Delta variant is proving enduringly difficult to suppress with restrictions, and the path out of restrictions seems to lie with vaccines. Unfortunately, the vaccination rate is the second slowest among the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. After missteps by the government, Australia has stockpiles of AstraZeneca vaccines that many citizens are reluctant to take, and not enough Pfizer to go around.

Last week economists at ANZ Bank had predicted the lockdown would continue “at least until September”, Business Insider reported. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, aimed lower, saying he hoped enough people would be vaccinated by Christmas that “we would be seeing a very different Australia to what we are seeing now”.

Thousands of police and hundreds of troops have been deployed across greater Sydney to enforce tighter restrictions. The rules include leaving home only to buy food or essential goods, or for exercise, essential work or medical care.

People are not allowed to travel more than 10km from their homes. For 2 million Sydneysiders in eight “local government areas of concern” in the city’s west, there is a 5km travel limit and masks are required outdoors.

Yet over the course of a month, restrictions have not worked to bring down case numbers. Expert opinion is split on whether adopting rules used during Melbourne’s long lockdown in 2020, including a citywide mandate on face masks outdoors and curfews, would work to limit the spread in Sydney, or whether its geography, demographics and the infectiousness of the Delta variant would blunt the benefit of some measures.

Last Friday, with a slightly lower case total, Berejiklian warned infections would continue to “bounce around” and again encouraged people to get vaccinated. “It’s really important for us to get as many jabs in arms as possible because more jabs in arms means more freedom for all of us in the quicker we get vaccinated, the quicker we can live more freely,” she said.

Just under 18% of Australians have had two doses of a Covid vaccine. The country of 25 million is vaccinating only 200,000 people a day.

The Grattan Institute, a Melbourne thinktank, said this week that Australia could not abandon its strategy of bringing cases down to zero until 80% of the population had been vaccinated – something it said was possible by the end of the year only if vaccine supply issues were resolved by October.

Questions remain as to what the government is doing to increase the rate of vaccinations. A coalition of nursing organisations said that if nurse practitioners were enlisted in the rollout, all Australians could have a first dose of the vaccine within just under nine weeks, and a second dose in just under 11 weeks depending on the varying interval periods for the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.

While the rollout remains slow and the lockdown in place, employment in the state “could fall by 300,000 in a couple of months”, a Commonwealth Bank economist told the ABC.

Last week, the federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, warned that the country could fall back into recession, months after recovering from its first recession in nearly 30 years. “My expectation is that the September quarter will be negative,” said Frydenberg. “But with respect to the December quarter, that does depend to a large extent how successful NSW, our largest state economy, is in getting on top of this virus.”

‘We’ve put in the hard yards and we don’t want to waste all the work we’ve done’

2m

Number of Sydney residents restricted from travelling more than 5km from home, and ordered to wear masks outdoors

18%

Fewer than a fifth of Australians have had both jabs of a Covid vaccine, with only 200,000 people a day getting a shot