(C) Fairness & Accuracy in Media 
This story was originally published by Fairness & Accuracy in Media  and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



A Covid Crisis or New Normal? Depends if It’s Australia or US [1]

['Neil Demause', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Vertical-Align Middle .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar Is .Alignleft .Alignright']

Date: 2020-10-01 18:43:20+00:00

The Australian state of Victoria declared a “state of disaster” over Covid-19 on August 2, sending the nation’s second-most-populous region, which includes the city of Melbourne, back into a strict lockdown. Nonessential businesses were closed for six weeks, the government imposed a nightly 8 pm curfew, and during daylight hours, trips outside the house were strictly limited: In metropolitan Melbourne, only one person per household will be allowed to leave their homes at any time to pick up essential goods, and no one can travel more than five kilometers from their home.

These extreme measures—reminiscent of lockdowns put in place in the spring in Italy and Spain as those nations battled virus surges—were necessary to stem a massive outbreak in and around Australia’s second-largest city, reported US and international news outlets. “Australia’s Melbourne Clamps Down in Frantic Race to Curb Virus,” declared the New York Times headline on a Reuters wire story (8/3/20). The renewed lockdown after a two-month-plus stretch of low infection rates in Australia “underscores how quickly early success in containing the virus can unravel,” noted CNN (8/3/20).

All of this was true, but it also elided one important piece of information: If Victoria were a US state, its infection rate would have been one of the lowest in the nation.

The “bleak Covid-19 figures” in Victoria, as CNN (8/2/20) reported, peaked at 671 new infections in one day at the start of August. That’s indeed a huge rise in infections, up from 77 a day a month earlier (New York Times, 7/2/20), a figure that itself was seen as an alarming uptick at the time. In a state of 6.6 million people, that peak represented an infection rate of 102 people per day per million residents, according to Johns Hopkins tracking data, more than five times Australia’s overall national rate.

Victoria’s disaster, though, paled in comparison to typical infection rates across the United States. At the beginning of August, 34 out of 50 states had higher daily per capita infection rates (calculated as one-week rolling averages) than the Australian hot spot.

At the top of the table, Florida’s infection rate stood at 421 new cases per day per million residents, even as observers expressed concerns that case rates could be undercounted, thanks to new self-testing centers that could result in numerous false negatives. And far from imposing lockdowns, most of these states kept reopening plans in place; in all of Florida except for Miami-Dade County, restaurants even remained open for indoor dining, though taking off masks to eat and talk in a confined indoor space is a perfect breeding ground for Covid infection (Wall Street Journal, 7/3/20).

While this might be the most important lesson for US readers—a major Australian city underwent near-total lockdown for infection rates that in the US can’t even get elected officials to require mask-wearing—virtually none of the media coverage made this comparison. Among the few exceptions: Forbes contributor Bruce Y. Lee (8/2/20) noted that even as cases surged across multiple US states, Victoria’s lockdown “seems much more aggressive than the measures currently being implemented in most of the US,” while Mother Jones (8/2/20) reported on Donald Trump’s tweet that “virus breakouts” were happening even in “nations which were thought to have done a great job” by noting that “in Australia, just 1 in 1,445 people have contracted the coronavirus, according to the New York Times. In the US, it’s 1 in 71.”

One of the disappointing hallmarks of US media coverage of the pandemic has been the way it’s treated the course of the virus overseas as dispatches from another planet, with little relevance for how our own national and state leaders should be fighting to prevent outbreaks (FAIR.org, 4/8/20). Ameri- can exceptionalism is a common media tic (FAIR.org, 5/16/16, 2/9/17, 6/13/18), of course, but it’s especially short-sighted at a time when we need to learn what works and what doesn’t by looking everywhere—even at nations that normally get relegated to wire-service reports unless they’re literally on fire.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://fair.org/home/a-covid-crisis-or-new-normal-depends-if-its-australia-or-us/

Published and (C) by Fairness & Accuracy in Media 
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/fair/