Christmas Eve, way down under!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2020

Aussies combat the plague: Are you kidding? Today being Christmas Eve, we're suspending our current reports, which are too negative for such a day. We plan to finish on Saturday.

In their place, we offer a quick look at The Practices of Christmas Eve Present as being performed Down Under. 

Lindsay Knaak-Stuart is an American, but she married an Aussie. In an essay for the Washington Post, she describes the hoops she and her children had to jump through when they fled the plague by joining her husband Down There.

According to Knaak-Stuart, the Aussies don't play! Here's a sample of the way the Aussies are fighting the virus:

KNAAK-STUART (12/22/20): Getting to Australia wasn’t easy. There were many months of waiting for my partner visa to come through, canceled and rescheduled flights and, finally, a mandatory government hotel quarantine upon landing...

Seventy-two hours before flying to Australia, we were required to answer questions about our health and dietary restrictions. This info would be used to plan our quarantine stay—a “privilege” for which our family of four would pay $3,800. After the 22-hour trip from NYC to Sydney—thankfully on a flight with only 36 passengers, due to weekly passenger arrival caps—we landed like hot-spot covid celebrities, ushered in by local police to start a process with the vibes of an episode of “Homeland.”

We were first directed through a series of health and border checkpoints, then were greeted at baggage claim by additional police and members of the Australian Defense Force. They had been waiting for us, and so had the bus that was going to take us to our undisclosed quarantine location. Families were on one bus, couples and singles on another. We snaked through Sydney, our police motorcade leading the way, and finally arrived at a nondescript full-service hotel/apartments where we would be locked for 14 days and would later emerge a few pounds heavier but feeling a lot more hopeful. It was clear Australia was taking things seriously; the guards placed outside our door reinforced that message.

It was all an impressive display of high-level coordination among federal, state and local governments. We got tested on Day 2 and on Day 10. We received three meals a day, designed to be well balanced and nutritious, although they seemed to have missed the memo on taste and variety. A team of on-site doctors, nurses and psychologists called us daily to check in on our health and mental state, and when on Day 8 our 6-year-old son started struggling with it all, we received advice from the psychologist on how to help him...

Knaak-Stuart continues from there. She isn't exactly trying to make a point, and so we will:

This column made us think of a recent conversation we had with a close relative who lives in Ireland. Along the way, he stated his view of why the Covid death rate has been so high in Belgium, western Europe's overall "sick man" during the bulk of this year's pandemic.

We'll save his offhand guess about Belgium's struggle for another time. For today, we'll offer this:

Knaak-Stuart describes a massive national effort to combat the virus. In the part of the essay we've posted, she even describes "high-level coordination among federal, state and local governments." Just try to imagine that!

Knaak-Stuart describes a full-blown national effort. Her description of that nationwide effort stands in stark contrast with the jumble of approaches and non-approaches which have been taken Up Here. 

Up Here, we've seen no such thing, and this may help explain the numbers. At present, a few of the numbers actually look like this:

Covid deaths per day, per million population
Week ending December 21:
United States: 8.1
Germany: 7.8
European Union: 7.6
United Kingdom: 7.3
Australia: Less than 0.1

Amazingly, Germany's daily death rate almost equals our own at this point. Down Under, the death rate is so low that it can barely be expressed in numbers.

For what it's worth, here are a few other numbers. It seems that Belgium, at long last, has gotten things a bit more under control:

Covid deaths per day, per million population
Week ending December 21:
Slovenia: 22.0 
Bulgaria: 17.9
Belgium: 5.9
Canada: 3.0

At present, Slovenia and Bulgaria are Europe's "sick men." Canada's death rate is well less than half our own, but it's still at least thirty times the size of Australia's.

How has Australia been able to do this? As we've noted in the past, our upper-end news orgs have shown little interest in addressing such obvious questions. Up Here, statistics are extremely hard, and information is boring.

Can those Aussie numbers really be real? Does Knaak-Stuart's essay start to explain Australia's very low numbers?

Also, what enables certain nations to function on a nationwide basis? Very much in passing, our relative offered his idea. We may go there next week.

We offer one last Christmas Eve thought. Wouldn't this be the perfect year to subscribe to The Dublin Review?