Quote:
Originally Posted by leesa
which ones were ignored? I'm not sure that they can even be compared as it's a vastly different world now? Surely back then most people arrived by boat and had effectively quarantined during their journey.  Now it's a couple of hours for people to get into the country and that opens up a lot more opportunity for disease to come in internationally. How was contact tracing even achieved back then? Perhaps it wasn't possible? |
You said “Australia hasn’t had a pandemic before”, and now you’re querying which lessons were not learned in the previous pandemic?
Travel times might be different now, but protection against contagion isn’t. The previous pandemic did reach Australia (estimated 15,000 deaths), so your point about long journey times on ships serving as effective quarantine doesn’t hold. And that’s simply because passengers don’t catch the flu all at the same time at the beginning of the trip.
As an example of a lesson not learned, more than one year after the pandemic started, there was no law requiring front line workers to wear masks. Eg. a limousine drivers ferrying international visitors around. Prevention.
Contract tracing may not have been done back then, and while it speeds up the process to suppress new outbreaks, it is reactive rather than proactive.