takes this business of civil liberties to a place which doesn’t necessarily take into consideration the greater community,” she said. Her daughter works at a university in Ohio where students who had tested positive for Covid were found to be hosting a party a few days later. Judi Levine, an Australian producer who had returned from Los Angeles for a project, told me she was less appalled by the rules in Australia than by the way Americans had behaved. Traveling through nearly all of it in August after 14 days of quarantine 2,000 miles away near Darwin, I heard two refrains about Covid: “We’ve been so lucky” and “It’s because we’re so compliant.” It combines a vast, red Mars-like landscape in the north and east, rich in minerals, with a fertile southwestern coastal section that includes the city of Perth and the wine and surfing region of Margaret River. Western Australia is roughly six times the size of California, but it has just 2.7 million people. Epidemics are a test of society’s commitment to the greater good, they argue, and if any country has failed, it’s the United States, not Australia. In both, I heard the same message - critics need to reimagine freedom not as the personal autonomy that Americans cherish but rather as a collective right with responsibilities. To understand why, I explored both Australias, the one with Covid, where roughly half the country’s population is trapped at home, and the one that has so far managed to keep it out.
Personality Changes: New research suggests that Covid's disruption of social rituals and rites of passage have made people less extroverted, creative, agreeable and conscientious.But fewer are getting booster shots, surveys indicate.
#AUSTRALIA LOCKDOWN 2021 SERIES#
A Decline Among Seniors: Americans over 65 remain the demographic most likely to have received the original series of Covid vaccinations.Updated Boosters for Kids: The Food and Drug Administration broadened access to updated Covid booster shots to include children as young as 5.Warnings of a ‘Tripledemic’: An expected winter rise in Covid cases appears poised to collide with a resurgent flu season and a third pathogen straining pediatric hospitals in some states.To some American conservatives, Australia has even become the world’s largest prison - its citizens all but barred from leaving or returning to the country, with governments reflexively locking people in their homes at any sign of the virus. The world has come to see the country through that lens - through the actions of its blinkered politicians.
“There is an explicit insularity and parochialism that now dictates debate.” “We might be looking at the country turning the clock back on itself,” said Tim Soutphommasane, a political theorist at the University of Sydney. But the road ahead may not be smooth - as shown by protests this week over a vaccine mandate - and state leaders are still insisting that they will go it alone. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thrown his weight behind a plan to reopen when 80 percent of adults are fully vaccinated.
Some states are trying desperately to hold on to what worked before, while New South Wales and Victoria, home to the country’s biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are being forced by Delta outbreaks to find a more nuanced path forward. The confidence and pride of 2020, when lockdowns and isolation brought Covid outbreaks to heel, have been replaced by doubt, fatigue and a bitter battle over how much freedom or risk should be allowed in a Delta-defined future.
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