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By Catherine Bennett*
australia will be ready for takeoff very soon” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison today as he announced the ban on international travel will be lifted some time next month.
Returning Australian citizens and permanent residents will be able to quarantine at home for seven days if fully vaccinated with a TGAapproved vaccine.
The recognised vaccines include those already approved for use in Australia by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson/ Janssen, as well as Sinovac and Covishield (Covishield is AstraZeneca’s vaccine made in India).
Unvaccinated returnees will still need to enter managed hotel quarantine for 14 days until Australia moves beyond Phase C of the National Plan.
Those who can’t be vaccinated, including young children and those with a medical exemption, will be counted as vaccinated for travel.
Arrival caps will also be abolished for fully vaccinated returnees.
Today’s announcement is one big step towards allowing vaccinated Australians to return home soon, as we move to a future that somewhat resembles pre-COVID life.
is seven days enough?
Home quarantine trials in South Australia and New South Wales will answer this question.
Authorities will be testing returnees and the proportion of those who are COVID-positive, as well as when they test positive, will inform decision-making. This will also be monitored on an ongoing basis once we open up and can be adjusted if it turns out a higher than acceptable number of travellers test positive between day seven and 14.
Currently, NSW data tell us less than half of 1% of returnees in hotel quarantine are testing positive. The NSW Surveillance report from August 21 shows only 4% of those positive cases were in fully vaccinated.
The low percentage of returnees who are positive will matter less anyway as Australia progressively moves towards “living with COVID” with a background rate of the virus in the community.
We know fully vaccinated people can still get infected, but at much lower rates. There’s also mounting evidence suggesting their infectious period is shorter than unvaccinated people, so they’re less likely to pass the virus on. Importantly, there’s now a better than 70% reduction in risk of having a serious infection requiring hospitalisation in all of the vaccines the TGA has recognised for international arrivals.
how will we ensure people stay home?
South Australia is currently trialling an app that uses geo-tagged facial recognition software to ensure people stay home during quarantine.
If this app proves successful it might be rolled out across Australia.
It might also include supports for other aspects of compliance, like prompts to get tested, a checklist of symptoms and other ways to check in with returnees.
Random checks by police or ADF personnel have
proven home quarantine and isolation have high levels of compliance. Something similar could also be brought in at some point if there were compliance concerns.
One thing that’s more difficult to monitor is whether other people come into the house of a person meant to be isolating. The risk of transmission to the visitor is much higher than if the returnee ventured out. But this is the same risk we currently have with isolating close contacts locally.
Ultimately the system will need to rely, in part, on trust. We know Australians are generally very compliant, and many people will be desperate to travel again and reunite with family and friends. The majority will be likely to comply with the requirements to facilitate keeping travel open.
The system will be safe enough — and that’s all we need going forward.
what aBout other household memBers?
One question yet to be answered is whether everyone else in the house has to quarantine if housing a returned traveller.
Contd. on pg 4
Contd. From pg 2
With the risk of a fully vaccinated returnee being positive very low, so too is the risk to the household. If they do return a positive test on one of their test days, their household members may also be required to quarantine. Rapid Antigen Tests might be useful for early detection of infection in these cases.
Another question is whether we will still have offshore screening, requiring a negative test prior to departure for Australia?
The finer details will emerge and probably change over time as we collect data and manage changing risks.
We’ll probably start conservatively and then gradually open things up more and more as we learn which components of risk mitigation are proportionate.
whiCh states will go First?
International travel will open to states and territories gradually as they reach 80% of over16s fully vaccinated. So we won’t have to wait until all jurisdictions have individually hit the threshold.
This is broadly in line with the national plan, but is coming probably a month or two earlier than looked possible in June. Vaccination rates, particularly in NSW, Victoria and the ACT, have been spurred on by significant COVID outbreaks. States are also assessing the distribution of vaccine coverage to ensure there are no parts of the community left behind by the time of opening.
what aBout travel BuBBles?
The Prime Minister flagged potential bubble arrangements with countries like New Zealand where there’d be no quarantine requirements. The list of such countries will likely change over time, depending on circulating variants and country risk profiles.
We’re probably heading in the direction of eventually not requiring quarantine for returnees at all, only testing. For now, it’s clear we’re moving towards a system that manages risks rather than operating with zero risk tolerance.
will ContaCt traCers Be aBle to Cope?
As fully vaccinated people contribute less to transmission and are at less risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms, all states and territories will progressively shift the risk settings that underpin contact tracing. We have used comprehensive contact tracing, casting the epidemiological net wide to ensure not one contact of a case who might have contracted the virus was missed.
The chance of someone being positive drops away the more casual the exposure. Once you no longer have to be fearful of missing even just one case, we can make the net smaller and just trace the people at highest risk.
Based on vaccination uptake rates, the ACT and NSW will likely be the first to open, followed by Victoria.
Tasmania is still tracking well but other states are lagging behind. Queensland and Western Australia will probably be the last to open their borders.
This is broadly in line with the national plan, but is coming probably a month or two earlier than looked possible in June. Vaccination rates, particularly in NSW, Victoria and the ACT, have been spurred on by significant COVID outbreaks. States are also assessing the distribution of vaccine coverage to ensure there are no parts of the community left behind by the time of opening.
what aBout travel BuBBles?
The Prime Minister flagged potential bubble arrangements with countries like New Zealand where there’d be no quarantine requirements. The list of such countries will likely change over time, depending on circulating variants and country risk profiles.
We’re probably heading in the direction of eventually not requiring quarantine for returnees at all, only testing. For now, it’s clear we’re moving towards a system that manages risks rather than operating with zero risk tolerance.
will ContaCt traCers Be aBle to Cope?
As fully vaccinated people contribute less to transmission and are at less risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms, all states and territories will progressively shift the risk settings that underpin contact tracing. We have used comprehensive contact tracing, casting the epidemiological net wide to ensure not one contact of a case who might have contracted the virus was missed.
The chance of someone being positive drops away the more casual the exposure. Once you no longer have to be fearful of missing even just one case, we can make the net smaller and just trace the people at highest risk. *Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University
Source- The Conversation, October 1, 2021
AuKus is deeper thAn just submArines
By arzan tarapore*
nuclear-powered submarines for Australia was the most eye-catching part of the announcement of ‘AUKUS’, the new trilateral security initiative joining Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The eight new boats would greatly extend the range, endurance and firepower of Australia’s submarine fleet. They would break the taboo against nuclear power in Australia. And they show that the United States and the United Kingdom are committed to strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.
But while AUKUS shows a seriousness about naval power, it shows an even greater seriousness about alliances. The trilateral initiative seeks to expand an existing alliance structure — the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — into the field of leading-edge defence technology and industry. AUKUS goes much deeper than submarines — but it cannot do everything.
The Biden administration promised to prioritise strategic competition with China, and to reinvigorate Washington’s alliances. Progress on this has been positive, but incremental. Aside from some high-level visits, Biden’s most notable initiative was elevating the Quad — comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States — to the summit level.
AUKUS is qualitatively different. The submarine deal alone enmeshes the United States and United Kingdom into the region for decades. But more ambitiously, beyond submarines, AUKUS seeks to win the technology competition with China by pooling resources and integrating supply chains for defence-related science, industry, and supply chains. This will be the decades-long and multifaceted purpose of AUKUS — a transnational project racing to seize advantages in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cyber technology.
This kind of technology integration is a radical idea. Countries often share military technology, but some technologies are more highly prized than others. Nuclear technology is in a class of its own. The United States has only shared its nuclear submarine technology with the United Kingdom — at the height of the Cold War. The United States is now so animated by competition with China that it will share the technology with one more country, Australia, for the first time in decades.
The technologies at the heart of AUKUS are at the cutting edge of scientific research, and promise to deliver unprecedented advantages in military power. The submarine project will likely serve as a forcing function to drive much of this new collaboration. It is still unclear how much of the submarines’ nuclear propulsion technology will be shared with Australia, but the Australian defence community will almost certainly gain access to the submarines’ other state-of-the-art technologies, including sensors and data-processing systems for maritime domain awareness and tracking and evading adversary forces.
What makes the United Kingdom and Australia Washington’s most valued technology partners? They are members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which over decades has developed joint systems, organisations and processes for sharing collection responsibilities and intelligence data.
Less tangibly, but at least as importantly, this has cultivated mutual trust and habits of cooperation, including through the past two decades combating terrorism and fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Compared to the other Five Eyes members, Canada and New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia are also demonstrably more committed to upholding the strategic vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.
AUKUS’s radical integration could only be possible among Five Eyes partners because AUKUS will be working on extremely sensitive intelligencerelated technologies that Washington would only entrust to its closest intelligence partners. AUKUS’s stated technology priorities — artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cyber — are technologies that are at the forefront of emerging intelligence capabilities. Little wonder that several Australian intelligence chiefs have been front and centre explaining AUKUS to Australia’s other strategic partners.
This is probably also why France was excluded from the grouping, prompting a sudden and ugly diplomatic spat. Despite its likeminded interests in the region, and despite its military power and activism, France does not share the systems and relationships that define the Five Eyes. In the years to come, AUKUS will gain greater regional acceptance and utility if it figures out how to share some of its prized defence technology and data with other partners, including France and others in the region.
AUKUS may represent the closest integration among partners, but it cannot do everything, and it cannot replace other groupings. The region requires a new security architecture, but unlike Cold War umbrellas like NATO, this architecture will comprise multiple, overlapping groupings, each with different roles and strengths. AUKUS’s technology-sharing mission is invaluable, but it is limited.
Different groupings serve different purposes. The Quad will remain critical for coordinating the strategic policies of China’s most powerful regional competitors, for presenting a common vision of regional order, and for acting as the nucleus for broader cooperation when needed. At its first in-person summit last week, the Quad reiterated its broad vision of promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific. And as the Indian government recently declared, AUKUS does not compete with or undermine the Quad.
Other partners like France and India cannot be full members of AUKUS, but they are indispensable in other roles that AUKUS cannot replicate. They each have significant military power, valuable geographic advantages and abiding networks of influence. And they are each vigorously engaged in the region, including through bilateral and trilateral partnerships with Australia.
The members of AUKUS should therefore work hard to repair their relationships with France because broad overlapping partnerships are a key asset in strategic competition with China. But not all regional challenges require a broad, inclusive approach. AUKUS’s declared objectives are radical — unseen in the firmament of US alliances, and certainly unseen in the region — and only possible precisely because the initiative is so exclusive.
*Arzan Tarapore is a Research Scholar on South Asia in the Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, Washington. - The views in the article are that of the author.
Source- eastasiaforum.org, 29 September 2021.(Under Creative Commons Licence)
