Compared with most other countries, Australia was relatively unscathed by the pandemic, although its health results were achieved by severe measures, including lockdowns and border closures.
Scott Morrison has a figure to convey just how well we’ve done: 40,000 lives saved.
But how is this calculated, is it the whole story and who gets the credit for this boast?
Where does the figure come from?
Morrison has been using the figure since about mid-December, when he explained it was “based on the average [number of deaths] in the OECD”.
Associate prof James Wood, a mathematician in the University of NSW school of public health, told Guardian Australia the claim was “accurate”.
In 2020 and 2021, 0.15% of the population in OECD countries died of Covid which, if applied to the Australian population, is about 40,000, he said.
Is this the whole story?
The first thing to note is that the OECD may not be the best guide to measure Australia’s Covid response.
Wood noted the OECD’s death rate is dragged up by the US, and by “middle income countries” such as Mexico and Poland, which have “had a pretty bad experience”. The latter are not among the countries we usually compare ourselves to on health outcomes.
“Even Sweden, with its much maligned Covid response, is significantly below the OECD average of deaths,” he said.
Dr Michael Lydeamore, an infectious disease modeller from Monash University, said it was a “reasonably valid claim” given Australia’s “very good pandemic response”.
He noted Australia was helped by its geography. “To have a period where there is no Covid in the country at all, you can only do that if people are either not coming in or subject to very strict quarantine, which was only possible because we’re an island nation,” he said.
Past success no guide to future
The second thing to note is: the 40,000 figure only compares 2020 and 2021, not 2022, a year in which hospitalisations and deaths increased significantly due to eased restrictions despite very high rates of vaccination.
Wood said the results would be “very different” in 2022, and Australia would be “much closer to the OECD average” because Covid has had a “fairly similar impact” once restrictions were eased.
About two-thirds (4,309) of Australia’s total deaths from Covid (6,562) have occurred in 2022.
Prof Nancy Baxter, the head of the University of Melbourne’s school of population health and clinical epidemiologist, said use of the figure “makes it seem like past success is a predictor of future success”.
“What we’ve seen with Omicron and the loosening of restrictions is a lot of unnecessary deaths and hospitalisations,” she said. Baxter cited mask mandates, working from home and better ventilation as policy settings that could have saved lives.
Baxter argued the figure also “fails to acknowledge any potential to do better: a faster vaccine rollout could have saved a lot of grief”.
Baxter noted the commonwealth “set priorities for vaccination that were entirely sensible – it just didn’t enact anything that would make that happen”, leaving Indigenous Australians, aged care residents and people with disabilities behind.
Indigenous Australians contracted the Delta strain at double the rates of non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous vaccination rates (82% of those aged 12 and over) still lag the rest of the population, and 105 Indigenous people have died since the start of the pandemic.
Who gets the credit?
Lydeamore said it was “difficult to attribute blame or credit” for Covid policies, as some were federal (the national border), some state (lockdowns and state borders) and some shared responsibilities (such as aged care). “The whole system has to work together.”
Baxter said it was “questionable” for the commonwealth to be taking credit, because many of the policy levers were activated by states, such as lockdowns, to make up for federal “deficiencies”.
“Because our vaccine rollout was so slow that necessitated long lockdowns in Victoria and NSW that could have been avoided.”
Verdict
Morrison’s figure is accurate but it obscures Australia’s more recent Covid deaths.
Australia’s health outcomes during Covid were excellent, but it’s not a commonwealth government success story, it’s a federal one.
