Early action is required to minimise the impact of Covid-19

A well researched and explained article has been circulating on Medium from Tomas Pueyo walking through why decisive early action is required in the fight against Covid-19.

Waiting until your healthcare system is overwhelmed "is what drives a system to have a fatality rate of ~4% instead of ~0.5%. If you want your city or your country to be part of the 4%, don’t do anything today."

So while it might seem like the government is overreacting, the fact that, in Australia at least, they seem to be increasingly following best practice as recommended by health experts, is extremely encouraging and should provide confidence.

Confidence in governments and leaders is one of the things we need right now. Certainly the situation in America also proves this point but unfortunately in the opposite direction.

Relatedly, Katharine Murphy has penned an article on the somewhat surprising u-turn of the Coalition in producing a Labor GFC-style stimulus package.

"This stimulus package suggests to me that the technocrats, both in the political and bureaucratic class, are still in the fight."

This doesn't change the fact that for quite a long time before the current shocks of the bushfires and the pandemic many people were calling on the government to more actively manage the economy. Instead the government single-mindedly pushed for a headline-grabbing surplus while leaving a situation where "chronic weakness left us exposed to any adverse shock".

While as Scott Morrison is very keen to point out, no one could have foreseen a novel coronavirus that causes a disease called COVID-19 coming out of Wuhan China and spreading around the world, but the risks were there that something would come along to test a weak economy.

Still what is encouraging is that in this time of crisis, Australia's leaders have turned to experts - both medical and economic - for the best advice. If these measures work - which hopefully they do - then there will be people who say the government overreacted and damaged the economy more than was necessary. It might be somewhat ironic for the Coalition given their decade panning Labor's response to the GFC but in the end if it saves lives and maybe even prevents a deep and prolonged recession, then they should be commended for it.