10 Reasons the United States Couldn't Have Done Australia's Covid Response

You fight the pandemic with the country you have, not the country you wish you had.

This morning, liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias published an interesting — though contradictory at times — list of 17 thoughts about the United States’ response to the Covid pandemic.

In the piece, he seems to suggest former President Donald Trump could have deployed a Zero Covid-type response similar to Australia, because we are “socioculturally similar” countries:

The prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, was a right-wing populist whose public profile pre-Covid was dominated by anti-immigration stuff. He was, in short, a very Trump-adjacent figure. And Australia, of all the countries on the planet, is probably the most socioculturally similar to the United States of America. If the Australian right could implement hard lockdowns to control the virus, I believe the American right could have as well.

What does he mean by “socioculturally similar” other than the fact that we both speak a lot of English? I’m not sure that being “socioculturally similar” really counts for much in terms of controlling an infectious disease compared to, say, poverty, housing, inequality, social welfare institutions, constitutional order, and geography.

During the pandemic, I often said that “you fight the pandemic with the country you have, not the country you wish you had” — channeling Donald Rumsfeld, I know, sorry — and I still believe that’s true. Here are 10 reasons why the U.S. couldn’t have copied Australia’s response:

1. Australia is effectively a big island. Yes, it’s a continent, but there’s a single federal government controlling the entire continent, so it can easily cut itself off from the entire world for an extended period of time. Unlike Australia, the U.S. has two gigantic land borders, which could not have been closed to commercial truck traffic or even, in the case of Mexico, everyday border crossings. For example, many children cross the border on a daily basis to attend school. Moreover, the U.S.-Mexico border — and this was true even when Title 42 was implemented — has constant irregular migration. Australians kept the virus out for a long time with a hotel quarantine system — would U.S. liberals have supported a massive military deployment and giant quarantine camps at the southern border in an attempt to prevent imported cases?

   

   Australia is neither at the center of global travel nor commerce.

2. Mexico — sharing a land border and trade links with the U.S. — chose a light touch pandemic response with minimal testing and no restrictions on inbound travel. As Zero Covid advocate Devi Sridhar noted on X in 2020, you can’t deploy an elimination-centered policy if the countries with which you share land borders aren’t willing to do the same thing.

3. Australia has 25.7 million people — for comparison’s sake, California has 39 million people — occupying a land area that’s just 1.3 times smaller than the United States. In other words, small population and huge land area. Because of this, Australian states could isolate from each other — preventing major outbreaks from spreading across the whole of the country — in a way that would be impossible in the U.S.

4. Draconian restrictions on U.S. interstate travel to slow coronavirus transmission would have also quickly been declared unconstitutional. When former President Donald Trump floated the idea of quarantining New York, then Governor Andrew Cuomo said that doing so would be like an act of civil war.

5. The Australian travel restrictions led to a gigantic decline in the number of flights arriving and departing the country. For a country on the periphery of the planet with a small population, that wasn’t a huge deal for global commerce and public health. If the U.S. had followed Australia’s lead on travel, however, the impact on commercial aviation would have been enormous. Supply chains already strained by China’s policies might have fully collapsed. Also, distribution of both routine and Covid-related vaccines and medical supplies would have been significantly harder, because those things generally travel on commercial flights. Trump is insane, but I doubt he would have been so insane as to allow that to happen.

6. The U.S. has approximately 400 million civilian guns. Australia’s Covid response involved heavy-handed policing, quarantine of entire apartment buildings, and mandatory isolation and quarantine at government camps. If the Australian response had been attempted in the U.S. — a country where a grocery store mask dispute led to a fatal shooting — it’s not difficult to imagine some of the aggressive interactions between the state and citizens leading to gun violence. After a few of those incidents, would police have continued to enforce Covid rules? Would politicians have continued to support the policy?

7. Enforcing a mandatory hotel quarantine system for arriving travelers was an epic challenge for a country 25.7 million people. It would have been functionally impossible for a country of 330 million with far more citizens disbursed across the globe. There would have been thousands of these horror stories.

8. In order to keep the aforementioned hotel quarantine system from collapsing, and to reduce the likelihood of imported cases from travel to non-Zero Covid countries, Australia effectively banned outbound travel and required citizens to ask permission to leave. This policy would have been impossible to enforce in a country, like the U.S., without exit immigration controls and with land borders that desperate citizens could have used to escape. (Note that some infected U.S. travelers used North American land neighbors to circumvent the pre-departure test rule.) An exit ban would also have almost certainly been declared unconstitutional.

9. Australia has a universal health care system and the U.S. does not. If there is no fear of medical bills — and many Americans got outrageous surprise bills for Covid tests — people are more likely to present at clinics or hospitals for testing when mildly sick or following exposure. In contrast, many Americans have been conditioned to only seek medical care when absolutely necessary. If your goal is driving cases as close to zero as possible, you need a health care system that doesn’t terrify people with financial destruction.

10. A federal system with just six states is a little easier to manage than one with 50, though Covid policies still diverged between Australian states. There’s probably a reason that the only large country — in terms of population size — attempting Zero Covid was a totalitarian dictatorship and the others were pretty small (e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.). Given U.S. political polarization, it is literally impossible to imagine all 50 U.S. states getting on the same page about Covid policies and, if your goal is national elimination, a handful of states refusing to implement the policy will make the whole thing collapse.

In short, even if Donald Trump — or any other politician — had wanted to “do Zero Covid” in the United States, it would have been impossible. The reasons are frankly so obvious that it’s really not even worth contemplating.