A leading economist was seen rolling her eyes at an infectious diseases expert during a lively televised debate about Australia’s response to the Covid pandemic.
Professor Gigi Foster, from the School of Economics at UNSW made no effort to hide her displeasure at Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake’s comments during a panel discussion on 7News Spotlight on Sunday night.
The panel discussion featured Sydney GP Kerryn Phelps, infectious diseases paediatrician Professor Robert Booy and former Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk , along with an often vocal live audience.
Professor Senanayake, an academic from the ANU School of Medicine and Psychology, said the drastic lockdown measures stopped people from dying.
He said stricter rules could have been enforced when hotel quarantine was introduced for domestic and international travellers after Australia first went into lockdown in March 2020.
‘When we locked down Australia, we should have made sure that hotel quarantine was impenetrable,’ he explained.
‘If you look at the Victorian report, it looks like the hotel quarantine… the policy was from conception to inception, it was just a couple of days.’
Professor Senanayake added that was an invaluable lesson, which needs to be learned to be better prepared for a future pandemic.
The cameras captured Professor Foster, a Yale-educated academic and former Young Economist of the Year rolling her eyes and shaking her head at his comments.
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Professor Foster said the lockdown measures failed because she claimed it was a ‘mass one size fits all policy’.
‘We have failed to protect the most vulnerable,’ she said.
‘It was lives against lives… it’s always lives against lives and lives are what matters, quality lives, length of lives, number of lives’.
She said Aussies were let down by the way the outbreaks of the disease were handled.
‘The more we put in people in authority… bureaucracies, which are unaccountable to the people and unelected, the worst outcomes we are going to get,’ she said.
A mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine rule was introduced for all international arrivals into Australia in late March 2020.
The public health measure, which was instituted by the then-Morrison government, kept the number of cases at a low rate during the first 18 months of the pandemic.
States and territories also instituted hotel quarantine protocols for interstate travellers.
Ms Palaszczuk said even though hotel quarantine was not popular at the time, the move stopped people from getting infected.
‘I did hotel quarantine myself and it was not good,’ she conceded.
‘At the time it was the best answer in terms of what we could do in terms of the longevity of the virus and to contain it.’
She defended the move by saying the decision was made in consultation with chief health officers from each state and territory.
Ms Palaszczuk, who closed off the Queensland border several times during the height of the pandemic, said lockdowns were necessary to ‘fight the virus’.
Professor Foster rejected her assertion that the measure was effective.
‘People’s quality of life has suffered and also the direct mental health cost of the lockdowns and the crowded out healthcare that’s been killing more people,’ she said.
‘We’ve lost tens of thousands more people since mid 2021 than we should have – one of the reasons could be delayed effects of lockdown.’
Professor Foster also said there were ‘other coronaviruses’ that happened before the Covid pandemic, which she said helped people develop better immunity.
Professor Booy was left shaking his head at the suggestion and said Covid-19 was a completely different virus.
‘This was a virus that went around the world and killed probably over 20million people,’ he said.
The excess death rate in Australia was about 20,000 in 2022 when we opened up [the borders] even though we had very high vaccination rates. This is a serious virus’.
Dr Phelps said Covid has not gone away and said public health responses during a future health crisis needs to be better.
‘The problem was we went from these quite draconian measures, to nothing other than vaccines,’ she said.
‘The vaccines approach isn’t working and we need to revisit that’.
Elsewhere on the program, Ms Palaszczuk stood by her drastic lockdowns despite families being separated from dying loved ones because of them.
‘Not everything was right, not everything was perfect, but we got through it,’ she said.
‘It was very difficult at the time, but the results for Queensland in the end, I do stand by it, but I do acknowledge it was very difficult and hard for families.
‘The end result was we only had tragically seven deaths during that whole period of that two years before we opened up our borders, so I think the results show that it did work.’
She avoided commenting on what she could have done better or whether she would make the same decisions today.
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