A prominent economist was seen rolling her eyes at an infectious diseases expert during a lively televised debate about Australia’s response to the Covid pandemic.
UNSW School of Economics Professor Gigi Foster made no effort to hide her displeasure at Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake’s comments during a panel discussion on 7Featured news Sunday night.
The panel discussion featured Sydney GP Kerryn Phelps, infectious diseases paediatrician Professor Robert Booy and former Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, along with a live, often vocal audience.
Professor Senanayake, an academic at the ANU Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, said the drastic lockdown measures prevented people from dying.
He said stricter rules could have been applied when hotel quarantine for domestic and international travelers was introduced after Australia first went into quarantine in March 2020.
“When we locked down Australia, we should have made sure hotel quarantine was impenetrable,” he explained.
“If you look at the Victorian report, it appears that the hotel quarantine… the policy was from conception to initiation, it was just a couple of days.”
Professor Senanayake said this was an invaluable lesson that needed to be learned to be better prepared for a future pandemic.
It was at that moment that Professor Foster rolled her eyes.
Professor Gigi Foster (pictured), from the UNSW School of Economics, rolled her eyes as Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake spoke during a panel discussion on 7News Spotlight.
Professor Foster said the lockdown measures failed because, she said, it was a “one-size-fits-all policy”.
“We have failed to protect the most vulnerable,” he said.
‘It was lives against lives… they are always lives against lives and what matters are the lives, quality lives, duration of lives, number of lives.’
He said Australians were disappointed by the way outbreaks of the disease were handled.
“The more people we put in positions of authority…bureaucracies that are not accountable to the people and are not elected, the worse results we are going to have,” he said.
A mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine rule was introduced for all international arrivals to Australia in late March 2020.
The public health measure, instituted by the then Scott Morrison government, kept case numbers low for the first 18 months of the pandemic.
States and territories have also instituted hotel quarantine protocols for interstate travellers.
Professor Senanayake said drastic public health measures such as hotel quarantine prevented people from dying (file image)
Ms Palaszczuk said while hotel quarantine was not popular at the time, the measure prevented people from becoming infected.
“I quarantined myself in a hotel and it wasn’t good at all,” she admitted.
“At the time it was the best response in terms of what we could do in terms of longevity of the virus and to contain it.”
She defended the move, saying the decision was made in consultation with the health directors of each state and territory.
Palaszczuk, who closed Queensland’s border several times during the height of the pandemic, said the closures were necessary to “fight the virus”.
Professor Foster rejected his claim that the measure was effective.
“People’s quality of life has been affected and so has the direct mental health cost of lockdowns and overwhelmed healthcare that has been killing more people,” he said.
“We have lost tens of thousands more people since mid-2021 than we should have; “One of the reasons could be the delayed effects of confinement.”
Professor Foster also said there were “other coronaviruses” that appeared before the Covid pandemic, which she said helped people develop better immunity.
Professor Booy shook his head at the suggestion and said Covid-19 was a completely different virus.
The Queensland premier said while hotel quarantine was not popular at the time, the strict rule prevented more Australians from becoming infected (file image)
“This was a virus that went around the world and killed probably more than 20 million people,” he said.
“The excess mortality rate in Australia was about 20,000 in 2022 when we opened (the borders), even though we had very high vaccination rates. This is a serious virus.”
Dr Phelps said Covid has not gone away and public health responses during a future health crisis must be better.
“The problem was that we went from these fairly draconian measures to nothing but vaccines,” he said.
“The vaccine approach is not working and we need to review it.”
