16 March

Good on you, Norman Swan. "I have a personal view on this: there is no time to waste. Each day that goes by we're going to lose control of this. We have been too late in banning large gatherings. We have got to stop, we've got to shut down schools. And my feeling is, to be blunt, we're dicking around and we've just got to shut stuff down now. The worst that could happen is that six weeks from now, the shock jocks are going to say, 'Well, I told you nothing would happen!' Because when prevention works, nothing happens. The mathematical modelling is very clear: if you look at all of the things that you can do to control this epidemic, the one thing that changes the trajectory is social distancing. And social distancing in an extreme form. That is, that you just don't mix with other people for a period of time. And that is what's going to control this epidemic. This is centuries-old epidemiology. We're back in 1918. There's no vaccine, no treatment. We've got to resort to what they've been doing since the year of the plague."