Are there alternatives to allowing students from China to travel to Australia while Coronavirus continues to spread

At present the Australian government has been very proactive in controlling the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Australia and they are to be congratulated for doing so.

We now face the interesting challenge where, on one hand, preparing for a wide spread outbreak of the disease and the government signalling a few days ago that it is going to relax travel bans for circa 760 secondary students, i.e. grade 11 and 12 so that they can travel to Australia from China.

Clearly this will be a forerunner and test case to allow the many thousands of university and college students that are also currently banned from Australia.

There is no doubt that the education sector is very important to the Australian economy, particularly when you bring in the secondary services such as student accommodation, tourism, food, text books etc.

While I wrote the two issues as being on different sides of the coin, it may in fact be two things on the one side of the coin. That is, allowing the students in may be the catalyst for a possible serious outbreak of the pandemic.

As an aside, I feel the World Health Organization has lost the last of their credibility in the way they have been playing around with words, but that is a topic for another day.

What I immediately thought when I heard the government was going to bring in the students was, surely there is another way? Australia, to my knowledge pioneered the School of the Air. Today, technology is vastly improved from the days of the pedal radios of old.

I regularly join webinars hosted by the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters (UK) due to the high quality of their sessions. LMI delivers training on our eServices and technical insurance topics to brokers and underwriters all around the world through Zoom Video Conferencing.

Surely the Chinese students could ‘attend’ class by simply logging into the class room via the net and be able to continue their studies.

I am the first to admit it is not as good as being face to face but you still learn, you can still ask questions and it keeps the student linked/associated with the education institution until the crisis is over. It is not forever, hopefully just for a semester to two.

The fastest way to bring the crisis to an end is to stop the spread and that means containing the virus. We only need one person to bring in the virus and the pandemic that the Australian government is gearing up for is more likely to happen.

I saw all of this as a conservative accountant not a medical person. I know that a lot of businesses are hurting now but I know that a lot more will hurt if there is a serious outbreak in this country, not to mention the potential for loss of life. We also must remember that unlike bushfire, hail and storm there is currently very few if any organisations with insurance covering business interruption losses flowing from Coronavirus (COVID-19).

If all the precautions fail and it was found that the relaxation of the travel ban caused a fresh outbreak here, it would be political suicide for the Government(s).

A lot is at stake for all of us.

It is for this reason that I think that alternatives, such as the one I have outlined here, should be considered before we risk bringing the disease into our country.