can you explain point 1. this I don't get. 'elimination' they call it on the news . i would think you can't eradicate it if it's like a flu.
It is arguably unproven that they've achieved it but WA, NT, SA, Tas and NZ are all in the situation of seemingly having eliminated it within the local population. To the extent they've got any ongoing issues, it's with people who've arrived from somewhere else notably Vic. Hence they've all now become extremely tight in terms of letting anyone in.
Whilst those places all have lower populations and population density than Victoria does, Perth with it's population of 2 million, Auckland with 1.65 million and Adelaide with 1.3 million in their urban areas aren't exactly small country towns. They're all proper cities, they've all got reasonably large buildings, they've all got public transport and so on.
Perth, Adelaide, Auckland, NT, Tasmania, regional WA, SA and NZ. There's a fair diversity there of population density and climate. If they've managed to actually do it then I'm not at all convinced that it isn't possible to do it in Victoria.
If it turns out that they haven't done it, if new cases crop up in Perth or Hobart or wherever, well then that idea might be a dud but at the moment it seems at least possible that elimination may have been achieved in these places. If nobody's turning up with symptoms, if tests aren't finding any cases, then possibly it has actually died out.
From a governance perspective, I don't know what they've all done but in SA it has largely been left to the experts, politicians taking a few steps back. The Chief Public Health Officer and the Police Commissioner have both gained a celebrity-like status to some extent amidst it all, they've been routinely on the news and so on and both have been clear and to the point in layman's terms.
Tasmania went the other way and formed a loose Liberal-Labor-Greens coalition of sorts (the Liberals are in government in Tas) and suspended normal politics for the specific purpose of dealing with the pandemic. In doing so that removed political considerations from the equation and enabled the focus to be on stamping it out.