Strange Gods in a Great Southern Land

Between 1960 and 2000 Australia witnessed four waves of “cult controversy.” This article provides a historical overview of these controversies. The four historical vignettes presented demonstrate the significance of Australia in the wider global history of the “cult wars” and some of the local societal reactions occasioned by various home grown and international new religious movements that have proved controversial. This article identifies a series of the key episodes and periods that might serve as historical landmarks for the writing of a more fulsome history of new religions in Australia, introduces to a scholarly audience some of the important individuals involved in these Australian controversies, and highlights the key new religions and cult-watching groups whose interactions have collectively shaped the Australian societal response over this period.

Only a combination of social distancing and massive testing can effectively stop COVID-19 progression in densely populated urban areas

We present a simple epidemiological model that includes demographic density, social distancing, and efficacy of massive testing and quarantine as main parameters to model the progression of COVID-19 pandemics in densely populated urban areas (i.e., above 10,000 hab km2). Our model demonstrates that effective containment of pandemic progression in densely populated cities is achieved only by combining social distancing, widespread testing, and quarantining of infected subjects. This finding has profound epidemiological significance, and sheds light on the controversy regarding the relative effectiveness of widespread testing and social distancing. Our simple epidemiological simulator can also be used to assess the efficacy of a governmental/societal response to an outbreak.This study has also relevant implications on the concept of smart cities; densely populated areas are hot spots highly vulnerable to epidemic crisis.

‘Distancers’ and ‘non-distancers’? The potential social-psychological impact of moralising COVID-19 mitigating practices on sustained behaviour change

COVID-19 mitigating practices such as “hand-washing”, “social distancing” or “social isolating” are constructed as ‘moral imperatives’, required to avert harm to oneself and others. Adherence to COVID-19 mitigating practices is presently high among the general public, and stringent lockdown measures supported by legal and policy intervention has facilitated this. In the coming months, however, as rules are being relaxed and individuals become less strict, and thus the ambiguity in policy increases, the maintenance of recommended social distancing norms will rely on more informal social-interactional processes. We argue that the moralisation of these practices, twinned with relaxations of policy, may likely cause interactional tension between those individuals who do vs. those who do not uphold social distancing in the coming months: i.e., derogation of those who adhere strictly to COVID-19 mitigating practices and group polarisation between ‘distancers’ and ‘non-distancers’. In this paper we explore how and why these processes might come to pass, their impact on an overall societal response to COVID-19, and the need to factor such processes into decisions regarding how to lift restrictions.

COVID-19 Propagation and Mortality in a Two-Part Population

There has recently emerged a striking consistency to the mortality from SARS-CoV-2, as a fraction of population, across many nations. We have constructed a model for the spread of the virus that reproduces this phenomenon via inclusion of two (or more) categories of susceptibility to the virus. In the simplest case, the population is given a smaller fraction of 10-20% with higher susceptibility and the balance of 80-90% with lower susceptibility. Susceptibility is taken to include the level of immunity to the virus combined with the societal circumstances of certain smaller groups within a population. This is programmed numerically by considering a realistic random rate of contacts, together with an assumed constant viral genome. The remaining major variable is the societal response of nations to the outbreak, with earlier or later application of various degrees of lockdown, tracing and sanitation. China, South Korea and other nations, including Germany, have stopped or greatly slowed the spread of the disease before it could run its course through a whole population. Using this model the extent of progress toward herd immunity is discussed, with an in-principle estimate of the remaining toll to be experienced.