Just a post to comment on some aspects of interest regarding the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak and its impacts on Australian politicians and elections. (Note added April: this article is being updated continually but no further politicians have been diagnosed for a while.)
Politicians
In the last week three federal Coalition MPs (Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, Senator Susan McDonald and Senator Andrew Bragg) have tested positive to COVID-19. Dutton is believed to have caught the disease in the USA, Bragg at a wedding in Australia and McDonald via unknown community transmission. No state politicians have been reported as testing positive, but that's surely just a matter of time.
Politicians represent a tiny percentage of the world population, yet there have been many cases of them testing positive, a fact already attracting
much attention.
A rough and doubtless incomplete tally of politicians who have tested positive, culled mostly from
this Wikipedia page, accepting their description of "politician" status blindly but excluding those who I could quickly and clearly see were only former politicians, is as follows:
The table shows that countries that have politicians who have tested positive usually have more than one. Of the 13 countries with more than one known infected politician, Australia has the fourth lowest ratio of total cases to political cases, currently above only Brazil, Romania and Iran. Some countries with high coronavirus counts have none so far (such as South Korea and Switzerland) while China has relatively few.
