In the initial stages of the pandemic, from January - March 2020, as the rest of the world was shutting down, Australia was managing quite well with few COVID-19 cases. However, around May 2020, Australia too shut down its’ schools, and placed the country on lockdown. Additionally, though like the rest of the world, Australia was impacted by COVID-19, the study claims that due to the fact that Australia was not as direly impacted by cases and deaths like the United States or United Kingdom, Australians did not have as much mental stress as Americans or British people.

Due to the fact that Australia has both private and public schools, closures varied based on whether the school fell under government jurisdiction or not. The study points this out as a factor taken into consideration, as they asked the teachers that they used for their data sample whether they were teaching completely remotely, half-remotely, in person, or remote as usual, meaning that they were already teaching remotely before the pandemic.