This is fantastic news. I do worry about the US though. As far as I can tell huge numbers of people are still treating this like it is nothing. I base this, very expertly, on the sheer number of large Halloween parties I was invited to tonight... and how people (aged 28-40) are still mocking those who won’t congregate with 50 randos in a house. It’s very perplexing. And on the ever-increasing infections and deaths.
The U.S. is filled with blind exceptionalism and narcissism compounded with social media and propaganda running rampant along with oligarchs who care about little else than money. This election hopefully provides a temporary relief, but there are seriously deep problems at hand.
Don’t be such an wide-eyed optimist, the US election will lead to 3 months of strife in the best case scenario. Both sides expect the other will try to steal the election, so how is it going to relieve anything?
I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not. What part of my comment led you to label me a wide-eyed optimist?
By "hopefully provides a temporary relief", I was thinking on a longer scale as in maybe sometime next year and more along the lines of getting to come up for a breath when we've had a hand holding our heads below water for four years.
My impression is that both in the US and in most European countries, there is a dire need for new political parties to enter the mainstream.
I mean this election is basically a forced choice between two grandpas and both are representing values from before I was born.
Where's the political party that I would trust to do what will secure a good future for my kids, because they, too, have young kids?
Where's the political party where people roughly my age are calling the shots?
US, France, Germany, UK, ... All I see is conservative old people. Germany and France tried to establish new center parties, but in both cases the newcomers quickly got infiltrated by old politicians and drifted far right, meaning conservative again.
If I've learned anything atop my 33 wise years old, is that any political candidate that looks like a clean break from the old guard, is exactly the same if not worse than its predecessors.
And this is just my cynicism: the corollary is that any candidate, new or old, is a bad choice, except extremely rare exceptions.
UK is polarised by age - a minority of people under the age of 60 voted to leave te eu or voted Tory, yet we are leaving with a massive Tory majority.
Labour’s last leader was magic grandpa boomer. The new one is slightly younger, come the next election he’ll only be in his early 60s.
Lib Dems had a young leader who (aged 39) managed to convert from being second in the June elections (led by a 70+ year old) to losing her seat in December, with a 7 year old and a baby.
There are relatively young leaders - Finland and New Zealand come to mind, but leaders tend to be reflections of the population. When the UK Labour Party was taken over by hundreds of thousands of young socialists via momentum in 2015, they didn’t chose the 45 year old (since christened king of he north), or the 46 year old with teenage kids, or even the 44 year old with no experience.
It's the final fling of the boomers (speaking as the trailing edge of them).
This is transitional and we'll see changes in the next political cycles. In the US it will be the post Nixon, post Reagan politicians, in the EU it will be the post Berlin Wall/unification politicians.
The problems of the 20th century are fading, but the problems of the 21st are crystalizing. Climate Change, the effects of 40 years of laissez faire capitalism and dergulation, the effects of casualisation of the work force and in many OECD societies, lack of wage growth or wealth of the lower/middle classes.
The main requirement for more diversity in the US system is ranked choice voting. Without it, people are forced to vote pragmatically for the lesser of two evils rather than according to their values, and no party other than the two entrenched ones can get any traction.
Needless to say, this is unlikely to change without a fight, since the status quo benefits the people in power on both sides.
Why is Europe's status something to care about in the U.S.? China is basically operating on all cylinders right now. It's insane how people in the U.S. don't get the damage that's being done on literally all fronts right now.
The past year has had irreparable damage to the U.S. It's hard to know where to even start, from slow production due to job loss and just everything going slower, poor health due to active cases and the decades of health care reverberations done from permanent damage and repeat infections, poor education due to an already broken primary and secondary school system basically being put on pause for a year, etc. The U.S. is literally fighting whether to re-elect a person who likely has clinical personality disorders and is probably well below even average intelligence, at the very best.
Not long ago, it was popular to criticize the US's handling of the pandemic as a failure. Seeing the surge of cases in Europe makes what the US is going through look less exceptional and more expected. There's also no reason to think the level of containment China achieved is politically attainable in the west.
Realizing it's "only" 180 cases, yes, China is firing on all cylinders:
Doesn't "the west" include Australia? I would think Australia and New Zealand count, and they've done a pretty good job. Canada has done a relatively poor job by international standards, but still much better than the US and the UK, who have both been roundly criticized in the Anglosphere.
Although parts of continental Europe are struggling, there are others that have done okay - Norway and Finland, for example.
Outside of "the west", democratic countries in East Asia like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have done alright too. Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have their political issues, but they're less authoritarian than Vietnam and China - the whole lot of them are doing well. Most of Africa is too. South America, not so much.
So, it's not just about politics, and it's not just about geographic location, and it's not just about climate.
It will be interesting to see the analysis after all this is over. There must be something we can learn from why it was that certain countries failed at managing this virus while others succeeded.
I’m a biased New Zealander - not only the above, but both New Zealand and Australia have controlled outbreaks twice.
After round one there were breaches (presumably that is the cause in NZ, the origin has not been found) and then new lockdowns followed by control/eradication.
Throwing up your hands and claiming it can’t be controlled in the west for some reason is a cop out and is also incorrect.
That isn't all that good compared to AU and NZ.
NZ = 5 per million and Au = 35 per million.
NZ has a population of 5 million and AU is 25 Million. Hawaii is 1.4 million.
Same source.
> Doesn't "the west" include Australia? I would think Australia and New Zealand count, and they've done a pretty good job.
Politically, yes, but being islands with a significant distance to other countries does make them very different. It's somewhat easy to restrict travel to NZ or AU, but it's much harder in Europe.
Geographic location seems to play a role. Japan and Taiwan are islands, for all intents and purposes, so is South Korea (a mine field inhibits travel). Singapore and Malaysia have much fewer land-borders.
Restricting movement in Europe between countries is more comparable to restricting movement within a country. They don't have hard borders, generally no controls etc. Probably doable, but not without very authoritarian policies which I don't see happening (during the migrant crisis in 2015, the general narrative was that it's literally impossible to enforce borders in Europe).
But new cases are up 10x from six weeks ago, and being exponential, most of those have been in the past few weeks. Still better than a lot of Europe, though.
And still sucking hind tit compared to Norway, Finland, and Denmark. But let's not let simple facts and data get in the way of your anti-lockdown fairy tale...
Sweden has a population of 10 million. If 2 of them die, that means everyone has a chance of 0.00002% of being one of them. I'd be willing to take that "risk".
Absolutely! I am worried about the entire world (for what my worry is worth). I simply currently live in the US, so it’s the only place I have significant first-hand knowledge of.
I in no way meant to imply that anywhere else was less deserving of worry.
When we say 0 cases we usually mean 0 locally acquired cases. We’re worried about community transmission rather than international travellers.
If someone enters the country they’re quarantined in a hotel room for 14 days. If someone tests positive during that quarantine period we report it, but count it separately.
The title should be "no new locally-acquired cases", but there was actually one that came in after the cut-off time so it will be counted in tomorrow's numbers.
Locally acquired cases - indicates successful cessation of community transmission, which means you're back to the easier task of trying to detect and contain importation.
All new cases reported in Australia today (Sun Nov 1, from tests performed on Sat Oct 31st) were acquired overseas and are in hotel quarantine.
Aside from them there were no new cases, even between close contacts (household etc).
So, the title is true for locally acquired cases, which I believe is the point the submitter is trying to make.
(Also there was only one locally acquired case the previous day, in the state of South Australia, which has barely had an outbreak at all, thanks to having a sparse population and relatively little international air traffic).
There were over 76000 test results processed to achieve that result, and there is a strong message through the community to get tested with even the mildest/vaguest of symptoms. Testing is free and stations are located to be easily accessible to most of the population, particularly in Victoria, which had a serious outbreak from June to September.
> I believe is the point the submitter is trying to make
Yes. I went with the headline Australian newspapers are using, which in hindsight lacks sufficient context for HN.
What I find remarkable is how many things Australia stuffed up, but was able to recover from by brute force and social cohesion. Procrastinating over quarantine for international travellers, obsessing about ventilators while ignoring prevention, identifying that aged care was a massive vulnerability but doing nothing to mitigate it, gross recklessness in setting up hotel quarantine, failing to anticipate that although the virus went away it was bound to come back: it's a long list.
Another thing that's helping Australia is that they're heading into summer.
Normalized by population the worst non-tiny (10M+) countries to be right now seem to be France, Italy, Belgium and Poland. And it'd be even worse in France, Italy and Poland in terms of new cases if they had the kind of testing throughput the US has been able to muster (1.24M tests a day). Belgium has comparable normalized test throughput. As far as cases, new cases = positivity * throughput. The higher the throughput, the more cases you are going to get.
Only Belgium of those seems to rank worse than USA for cases/pop. Missing from your list seems to be Israel and Czech Republic (unless your limit for non-tiny country is 11 million).
But even below USA, before we get to France, Italy or Poland; Peru, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia ranks in before.
And most of these countries are testing at lower rates than France.
That's only if you fail at basic arithmetics. All of them are worse than the US. Scaled up to US population, France would have 190K new cases per day. Italy - 168K. Poland - 185K. And so on and so forth down the list.
That wasn't particularly clear from your 'worst non-tiny countries' (which out of context just sounds mean-spirited). So you meant in terms of new cases, not total cases?
Yes, since the original article is about new cases, not totals per se. Normalized totals will be the same everywhere - everyone will get it eventually.
Australia for example has a 25mill population at ~3people per km2. This is effectively worthless as a measure as ~95% of the country's population lives in major cities with population density of 4k-8k per km2.
Not that I know of. The stats are designed to be maximally impenetrable and misleading, and I'm not entirely sure why. Basically the stats that matter are: hospitalizations, ICU bed utilization, and excess deaths. Everything else is bullshit. Yet you won't find any of these stats for most countries, certainly not in an easy to digest form.
You've only postponed the inevitable though. Virus is gonna virus - it's not going anywhere, ever. I'm not downplaying. I really hope you've used this time to prepare and didn't just sit on your behind hoping it'd go away.
No you aren't. There's no "getting rid of it". Spanish Flu (!) is still with us. It just kinda fizzled out after just about everyone got it over the course of 2+ years, but the virus still endemic, over a hundred years later.
What measures are getting rid of it permanently? Until there is a vaccine, herd immunity is the only path. We won’t rid ourselves completely and it will keep coming back.
Not just "until there's a vaccine", but "until there's a safe and effective vaccine", which is a feat several orders of magnitude harder, that has not been achieved against any other coronavirus.
We have substantially improved and increased both testing and tracing and isolation/quarantine.
We have testing in industrial environments that are known to be dangerous (eg abbatoirs, health care).
We have tracing that in the last week caught a single case in a school that ended up with over 800 people in isolation while being tested. Our tracing is not only close contacts, but the close contacts of contacts.
This test/trace infrastructure is being replicated across the country and by next winter, we should have standardized processes.
Work is ongoing in areas like health and aged care, and we are planning for how to bring international students (an important part of our economy) back for the start of the university year in March.
Yet we don’t really worry about it in the US: people are (mostly) vaccinated, and getting a visa to enter the country requires vaccination.
Covid might be similar, except given anti vaccine sentiment the US, Australia might have to throw the US on the list alongside Brazil, Nigeria, and the Congo.
We're feeling pretty relieved to be getting these results and excited to be tentatively emerging from nearly four months of fairly strict lockdown.
Much is being made of the fact that back in August when Melbourne was reporting over 700 new cases on some days, UK and France were reporting similar new case numbers, yet we are now getting zeroes and those countries have out-of-control spread.
At the same time, there's much debate and political ruckus about the merits of the lockdown - i.e., the economic and human costs, vs the benefits of suppressing a virus that many consider to be not very serious.
There's also the ongoing attack on our state government from political opponents and parts of the media, over the fact that the virus was suppressed here back in May, as it was in the rest of Australia, but then started spreading rapidly again in June, when poorly-trained security guards acquired the virus while working in quarantine hotels, then took it back to their families and communities, with the outbreak then tearing through aged care homes and leading to a total of 800+ fatalities.
What isn't being talked about here, but has been mentioned by another commenter in this thread, is weather. Melbourne is the only large/dense city in Australia that has quite cool winters, similar to the weather that prevailed in Northern Asia, Europe and the US in Feb-April, and that is returning to Western Europe now. As we now know, given the serious outbreaks that have happened in warmer regions, warm weather is not a strong enough factor to halt this virus altogether, but it does seem to have an influence, and it's striking to note the progression of this virus in Melbourne, relative to the weather.
> ... vs the benefits of suppressing a virus that many consider to be not very serious.
I haven't seen good polling numbers around this, but I suspect it's not actually 'many', but rather a highly vocal small number of people, blessed with hubris, ignorance, and/or partisan agendas.
I appreciate that there's some significant impact to a lot of people, and that my world view is significantly skewed because I'm not in that category, but what we continue to find out about the way this disease can affect otherwise fit & healthy people, and with the unfortunate benefit of seeing what is happening in countries that aren't as committed to controlling this, indicates we've probably made the right decisions here.
Lockdown has a death toll. This is just fact. People delay preventative treatment, they get depressed, overweight, suicides skyrocket. In Melbourne in particular, there was a giant spike in 12 year olds getting prescribed serious anti-depressant medication.
Four newborn babies died because the South Australian government did not want to risk flying them to Melbourne for treatment.
Lockdown primarily harms young people (ostensibly to save old people, the primary victims of the virus). I think this is such a sickening calculation.
We're enslaving our children to debt, depriving them of social lives (this can have permanent impacts), some of them commit suicide, some of them are denied treatment by government and die and they're not getting as much exercise and are also eating poorly.
I'm really tired of seeing people gloss over the effects of lockdown, because lockdown is dangerous in itself. Is the virus or the lockdown more dangerous? Well, that remains to be seen.
In Australia, an additional 4,000 - 7,000 suicides were projected beyond the norm as a result of lockdowns. [1] This is significantly higher than the death toll of the virus and is only a single datapoint. It doesn't include people skipping preventative appointments and dying as a result, or the long term effects of massive depression and obesity spikes.
where did you get the 4,000-7,000 figure? There were 3,048 suicides in Australia in 2018[1]. Data from the Victorian coroner shows that there's been roughly the same number of suicides in the state this year up to August 27 as last year(466 this year vs. 468 last year)[2].
Don't take this the wrong way, but did you read your own source? It literally proves my point.
>"We still think we're going to see, over the course of a 12-month period … and then subsequent years, in the order of 30 per cent increase [in] suicide rates," he said.
30% of 3,048 is 914. 5 years of that is 4,572 additional suicides. I got the 5 years data point from the Australian Medical Association. [1]
Assuming this is a genuine question, thousands of businesses and lives have been irreparably destroyed. Suicide can take years to manifest after trauma. It's also worth noting that a lot of people have been temporarily propped up by government social programs, which will presumably end at some point. Once they do end, the destruction is no longer hideable and the people who have been made destitute by government mandates will have absolutely nothing.
A restaurant owner who saved their entire life to open up a business was forced to shut down for the greater part of a year with inadequate government support. Of course that causes depression and even suicide in some cases. Their life's work has been eviscerated through no fault of their own.
During the lockdown, the government's message was essentially "do not open your business by threat of enforcement action, but by the way you have to keep paying your rent/mortgage and we're going to give you a token amount of money to help".
While this was happening, governments around the world were throwing cash at banks and big business. Small businesses got screwed. As usual.
As for the specific medical reasoning, I'm no medical professional and would not pretend to know how the Australian Medical Association comes up with their claims.
If you were questioning the source, I'd implore you to post counter-evidence.
There was more than "token" support for small businesses. There was Federal government support for maintaining employment and there were bank and commercial lease supports. In addition, the state government provided loans and direct funding to various industries.
Remember that Australia has not had a financial recession for 25+ years. Recession for any reason causes bankruptcies which leads to those personal impacts.
But the lockdown has meant that our economy will be closer back to "normal" earlier than it would have been. Our primary markets in Asia (in particular China) are all recovering rapidly.
So not sure what your argument is here. Yes, all of the effects you state are correct. However, what was the alternative?
You seem to be missing the point. That support was inefficient because government action still crushed thousands of businesses despite the support available.
Some of these restaurants had $20,000/week expenses and the government was offering significantly less than that in support.
>But the lockdown has meant that our economy will be closer back to "normal" earlier than it would have been
That sounds like wild speculation. Thousands of businesses closed permanently. Sure, giant banks and huge corporations that were specifically bailed out by government will be more-or-less fine. But that family restaurant? They went out of business months ago.
But all that is beside the point, which was suicides from lockdown effects will be substantially higher than virus deaths currently, according to Australian Medical Association modelling. I don't think you attempted to refute that with any counter-evidence (beyond your speculation).
Likely many of those businesses would have closed anyway, even without the lockdown, just from people avoiding crowded areas because they don’t want to get sick.
Irreparably? Using restaurants is a terrible metric since most of those fail even in a booming economy. I think restaurants and hospitality will be one of the fastest areas to recover once people feel it's safe.
A lot of these things would've happened even without a lockdown, since if the pandemic goes badly enough, huge swaths of the population would've shut themselves at home to avoid risk of contagion.
Also, the virus is clearly more dangerous than the lockdown: you have seen what happens when the lockdown is applied to the whole population, but you haven't yet seen what happens when the virus has spread to 50%+ of the population (and it's especially ugly if it'd happen all in a short amount of time).
It's sad to know about additional suicides, though the reports I've seen say that there hasn't been any increase in suicides during the lockdowns (but again: it might've been specific to the situation in Europe)
This is important to repeat and add also add economic toll. People blame the death and economic toll on lockdowns or other mitigation measures, but the toll is from the pandemic itself.
Even if no state mitigation measures were implemented, there would still be a huge economic and mental health toll.
Sweden didn't lock down and if you look at the deaths per million they are the lowest in Europe.
Raw infection numbers are scary, but not very telling since testing is far from universal or error free.
Death stats aren't that reliable either. Covid seems to be deadly and a miracle cure at the same time - it's amazing how death rates for other maladies all seem to be dramatically down. I'm sure that is just coincidence.
This was like maybe true 8 months ago, before Sweden had multiple waves. It’s been false for a while now and I don’t know why everyone keeps saying it. Another comment has the right data. Also if you’re insinuating that other maladies are getting reclassified as covid, you can look at excess deaths and see most countries had more people die in the past six months than usual, and seems to indicate we actually undercount covid deaths (this latter part is for the US)
I steeled myself to read this post in the most charitable possible light. Yes, lockdown most likely has some death toll. But the specific points you're making are very dubious and also very recognisable as the effect of consuming specific kinds of media.
Firstly, the point about "not getting as much exercise" is frustrating. Back when we didn't have data on this, it was annoying to me to hear people's absolute conviction that (a) people would exercise less and (b) the effect would be so large that it would lead to a decrease in obesity significant enough to offset the number of life-years lost to COVID, especially since the lockdown personally prompted me to start exercising MORE due to my new surplus of idle time. We now have some suggestion that for previously sedentary people, it led to more exercise (my experience) and for previously active people, it led to a decrease. I'd love to see any suggestion that the net effect of this was so colossal as to produce the adverse health outcomes of whose existence you seem so confident. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312512/
> In Australia, an additional 4000-7000 suicides were projected
If that suicide prediction was made it must have been early on in the pandemic when no one really what was going to happen. If there was an increase of 4000-7000 that'd mean 2-3 times the ~3,000 suicides that occurred in Australia last year.
>At least in Victoria, it seems like these predictions were unfounded.
I specifically said Australia, and your claim is incorrect according to the Australian Medical Association which forecasts 750-1,000 additional suicides for 5 years. [1] I can't find my original source for that figure but the AMA source still proves my point.
Belgium did not have a Melbourne-tier lockdown at any stage. Why would it be comparable?
>But the specific points you're making are very dubious and also very recognisable as the effect of consuming specific kinds of media.
Ah yes, "specific kinds of media" like the Australian Medical Association. Those darned far right Murdoch-leaning doctors.
Your own source proves my point in fact. [2]
>"We still think we're going to see, over the course of a 12-month period … and then subsequent years, in the order of 30 per cent increase [in] suicide rates," he said.
30% of 3,048 is 914. 5 years of that is 4,572 additional suicides. I got the 5 years data point from the Australian Medical Association. [1]
No you didn't. Belgium allows unrestricted domestic travel, Melbourne allowed 5km maximum. Additionally, Belgium allows funerals with up to 15 people which is still not the case in Melbourne. You even allow children's sporting events to continue, which was never the case in Melbourne. Further, your "close contact" rules are far more lenient than Melbourne's during peak Stage 4 lockdown.
Above all of that, Melbourne has had one of the longest lockdowns globally (surpassing Wuhan in length).
> Yes, lockdown most likely has some death toll. But the specific points you're making are very dubious and also very recognisable as the effect of consuming specific kinds of media.
I find that an unnecessary slight. Since that topic is very taboo, you won't be able to read about it in mainstream media sources, but only in opposition sources and professional journals. Attacking it on those grounds is weak.
It would be extremely surprising if a multi-month lockdown didn't have a death toll, "most likely" makes it sound like that's probable but remains to be seen. I don't think that's a reasonable position given all we know about the cost of policies, mental health and economic depression.
The argument shouldn't be "lockdown is painless" (because it obviously isn't), it has to be "no lockdown is more painful". We won't be able to tell whether it's true for quite some time, but there's a good argument for erring on the side of caution.
Yes, there were deaths as a result of the lockdown. There was definitely increases in mental health problems and associated effects like domestic violence and addictive behaviors. There are scars that will take time to heal. There are likely to be ongoing effects that will need to be addressed.
However, the effect of these needs to be balanced against the effect of not controlling the spread of COVID. There were also other benefits, for example, much lower influenza and other winter diseases due to lack of contact and masks and social distancing.
By controlling and reducing the number of cases, we had lower rates and now almost eliminated hospitalizations. There were interruptions in "elective" surgeries, but required surgery and hospitalization for other disease suffered much less than it could have.
I can confirm his exercise point. The physically active people I know, including myself and my wife, exercised mostly in gyms before COVID. First, gyms were shut down for months, which pretty much kills the habit of going to the gym (the main reason why people stick with it). Now their policies are so onerous, they're borderline psychotic, so we canceled our gym memberships months ago. On a less anecdotal note, two of our three major local gyms are now in bankruptcy. The one that's not in bankruptcy is largely funded by Microsoft, their employees used to go there, and now even though they don't go, Microsoft still keeps paying.
Both my and my wife's weight went up. I was able to beat it, she wasn't, so she's about 8kg heavier now than she was in February. The only exercise I get now is half an hour of stationary bike a day. I used to seriously lift weights 4-5 days a week, in addition to it.
It's not even a question for anyone not completely brainwashed that lockdowns are very psychologically hard on people.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I would also like to see some hard (not projected) numbers to take it beyond speculation.
Where I currently live in BC (Canada), there have been more overdose deaths than coronavirus deaths in 2020[0]. It might be the case that the overdoses have increased precisely because of lockdown. It might also not be the case. That remains to be investigated.
I think it's superficially easy to blame suicide, overdose, domestic violence etc on the lockdown, but that's hard to prove, because who's to say it's not a reaction to the overall situation of people dying of a brand new disease?
Personally, I really resent lockdown/movement restrictions and I think it's a garbage policy, right back from when I lived in China during the initial outbreak. However, I also have to admit that the countries that locked down seem to have successfully knocked this virus on the head, whereas those that didn't are still suffering the effects. Perhaps a lengthier lockdown pain at the beginning is better than this drawn-out shitshow of half-assed measures that other countries are going through? I dunno.
We all know that we are in "COVID normal" not "normal" until there is a widely delivered effective vaccine.
However, it's much easier to test, trace and isolate small outbreaks ("whack a mole") than if its widely spread and uncontrolled.
Recently we had a single case of a school child that went back to school before they should have. Two days after he tested positive, the following happened:
* The school was closed and deep cleaned
* Close contacts and close contacts of those contacts went into quarantine. This ended up being approximately 800 people.
* All of them were tested within 48 hours and even further contacts (not "close") were also tested to the point that approximately 5000 tests were done and no additional cases were found.
You can't do that tracing and isolation if there is wide community transmission.
For most viruses whether or not you get sick or become infectious after being exposed to them depends on how strong the exposure was. The amount you need is called the infectious dose.
The infectious dose of COVID is not known, but believed to be somewhere in the several hundred to a thousand viruses range.
An infected person breathing normally near you might expose you to something like 20 or 30 per minute (breath is normally expelled with low force, so it doesn't contain viruses from the lower parts of the respiratory tract). Talking might do around 200 per minute. A cough or sneeze can do millions.
Thus, if I have COVID and go shopping at the same time you do, wearing a mask, and don't cough or sneeze pretty much in your face when we happen to pass each other, you almost certainly are not going to get it from me, and it makes little difference for contact tracers to find you.
It is the people that I spend a few minutes talking face to face to or that I spend a long time near that contact tracers need to find.
Note that it doesn't depend on who you get the viruses from. If a lot of people in the grocery store have it, then even though you might only get a handful of viruses from each person you pass you still might accumulate an infectious dose during your time in the store.
To control it, you need to get the number of infections down enough that people won't be getting it from casual transitory contact, like when grocery shopping, and people need to limit situations that involve more extended contact to times/places where the people they have extended contact with can be identified and traced, and need to limit the frequency of those events so that there is time for contact tracing to work.
Sounds like you’ve gone to the argument of “this can affect fit and healthy people in other ways that we may not even know.”
It is clear that the death toll is overwhelmingly skewed toward the elderly. Many of whom died in the first wave as corona prob got into many nursing homes before we knew better. We are now very careful w nursing homes/ elderly, we might see cases go up but as long as you protect them the deaths/ hospitalizations shouldn’t show similar levels to spring 2020. I don’t think you can deny this, so pro-lockdown people are now mainly using this “it can affect young people” argument to avoid cognitive dissonance - I have yet to see proof. I only have seen an article that says there is lung damage after infection which diminishes over the course of weeks. This is what you would expect with any kind of damage but the article had a ridiculous title like “coronavirus may lead to long lasting damage.” Lastly, I see a lot of ambulances these days - it serves as a reminder to check myself. But we’re all probably pretty analytical here and you can’t justify a strict lockdown from a utilitarian standpoint.
> Sounds like you’ve gone to the argument of “this can affect fit and healthy people in other ways that we may not even know.”
Not so much an argument of, than an observation regarding, the unpredictable mid to long term impacts of this infection in the demographic that includes most of the 'it's harmless' crowd. Ie, the 20-40yo, relatively healthy individuals.
Most of whom, I hasten to add, are cautious rather than cavalier -- but within which group there are sufficient case studies of severe debilitation lasting very many months, and occasional signs of much longer term damage.
Basically my position is 'we don't know' with a consequence of 'let's assume it's worse than we hope'.
> It is clear that the death toll is overwhelmingly skewed toward the elderly.
Almost definitely. And if you're not in the 'elderly' demographic, or care about people who are, this is probably less worrying for you.
> ... similar levels to spring 2020.
Spring 2020 started two months ago.
I mean, TFA is about Coronavirus in Australia, and Australia is where I am right now, and Spring is what's happening here now.
> I don’t think you can deny this, so pro-lockdown people are now mainly using this “it can affect young people” argument to avoid cognitive dissonance - I have yet to see proof.
Apologies -- but I do not understand the point you are trying to make here.
> I only have seen an article that says there is lung damage after infection which diminishes over the course of weeks. This is what you would expect with any kind of damage but the article had a ridiculous title like “coronavirus may lead to long lasting damage.” Lastly, I see a lot of ambulances these days - it serves as a reminder to check myself. But we’re all probably pretty analytical here and you can’t justify a strict lockdown from a utilitarian standpoint.
You mention 'here' without describing where that actually is. And you mention an article that said something you didn't like, but don't provide a reference to that article. Apparently there are ambulances near you. You then conclude that a lockdown is not justifiable, despite TFA being about how lockdowns have effectively halted the spread of SARS-CoV2 within Australia.
I think that the parent was referencing the improvements made in covid treatments over the past handful of months, which have been significant - not as many people in hospitals are dying
>Apologies -- but I do not understand the point you are trying to make here.
Young people, as a population, are not much impacted by this virus. As of Oct 10 there have been 5.3 deaths per 100,000 people under the age of 35 [0] in the United States. The headlines are often misleading about this. I think the parent may have been implying that young people are being misled.
Yup, I get that mortality rates are relatively low - but finding quantifiable QoL impact is extremely difficult, especially as these effects can last for months.
Reporting seems to focus exclusively on mortality, which I suspect leads to people feeling much more confident than if long term health impacts were more clearly reported.
When I looked into it I was shocked at how many people have long term affects after the flu. One of the studies I saw in a comprehensive paper looking at heart swelling and the flu showed a shocking amount of this in even non-hospitalized flu patients! [0]
Apparently any virus that attacks the lungs and.or nervous system leaves behind a lot of damaged people. Most of the time things like heart swelling go away after a couple months. But some people are permanently damaged. This can happen with all viruses, even the common cold kills people, and there is no indication yet that this virus is any different.
Bro I wish I kept some of my Covid in a jar to share with you so you can prove how macho you are. The virus kicks your ass months after you’ve already recovered. Early 20s and I run every day. You are probably older than that and don’t exercise
Edit: I eat my vegetables and you probably don’t eat your vegetables either
When the roadmap was published the first step of lockdown relaxing was:
> Residents will need to stay within 5 kilometres of their homes and will still only be able to leave home for shopping, exercise, care-giving purposes or permitted work.
> The city's night curfew starts at 9:00pm rather than 8:00pm, and residents can exercise for up to two hours a day, up from one hour.
Pretty strict, but I think the clear steps and threshold being announced were a brilliant approach.
Can only leave house for work, 1 person per house for food or other necessities 1 once per day, 1 hour exercise max 5km from home, must work from home is possible, can't leave Metro area without valid reason and must wear a musk in public.
It changes every week or so depending on the cases.
We'll be able to meet with the relatives hopefully after the 9th if everything goes well.
The initial rules when we went into "Stage 4" lockdown were:
* Essential industries (food, health care, logistics) were working, some, like abbatoirs, with reduced capacity
* Retail food sales (supermarkets/butchers/bakers etc) open. Cafes/restaurants for take-out or delivery only.
* Other retail closed except for online or click&collect contact free.
* Night curfew 8pm - 5am, relaxed later to 9pm.
* Maximum 5km radius from home unless for work/medical care.
* Only 4 reasons to leave home: essential work, medical care, one person shopping once/day, one hour of exercise.
* Masks whenever in public (not just inside).
Over time, some things got slowly relaxed. The curfew was changed when we got to the start of daylight savings. The radius was relaxed from 5km to 25km. A "singles" or "intimate partner" bubble was established, that allowed people to have one other person outside their household. Then two households were allowed to meet outside the home, but still masked.
At the same time, the government support included $150 if you were being tested and had to quarantine until the results (usually 24h). Then if you were positive or were a close contact and had no sick leave, then there were payments of $1500 for the 14 day isolation/quarantine period.
The Federal government introduced Jobkeeper, which was a subsidy of $1500/fortnight for businesses to maintain employment, and Jobseeker was an extended unemployment payment.
Just adding that you needed to carry a permit from your employer on your person if travelling to work and fines were significant for anyone caught out.
"Penalties of up to $19,826 (for individuals) and $99,132 (for businesses) will apply to employers who issue worker permits to employees who do not meet the requirements of the worker permit scheme or who otherwise breach the scheme requirements.
There will also be on-the-spot fines of up to $1,652 (for individuals) and up to $9,913 (for businesses) for anyone who breaches the scheme requirements. This includes employers, and employees who do not carry their worker permit when travelling to and from work"
The success is the result not just of the lockdown. The other key components were the testing and contact tracing. Without those components, the virus keeps spreading. With them, the virus is removed from the community.
Much is being made of the fact that back in August when Melbourne was reporting over 700 new cases on some days, UK and France were reporting similar new case numbers, yet we are now getting zeroes and those countries have out-of-control spread.
Congrats on getting to the magic 0!
I know it can seem weird that Europe didn't lock down over the summer, but here we mostly use Health care capacity, not active cases, as the most important number.
Being a relatively small island [0] on a remote corner of this planet makes the case for going to the 0 cases a viable one.
Going into a 4 month lockdown in Europe would be useless, since it would just pop up again since we don't have a few international airports as only places where you can enter.
So we're going into lockdown in Europe to prevent swamping our hospitals, and will resume life when it's okay again. And probably will keep going back and forth until a vaccine.
Land borders can be closed except for a few checkpoints, which serve as the equivalent of international airports (and seaports, don't forget about those). I don't know much about Australian geography, so I had to check on a map, but it looks like it's possible to travel from Melbourne to other parts of Australia over land. Apparently some measures were taken to prevent the virus from spreading along that route.
Driving case counts down to zero isn't useless since any outbreaks that flare up again due to gaps in border security will be localized and can be kept in check with localized lockdowns instead of shutting down the whole country.
> Land borders can be closed except for a few checkpoints, which serve as the equivalent of international airports (and seaports, don't forget about those).
Not in continental Europe, not without involving the military.
> Apparently some measures were taken to prevent the virus from spreading along that route.
Police road blocks. Geography no doubt helps: there are only so many bridges across the Murray River, passes through the Australian Alps, and roads across the desert to Adelaide. And it's a bit far to ride a bicycle cross country.
I live in Vietnam. It is neither a small island nor on a remote corner of the planet. We have a population of 95,000,000 people -- substantially more than any single country in Europe -- and share land borders China, Cambodia, and Laos as well as being within trivial sailing distance of Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
We have had 0 cases for over 2 months.
You should stop with the "it is only viable in a small island in a remote corner of the planet" line of argument because it doesn't hold much water in my mind.
If you have enough time to write these kinds of rebuttals on HN, you can certainly just google “Vietnam Covid Success” instead of asking others to explain it for you. Here’s one of the first links you can find by doing so:
I'm an Australian living in Europe, it's painful to keep hearing people say "it will never work in Europe", when it's been shown to work elsewhere in countries small to large, with borders or without.
Borders can be shut, it was done earlier this year. Lockdowns can be enforced, it was done earlier this year. Governments can provide financial support, it's been happening all year.
All this could be over in 4-6 months, and were going into the miserable 4-6 months of the year anyway.
But somehow it's all too hard and the economic damage would be too severe.
What people won't put up with, and rightly so, is an incoherent strategy across Europe. Why make sacrifices if everyone is then encouraged to go on their summer holiday to save the economy and undo everything?
It would take an actual eradication strategy to eradicate it entirely. The first lock down was all about lowering the curve, which i think now is plainly a mistake.
I also don't believe europe would be capable of implementing an eradication strategy. The required social capital has already been burned, and at no point has europe demonstrated it's ability to work together on this. Now we can only wait for the technocrats to deliver us salvation in the form of a vaccine.
Even if the entire EU would agree to do it, we're still surrounded by other countries who might not do the same. And who's people will come into the EU whether we close the border or not.
(the guy who beheaded someone in France came to the EU illegally over the Mediterranean 2 or 3 days prior.)
Thinking an eridication strategy would've worked would've been a worse plan than lowering the curve I think.
We couldn't keep it out even if we wanted to. And yes, on that aspect, it's a huge difference to be an island far away from other countries.
> But the borders vietnam shares with those countries are hard borders. You need a visa and pass a government controlled checkpoint when you enter.
As someone who lives in Vietnam, I think your conception of the hardness of the borders is mistaken. The land border with Vietnam-China is 1,300 kilometers long. That's longer than Germany's combined border with the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.
"The 1,400km border between Vietnam and China is extremely porous, with a complicated geography characterised by mountains and rivers – especially in the north – that makes it difficult to monitor cross-border traffic, according to Mimi Vu, an independent Vietnamese-American anti-trafficking expert based in Saigon."
> Europe (mainland) has no internal borders. There are no checkpoints, customs agents or chokepoints between countries.
Yes it does. Germany closed its borders on March 16.
One thing we have learned is that it is easier for authoritarian regimes to deal with pandemics, because having a police state that knows everything about you makes it a lot easier.
So, the answer is, a number of things matter, and it will take many years to parse these things out.
Being a small island helps, being remote helps, having less public transportation helps, living in a police state helps, etc. etc.
Just FYI, in terms of lockdowns, it's only been Victoria and NSW that have done the stage 4 lockdowns over the last few months. In SA, WA, QLD, NT, we've had closed land borders between the states, with police at border crossings and points of entry to stop anybody trying to come in without a valid and allowed reason. This has prevented the cases from Vic and NSW from spreading to the other states, in much the same way that would occur in the European scenario you describe. It's not impossible, it just takes the will of the people to accept a lack of freedom of movement.
Australian here and I recently came back from spending months in Perth (where there hasn’t been a case of community spread since April).
You mention weather here but, having followed the news, is clear that the primary factor in Melbourne’s outbreak was breaches in quarantine, so much so that there was a government investigation into it. Weather seemed to have very little to do with it.
There’s really no comparison with Melbourne winters and those in most of North America or Europe either. Melbourne climate is pretty mild all things considered.
You seem to be pinning this on poorly trained and paid security guards but there’s credible evidence that there were incidents on security having relationships with those in quarantine (and the responsibility for that falls on both parties). Plus the quarantine didn’t seem to be that strict. People leaving to go out shopping, that sort of thing. Again those in quarantine should also know better.
I don't really have a dog in the fight, but it's uncontroversial that basic quarantine breaches were what seeded the the June-October outbreak in Melbourne. Stories of "security having relationships with those in quarantine" make for titillating clickbait articles, but so far little more than rumour has been reported. We'll see what the inquiry report says, but any poor practices in quarantine would have been sufficient to seed the outbreak, whether or not there was any intimate contact. But then it was also poor contact tracing/outbreak management and aged care management that exacerbated things after that. So these things are always multi-faceted.
I've been paying close attention to the weather factor since the epidemic spread beyond China in Feb/March. It was notable that the places that had the biggest outbreaks then (Milan, Qom, NYC, London, Madrid, as well as Wuhan itself) had similar weather in those months to what Melbourne has in winter - cool but not freezing, and not too rainy or humid. When I saw that, I immediately felt Melbourne could be more at risk of a serious outbreak than other Australian cities - all of which have either warmer winters and/or lower population density (EDIT: and also more sunlight in some cases, influencing Vitamin D). Of course, if quarantine was better managed it could have been prevented. But I also find it hard to believe that there was not a single serious lapse in any of the hotels in any of the other cities that were running quarantine.
When weather is raised, people are quick to point out the warmer regions that have had major outbreaks, like India and Brazil. What these places also have his highly dense populations with many people living/working in close quarters, which obviously also facilitates spread. Nutrition/health may also be a major contributor.
As another commenter has pointed out, research has found Victorians to have higher rates of Vitamin D deficiency in winter compared to other states, so weather can play a role in different ways.
Clearly this is a highly complex illness with multiple factors that combine in different ways to influence the outcome.
My personal theory is that weather is proximate. The spread is not about population density and social patterns.
Take England. I’ve lived in London. There’s a large segment of British social life that revolves around going “down pub”. People will gather at pubs in confined spaces for long periods of time. Those seem like the perfect conditions for community spread. It comes as no surprise to me that England is in another lockdown.
Boer I’m sure weather plays a part on that. Nicer weather and people might go on holiday out do things outdoors but once the weather starts to cool? They’re back to the pub.
I suspect you’ll see patterns like this in other places.
As for your theory in cool climates, well you’re also hitting the climate barrier for high density living and high population centers.
There are outliers (eg Moscow) but generally speaking big cities aren’t in Arctic-like climates.
I don’t know Melbourne at all but o suspect there’s a predilection for pubs, bars, nightclubs and restaurants and there’ll be some relationship there between colder weather and indoor patronage.
For what it's worth, pubs/bars/restaurants were already closed when Melbourne's major outbreak happened. The outbreak really took hold when households intermingled in May/June and spread it to each other, then when it got into aged care homes (with staff that worked across multiple facilities) it was all over.
I think you're being too specific, pinning it on pubs, etc. It just needs people intermingling in confined spaces of any kind; homes, apartment buildings, workplaces, hospitals/care homes, churches, schools, sporting events, public transportation, and sure pubs/bars too, but any/all of these are conducive to spread.
> Rates of deficiency were shown to be lower in summer (14%) and higher in winter (36%). There was little variation between the states and territories in summer, when deficiency levels were low across the country; ranging from 6% in Queensland to 19% in New South Wales. A divide was apparent in winter, with rates of vitamin D deficiency particularly high for those living in Victoria and ACT, where nearly one in every two people (49%) were vitamin D deficient in winter, compared with only 16% and 13% respectively in summer. In comparison, vitamin D deficiency remained relatively low in winter for those in Queensland and the Northern Territory.[10] Differences were also seen across each state or territory - vitamin D deficiency was more common among those living in major cities (27%) compared with those living in inner regional (16%), outer regional (13%) and remote areas (9%).[10]
I've spent a lot of time in Melbourne, and it's winters are characterised by almost constant heavy cloud cover. That mixed with greater latitude makes natural vitamin synthesis by UV a real problem. There is also a large hole in the ozone around the southern hemisphere, so maybe that allows a little more UV through on less cloudy days.
I don't understand. Is the plan to keep covid out of the country forever? That doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense at this point. Will there be a lockdown every time there's new infections?
I mean, it appears to be working in New Zealand. Island countries with relatively small populations seem like the places where this approach is feasible.
I would assume until a vaccine that at least helps slow the spread or until the virus has mutated enough it's less of an impact. Or at least an bet at one of those 2 occurring.
> I don't understand this attitude. It's seems to essentially be "it requires thought, planning, and effort, and therefore is impossible."
This kind of thinking has become extremely common across many different topics, ideas and issues.
Improving healthcare, climate change, making better cars/public transport, etc. etc. It's like people have wholesale given up on trying to actually improve anything.
My personal suspicion is it comes from most people struggling under crippling debt, and desperation and no way out in their own life flows over into their broader thinking.
The goal is to keep the virus rare enough for normal public health measures to contain, and continue indefinitely with some 2m apart and working from home type restrictions.
One effect of the virus has been a rise in geographic realism among Australians. Over the last 50 years or so, we have been very gradually coming to think of Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan and Japan as medium size, more-or-less democratic countries like Australia. This year, we've been forced to give up on America and Europe, and we're thinking more seriously about how to live in our part of the world, where many countries have the virus under control. Though not yet seriously enough to learn the languages they speak, or anything like that.
The idea is that now the virus has been suppressed (they are doing sewage analysis to confirm whether the virus has gone away), they can control new cases with well-managed quarantine of returning travellers, and outbreak management. NZ and the rest of Australia has done this successfully since about May.
Good luck y’all! Life in Thailand has been pretty awesome (if you don’t rely on tourist dollars) since we hit this point some months back. At this point when the occasional bizarre local case does show up (and one or two have here) the government can go nuts on contact tracing and make sure it stays under control.
Ha ha! That's what my friends in KL and Penang were telling me in August. Just wait until the king comes home from France, and insists that his 100 or so favorite hookers skip quarantine :-(
Seriously, I think that we'll have to live with one Southeast Asian country (including Australia) having an outbreak at any given time.
I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say with the last sentence there. For one, the outbreaks in Indonesia and the Philippines show no sign of abating.
Just put in prison. With the new King there is a lot to be critical of, but for whatever reason he has held back on imprisoning people. The junta has nevertheless been quite harsh on critics of the regime.
Oh that's right 3 to 15 years of prison for criticizing the royal family....that's as fascist as it gets. Not a great model for any country to aspire to.
How do we know Thailand isn't just executing anyone testing positive for Coronavirus?
Would anyone report it if true with free speech laws like that?
Well the Thais are really efficient at organising themselves and have an excellent public health and medical system. However, the notion that they can keep a secret like that is laughable.
Thailand has actually reopened to Chinese tourists to some extent.
It is important to point out that Coronavirus emerged when the Northern hemisphere was still in Winter and early spring, a time where viruses can extremely thrive and now the Northern hemisphere is seeing a second wave because we still don’t have a vaccine and are entering a full new winter with COVID.
The southern hemisphere had only to battle COVID for a single Winter, and that delayed too, having had already the advantage of all the lessons learned in Europe. It’s very likely that their second Winter will already see a vaccine so by pure chance when the virus emerged countries in the Southern hemisphere have had a much better situation and therefore should expect better outcomes.
You are still disadvantaged against nature. We know that being more outdoors and having your windows more open is helping to reduce infections, but when you are entering Winter then a lot of the knowledge we have won’t stop the fact that infections will still rise due to the change in our behaviour in cold weather. It’s just a fact of life, the entire world sees infection spikes of other viruses (flu and so on) in Winters and therefore it’s not helpful to make sarcastic finger pointing comments when we all have accepted this as a fact of life and know this is just how it is.
Because Australia suppressed the virus as much as they could with a very long lockdown. South America didn't, so they started with complete different baselines into their summers.
To those citing weather as a likely influence, I'm not sure I agree.
Given the graph provided by the linked site, it looks like cases started really dipping in late August. August and September are still bloody cold in Melbourne, where most of the cases have been recorded. Additionally, Australia is heading into a La Nina summer, generally characterised by a slower onset of warmer weather and greater average rainfall.
Edit: Anecdotally, Adelaide weather for the last few months has barely registered as spring. Melbourne is typically a few °C cooler than Adelaide.
Yes, it was Winter and they were in a four month lockdown. Let me repeat, a FOUR MONTH lockdown. That is a bloody long time so anything but a huge dip during a four month lockdown would just be bizarre. Now they have summer, cases a low after a lockdown and due to the weather cases will remain low like we've seen in Summer across all of Europe, regardless what measures countries have taken. If Europe was to spend 4 months out of their Winter in lockdown, then cases will drop there too.
> Now they have summer, cases a low after a lockdown and due to the weather cases will remain low like we've seen in Summer across all of Europe, ...
Summer starts here in Australia in a month from now. (We'll then be contending with the return of bushfires.)
I think it's disservice to assert the weather is what will keep our case count low -- when a lot of people have gone through a whole lot of shit (and still are) to achieve & maintain the situation we now have.
I think there's sufficient contra-examples in both hemispheres to suggest that the weather is not a major factor -- though it is politically expedient & convenient to point at the weather to distract from mismanagement.
> I think there's sufficient contra-examples in both hemispheres to suggest that the weather is not a major factor -- though it is politically expedient & convenient to point at the weather to distract from mismanagement.
I'm not a politician, I'm not a nationalist, my birthplace is not the culture which I've been raised under, where my parents come from I've never lived and where I live now I have no ties whatsoever, so simply I don't care about country politics and trying to suggest anything different is the real disservice.
It's a fact that warm weather plays a huge role. In Europe we have seen a first relief during Spring and all countries have seen a huge dip in cases during their warmest summer months, completely irrespective of the countries individual measures. That's just a hard fact that you can't argue away in good conscience.
Furthermore, irrespective of how well countries have done, how many sacrifices people have done and what measures countries have taken (e.g. Germany vs. Sweden vs. UK vs. Czechia, etc.) all European countries see the same acceleration of cases. The only difference is the baseline where the spike starts, but the curve upwards is literally identical, so it further underlines that the weather has a bigger influence than any other measure except a full lockdown on the infection rate of coronavirus.
My point was that politicians that are incapable of managing this disease within their own borders would be happy to point to weather, as a way of abrogating responsibility. This claim is typically made without citation.
If people that repeat this claim, asserting it as fact, don't have citations -- then that's a different but related problem.
In Australia we got this under control through winter. Several states (South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, Northern Territory) had it so well controlled they had little if anything resembling strict lockdowns. Also through winter.
If 'all of Europe' (I'm not sure if you're talking mainland only there, or are including the very warm bits down the south, etc) is having the same results, then absent a control set to compare to, we can't know if that's an effect of comparable politics / culture, lack of controlled border controls, that a tipping point has been reached, or, as you say, 'because it's cold'.
A point for Germany: the current outbreak is much stronger than the one in March, even though we didn't have obligatory masks in March (they've been in effect since April; few people had them before they became obligatory). We had very few cases during the (pretty warm) summer (in the county I currently live in, there were zero cases in June). March peaked at around 5.5k on a single day, October peaked at ~13k with most days >5.5k.
Given that we have a lot more measures in place now (masks, distancing etc), something else has to play a role. February and March were unusually warm and sunny. I don't know whether that's relevant, but it seems unlikely that the counter-measures predict the peak - they are much stricter now than they were at the beginning of the year.
There were no real testing infrastructure in March. Everything was an unknown, and most people didn't get tested unless they showed serious symptoms and were close to hospitalization.
The current assumption in Norway, based on testing and WHO guidelines) are that we detect about 1/2 of the active cases through testing now, compared to 1/10 back in March. Applied to your numbers, the current outbreak in Germany is about a fifth of what it was back in March.
Be careful about assuming the numbers represent the same thing over time and between countries; in general the ratio of positive cases compared to the number of tests has changed a lot during the last eight months.
Some of the reports from the Norwegian health authorities has explicit notes about where reporting and testing criteria changed during the timeline.
Good point, testing might be a large factor. That would be very good news with regards to the danger of Covid-19, since it would lower the actual death rate massively.
From what I understand the current daily test capacity for Germany is about twice as large as it was in April. I do believe that they're still only testing those who exhibit symptoms or have been in contact with somebody who tested positive.
Germany was the one country in Europe that did have fairly decent testing infrastructure in place during the spring outbreaks, though. So that doesn't apply so much to them as it does to other European countries. It wasn't quite as good as it is now - looking at the RKI's stats, they did over 400,000 tests in the week at the end of March when test positivity hit its spring peak, compared to over 1.2 million the last few weeks - but they didn't have the massive ramp-up in testing that most other European countries did.
Speaking of test positivity, their all-time high is 9% and the most recent week for which information is available isn't that far off that at 5.6%, and I think that number's effectively a week old at this point. All indications are that Germany really, genuinely does have a bigger outbreak this time around.
It's also pretty easy to find counterexamples. For example, COVID numbers in India started exploding in May, which is also the hottest month throughout most of the country.
The trend for suppressing spread in the US isn't so much hot weather, it's temperate weather. Any time people are comfortable being outside, there's less spread. When it gets too hot for that (the South and Southwest over the summer) or too cold (the North, broadly, now) we see lots more spread.
Apparently it is relatively easy to control this virus during the summer, and almost impossible during the winter. Australia's summer seems to be helping it a good deal, even as winter in the northern hemisphere is making things much worse.
Returning residents bring in covid - they have been allowed back at all stages. Some days there is none, but on most days several cases come into the country.
Essential workers are also allowed in, although this has become a political football. For example, a equestrian race track builder was allowed in.
We are not in summer yet (i.e., I do not see any bushfires outside my window) but the weather is starting to warm up a bit (many low to mid-20C days) here in Melbourne. I'm not convinced weather is the only factor.
If you told six month ago me that we'd be treating people who are high risk of this disease the same as people with low risk I would have been in complete disbelief.
What's unbelievable is that we started this pandemic by treating people as if we knew nothing not only about this virus, but also by throwing all ARDS experience to the trash.
I will remember our experts telling us to intubate early and withhold steroids for a very long time. We killed a lot of people because a minority wanted to show off. This is depressing.
Experts didn't suggest withholding steroids just because they wanted to show off. Doctors in the field withheld steroids because the steroids they were giving patients with covid-19 was actively killing them. It took a long time to find out what steroids could safely be used for treatment
When I say 'we killed', it's myself included in a very personal way. I am an ICU doctor working on the frontline at one of the largest european university hospitals. And I am not a resident anymore.
Yes, they were show-offs and they still are. There is no justification for throwing away years of clinical experience with ARDS based on the personal opinions of a few who want to steal the spotlight by relying on novelty. They deserve to be despised, and I can say that with full confidence because I know a few of them personally.
BTW yes, they said that. And now we see that using them and trying to keep people breathing by themselves, we do much better (big surprise).
I do a lot of medical research and I am fully confident in saying that to decide to go against the grain based on preliminary data is irresponsible in medicine.
As a personal note, the attitude of medical researchers and the loosening of ethical and legal boundaries pertaining to research I saw in the first wave make me puke.
I think the issue was that most of the decisions made, over-reliance on intubation, withholding steroids, etc where made in the beginning, in places were the hospitals were overloaded and there was this sense of urgency and panic. Then some random study is showing a 18% fatality rate in severe cases with steroids Vs 14% without, giving the impression that this virus works like no other
In my opinion, reverting to more usual intubation practices is really a major improvement. For some reason, people tend to forget that mechanical ventilation is not a treatment but merely a supportive measure.
> some random study is showing a 18% fatality rate in severe cases with steroids Vs 14% without, giving the impression that this virus works like no other
Exactly. And I think that this goes to show that the current dynamics of medical research are highly toxic. The synergy between the 'publish or perish' motto and the myriad of Excel spreadsheet warriors who go on to become influential professors kills a lot of people.
Yeah let's get all the young people infected, having one percent of that population die is fine right? Next, they'll surely never talk to the people at risk. Their grandparents can sit at home and be more bored to death and lonely than they usually already are and have young people, which are allowed out, to bring them food. Couldn't possibly go wrong.
How do you picture different kinds of measures per risk group going? People can already choose to isolate more, disinfect more, keep distance more, etc. if they find themselves at risk. The compulsory measures are a bare minimum to prevent unnecessary deaths and keep the long term impact to a minimum. You can find a new job next year and live on government benefits in the meantime (or is the worst-case scenario for you not unemployment and boredom? Well, infecting loved ones would be worse in these times but you don't seem to find that very worrying) but if you're one of today's corona deaths you can't find another life.
Are we really going to split hairs over what the exact percentage is or can we talk about the point? To me it seems like crazy talk to pose something, which would cause millions of deaths, to be unbelievable not to do. I'd be much more interested in how they think this could possibly work in a safe manner than debating whether it causes 5 per thousand or 10 per thousand (a sibling comment said 0.63%, so 6.3 million among the billion young people we have). Something something straight face.
You’re probably two orders of magnitude off. Not exactly splitting hairs. (Sibling comment is talking about CFR, not IFR.) Any conclusions you might reach based on that kind of exaggeration of the risk are pretty meaningless.
> You can find a new job next year and live on government benefits in the meantime
The problem with that kind of thinking is it doesn't account for how the government gets money, which generally taxes on stuff being produced. If you don't produce stuff, you cannot redistribute it. There's no magic "the government takes care of it, we can all stay home forever" concept.
Increased government spending now means increased taxes tomorrow, that ought to be obvious.
Increased government spending now means greater national debt. Governments get money by printing it. They get revenue by taxation. They can borrow by issuing debt instruments.
A recovering economy and greater economic activity leads to greater tax revenue without necessarily increasing taxation rates.
This is a natural "budget stabilizer" effect that happens during recessions and expansions.
Debt funding is currently at historically low, almost zero/negative rates. Australia's debt-to-GDP is relatively low (42% prior to the current recession), our debt ratings are AAA.
> Increased government spending now means greater national debt. Governments get money by printing it. They get revenue by taxation. They can borrow by issuing debt instruments.
That's just a path for hyper inflation when no increased production is included. Money is a placeholder for value. If you don't create value and print money, the money doesn't magically create the stuff that gives it value.
It might not ruin a country, but I very much dislike this "whatever, the state can pay" hand-waving that just assumes the products magically appear if you just increase the money supply. There's no perpetual money machine, you can't just spend a billion as a state and generate 1.2bn in taxes, rinse & repeat.
I dunno. The US seems like a case study in this stuff. Large deficits every year, and even the more Conservative party is willing to pass a huge tax cut and nobody blinks an eye. The connection between income and spending appears to have been completely severed. And some people have been predicting hyperinflation for at least 40 years now.
The IFR of Covid is closer to 0.5% than to 1%. That is something we are perfectly used to: For example, Australia had a death rate of 0.63% in 2019.[1] Of course having anyone die isn't "fine". But the death of less than 1% of the population is something we can tolerate, not some kind of disaster of unprecedented magnitude worth a lockdown causing damage we can't even foresee yet.
That number looks accurate, but I'm not sure it's the only thing to look at.
First, deaths aren't the only measure. For every death there are many more people that just barely survive after a hospital stay, and data suggests a significant amount of those people will have long-term problems.
Second, if the hospitals are overloaded by such people (even if most of them survive) then the IFR of Covid can rise higher than 0.5-1%.
> First, deaths aren't the only measure. For every death there are many more people that just barely survive after a hospital stay, and data suggests a significant amount of those people will have long-term problems.
...where long-term means a few months at most. People do recover, just uncomfortably slowly.
> Second, if the hospitals are overloaded by such people (even if most of them survive) then the IFR of Covid can rise higher than 0.5-1%.
I'm not so sure about that. These IFR estimates haven't changed much since spring, when half of those hospitalized died.[1,2,3] Our treatment methods have improved since then. If the estimates reflected the IFR with treatment, they would be lower today. So I think an IFR of 0.5-1% is actually the worst case.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any source explicitly comparing death rates with vs without treatment.
Sydneysider here. Sydney hasn't seen anything remotely resembling an outbreak yet (not as bad as Melbourne's), but people are still wearing masks on trains, we are still getting tested (for free!), and businesses generally appear to be complying with covid restrictions. Life here has been relatively normal so far.
I recognize that Sydney might still be due for an outbreak, but I have more faith that the chances of that happening is low. I am incredibly thankful to be living in a country whose people and its government seem to be doing the right thing when it comes to this pandemic.
My other half is a high school teacher - she's had I think 4 cases of cough / sniffles that have required a test, with the process being free (as you say), convenient (walking distance - there are many places that offer the swab test), and fast (results back within 48 hours, usually faster, via SMS & email).
I've caught a train into the office 3 times since March - public transport utilisation is wonderfully low (though I'm avoiding peak times), and most people seem to be good about wearing a mask. I've eaten out a half dozen times only, in that time, and again people seem to be behaving and handling things admirably.
Looking around at the rest of the world, it's equal parts encouraging & astonishing just how well we're doing compared to, well, not just the obvious examples, but almost everywhere else.
I'm not sure why this needs explaining still. But this virus, like all viruses will evolve and change over time. The vaccine today won't be effective in a couple of years.
The Federal Government forecasts debt will increase by $500billion due to the pandemic response.
If we take the deathtoll from Sweden (lower than the USA, Spain, Italy, Belgium), Australia could have expected 15,000 deaths, adjusted for population. Less if we consider only excess deaths.
This is $33 million per life saved, typically for a person in their 80s.
Is this a good use of funds?
If this money was devoted instead to tackling climate change or domestic air pollution (basically the same thing), how many lives would have been saved and improved instead?
Its likely that the country could have been completely decarbonised - all coal power plants shutdown, urban wood burning banned and new efficient gas heaters and insulation subsidised, and all new vehicle sales replaced with electrics.
I also saw someone else say if we had done the Sweden approach and allowed those 15k deaths and saved all that money and ALSO made cigarettes illegal we would have saved many orders of magnitude more lives.
I'd bite that bullet - cigarettes should be banned.
In Australia the tax on them is continuously ramped up every year and fewer and fewer people take up the habit. It's obviously an elimination strategy there as with COVID.
That's 25 grand per person. If life goes back to normal for Australians for 1-2 years before everyone else, that's a bargain.
Considering that the Australian economy is based on digging and has an economic complexity just below Uganda[0], most of that damage was unavoidable anyway.
Australia will be the slowest to go back to normal since they will need to maintain national quarantine forever - until a suitable vaccine is found and administered.
$25,000 per person is a huge amount of money, far greater than for any national scheme, ever. Probably approaching Australia's expenditure for a world war or major international conflict.
Keep in mind that currently in Europe - there is very limited excess mortality. For example in Belgium right now, there are less excess deaths than from a heatwave in August:
Sweden and other non-lockdown countries are already back to normal. The only thing preventing normality is politicians who insist on lockdowns for a virus which is currently not causing excess deaths beyond what we would expect from regular influenza.
I'm not talking about dying, I'm talking about normal life.
I live in Denmark, with arguably more restrictions than Sweden. I'd happily sacrifice 25k in future lifetime earnings to have 2020 back. (BTW, as a startup founder, the possible costs of COVID may wind up being far more disastrous to my lifetime earnings)
Wow, Australia has an astoundingly low ECI. Is there any way this could be confounded? I know we're no USA in this respect, but it still comes as a surprise.
We mostly sell ore, meat, and grain. If I'm reading the ECI right this takes no particular skill and these are common products that many countries in the world can produce, explaining the low score. It's why we rank alongside so many African nations.
It doesn't seem to take into account internal economies, but I don't know how we fare there.
I understand that, and if the ECI is normalised by total economic output, it would make sense for it to be low in Australia for that reason.
But if you subtracted these industries from Australia, I would expect there to be more knowledge and technology industry remaining than in some of the countries with a higher ECI. So if ECI is not normalised by total economic output, I would be surprised.
Normalising by economic output makes it a bit of a misleading metric. Australia could have world-class knowledge and tech sectors (they don't, but they could), and yet ECI would be low just because some low-complexity sector was booming.
Not normalising at all is pretty fraught too though. I guess it has the potential to mislead in both cases.
Also someone in Sydney who hasn't caught a train since probably March, masks do seem kind of rare places I go (south and eastern suburbs). And the days of 1.5m social distancing are long gone. It's not enforced at all, people walk all over paths and stairs and you have to squeeze by.
Which is probably not a big deal, overall, because as you say rates are low and it's basically gone at this point. Some places are taking it seriously though, I know for example a relative with a child in daycare had to get her daughter tested multiple times. Every symptom needs a test, and kids tend to have snotty noses even when healthy, which gets them pulled aside and parents called for a test before they can come back.
I had jam donuts, which don't have a hole, but, there's no donut rules!
For those who don't know, when we went into lockdown, our Premier said "This is no time to gather with mates at home and get on the beers".
He had a daily press conference every day, 111 days straight. He announced the current situation, what was being done, what was changing, and then stood and took questions from reporters until they ran out of things to ask.
When we recently started to relax the lockdown, he was asked whether it was time to "get on the beers" and he said "I don't know that I'll be drinking a beer tonight. I might go a little higher up the shelf."
Seeing all these knee jerk anti-lockdown, anti-government, anti-rules, posts claiming beyond all reason that Australia just magically has no cases because of some statistical quirk or something really shows how many people will just never accept any kind of government intervention was beneficial even when blatantly obvious.
Comments claiming the lockdown did nothing add something to the discussion? How could any rational human being really think this? They just blindly hate the government and some people here really don't understand that this worked, not because they debated about it but because they just did the obvious thing and organized a response and executed it.
Edit: and also instead of making personal attacks please address the substance of what I'm saying I've been on HN but just created an account to respond to the new wave of germ theory denialism I see on this site.
Genuine question from a fellow software engineer (throwaway because COVID is such a wedge issue. And for the record I'm currently in Australia and spent the early part of COVID pandemic in the US so have familiarity with both sides of the equation):
Does anyone have a plan to get the world out of COVID? Previous pandemics such as SARS/MERS were contained but had no vaccine, Spanish Flu wasn't contained but there were lasting antibodies (up to 90 years![0]). For COVID all we've been doing is "hoping for a vaccine" which by all accounts[1] will only be 70% effective and will likely require boosters. The world is on a roller coaster of going into and out of lockdown (see Europe this week instituting stay at home orders again) and all the while _there is no plan_ for the world to get past this.
So I ask again, does anyone have any kind of plan to get the world back to normal? In Melbourne, Australia, people are wearing masks and "buying time for a vaccine" but when it comes it won't help the at-risk portions of the population. In the US there seems to be no plan at all. Nowhere in the world has anyone come up with a pathway forward to return the human race to a way of life similar to where we were at in 2019.
So, given there are so many people in here skilled at decomposing problems and articulating effective solutions, and given there most likely won't be a >70% effective vaccine in the next 2-3 years, what is the way forward for the world? Or are we to be mired in an endless cycle of lockdown/open/lockdown for as far as the eye can see.
Even with a vaccine, I'd expect the world to be different than a year ago. There will be long-term changes. Much of Asia went through such changes after SARS, so the world has experience with this.
But we can get to something very close to normal, with differences from before. More mask-wearing, more government powers to do contact tracing, more health checks on borders and other travel limitations, more remote work, etc. So it might not be the same "normal" as before, and some of those things will be unpleasant, but we can live with them (and some will have other benefits, like remote work and a decrease in flights will help against climate change).
And specifically I think you're downplaying a vaccine. Even a 70% effective one would make a huge difference in how the virus spreads, potentially decreasing R below 1 even in Europe and the US and other hard-hit areas.
The response is handled at the state level, not the federal level (though it can make recommendations). Most states have reopened or are planning to. Others, like mine, have in their plan that they won't completely reopen until there is a vaccine (and it's looking likely we'll be re-locking-down soon).
Whether people return to normal activity after restrictions are removed is its own question.
The west should have given a chance to complete containment. 2-3 weeks of stopped flights would have cost less. But it wasn't even seen as a possibility. Probably that ship has sailed for COVID-19, but it should be considered for COVID-21 etc, the virus hasn't stopped mutating.
I think the idea is to suppress numbers via lockdown to the point where contact tracing, along with ubiquitous testing, can detect and squash any local outbreaks before they spread widely, and people can live somewhat normally.
Afaict that has been the plan all along in the US as well (in terms of what scientists and infectious disease experts were saying), but most states and the administration gave up on that months ago, e.g. the national "testing czar" declaring the required testing capacity impossible.
How is that possible given that the virus spreads so rapidly, asymptomatic people can spread the virus, and the tests aren't 100% accurate and population size is large?
By the time an out break is identified hundreds or thousands of people have possibly been infected.
It's not asymptomatic enough, not infectious enough, for that to be impossible. Multiple Australian states have demonstrated this, as have China, New Zealand, Taiwan and a few others.
If every time you get a symptomatic case that tests positive, you isolate contacts and secondary contacts, you will have isolated enough of the asymptomatic cases and false negative tests to get R < 1 and halt the spread of the virus.
I'm telling you, empirically if you do this, the virus goes away.
The proof is in the pudding: we are seeing this strategy work.
Those grocery store shoppers might be susceptible, but it turns out that not enough of them get infected for this strategy to fail if it is stuck to for long enough.
I'm posting this from Victoria, where we've had zero new COVID cases for three days now. I'm telling you, it works.
Once society lets down it's guard, if your country hasn't reached herd immunity when the virus returns you're back to lockdown. Perpetual corona whack a mole.
There's no realistic way out of this other than herd immunity through a vaccine or natural means.
Non vaccine human control of this virus is impossible long term.
Some places have eradicated it by careful tracking and isolation.
It's a virus. It has no reservoir but currently infected people. In fact, if we could all stay isolate for 2 weeks it would be gone from the earth. Of course that's impossible but combination strategies can (have) worked.
Ok, in that case I agree with you that it only delays re-introduction. By, like, a hundred years. I'll take that.
Obviously the bigger risk to Australia et al is reintroduction from other countries. So Australia's borders will continue to require 14 days of quarantine until there is a good enough vaccine. However, New Zealand has now seen three re-introductions, and they have managed to suppress them just fine so far. So if this is what delaying the inevitable looks like, I'll take it too. Seems like it can be delayed an awfully long time.
Maintaining quarantine at borders is an option, if a country decides they want to do it. Australia decided it wanted to. I see no reason why this can't be sustained indefinitely, it's merely a matter of how long Australia is willing to have a border quarantine system in place (which comes with all kinds of costs due to reduced international travel).
There's no epidemiological reason the virus can't be suppressed and kept out of a given region. The only remaining question is how soon we expect a vaccine such that this isolation is worth it in the long run. If a vaccine never comes then it is not a viable strategy, otherwise, it does seem like a good call.
Just want to remind you that I'm writing this from Australia where there is practically no virus in the community and are freedoms are increasing rather than decreasing. I don't expect there'll be widespread COVID in Australia ever again, as we've gotten quite good at suppressing small outbreaks now.
Flu and Ebola rear their ugly heads constantly yearly even. So every hundred years would be cool but not guaranteed.
These are very optimistic beliefs of yours and time will tell.
You have to keep in mind that even if the virus is able to be contained by human intervention..there is a cost of perpetual repressive policies: closed borders, mask wearing, burden on small businesses, social distancing, etc.
Herd immunity via vaccine or natural acquisition is the only way we'll ever fully go back to normal.
And I do wish you all the best over there, and hope that all of this is as manageable as it appears.
Either way if a vaccine reappears were mostly back to normal.
Plenty of countries have maintained local transmission at zero or near zero thanks to travel restrictions: taiwan, vietnam, new zealand, the Atlantic region of Canada, Thailand
The virus isn’t magic. If you have a testing and tracing system in place and act quickly with temporary restrictions you can squash any outbreaks that do make it through.
And meanwhile life in those areas is basically normal. I’m in one now. Functionally we’re much more free than people in places with heavy lockdowns and fear.
We know the virus is asymptomatic yet contagious in people for weeks.
All it takes is for one low paid person at a checkpoint to have a bad day or be bribed and let an infected person through and you have a pandemic again.
Additionally the tests aren't 100% accurate so even with perfect testing of borders someone could slip by given a large enough sample size.
I think those countries have either:
1. Reached herd immunity already due to wide spread infections or pre-existing cross immunity(possibly regional exposure to a related corona virus)
2. Living on borrowed time
Something doesn't add up.
I think you all may be patting yourselves on the back too soon.
Or the population actually has herd immunity already due to having been exposed to similar viruses.
That would explain why a lot of Asian countries in China's orbit are reaching minimal infections sooner. They may have had Corona or something similar for years.
Any excuse to wave away the possibility that competent government and a society that is willing to take a temporary hit for a bigger goal is possible right?
First of all, throughout all of recorded history, when has government been competent in caring for it's subjects needs?
When it had its foot on the neck of the peasants for a thousand years during Egyptian times or a thousand years during medieval times?
The only thing that ended massive repression by the government during the middle ages, was the black plague which killed indiscriminately and allowed redistribution of the wealth and subsequently the enlightenment.
What about when gov't started started holocausts, genocides, crusades?
When it invaded Vietnam and many of the other frivolous wars the human race has been in?
This is not hand wavy this is history.
SECOND OF ALL, this is not a temporary hit this is permanently hurting hundreds of millions of peoples lives increasing real poverty around the world destroying small businesses and people's livelihoods.
This is rewriting society and culture.
This is increasing homelessness, suicide, drug addiction and overdoses and more.
If you think this is a temporary hit you and the rest of the people like you are truly in your own bubble.
There's no testing at borders in the countries I'm aware of that have eliminated COVID-19. How it works is that very few people are allowed in at all, and every single person who _is_ allowed in is force-quarantined for two weeks in facilities specifically built/converted for secure quarantine. Outbreaks that _have_ happened tend to start from guards in quarantine facilities, not from someone slipping by border security (which is hard to mess up if you let in single-digit numbers of people per day).
You’ve got some heavily inaccurate assumptions about how the virus spreads. Most infected people spread to nobody, even without restrictions. The bulk of spread happens in clusters in poorly ventilated indoor environments. The household attack rate is something like 17%. That’s people living in the same house. 83% of people don’t get it!
To have a sustained outbreak breach quarantine, you’d need:
1. An infected person to arrive (probably less than 2% of arrivals are infected)
2. This infected person must breach isolation protocol. (Most people are honest or fear or penalties)
3. They must be infectious when they breach protocol (you are only very infectious for five days or so)
4. They must go to a place apt to superspreading (not everyone breaching isolation will go to a bar or a party)
5. The newly infected must all remain asymptomatic and not seek testing
6. Once community spread is detected, the government must delay taking action, fail to contact trace, and avoid implementing new measures
This is obviously possible. Outbreaks have happened in Australia, Vietnam, New Zealand, New Brunswick. But it is much, much less likely than you suggest, which is why you’re being downvoted: you’re completely failing to consider the system dynamics.
And in each case step 6 has put things back on track pretty quick. Australia is the exception, but there the local government was slow to respond and so they needed a big, long lockdown. Other areas responded quickly and so the necessary lockdown has been short.
I’m in the Atlantic bubble. Frankly it leaks like a sieve and yet it’s still been enough to keep out infections for now.
I think a lot of what you said doesn't take into account how actual reality works.
I think the system dynamics you're using may be purely academic.
I was saying one person as an example...but America has millions of undocumented people that snuck across the border here. Do you honestly think other countries don't?
Borders are very fluid.
Humans are social creatures by nature. They're going to come into infectious proximity of hundreds if not thousands of people a week at grocery stores, restaraunts, gas stations, bars, salons, etc.
Also theres's science showing corona virus stays on surfaces for days which means if they cough on a surface like a doorknob that can spread to people they weren't in contact with.
Contact tracing is useless.
Like I said.. once again.. youre just lucky and are patting yourself on the back too soon... or your region has reached some form of herd immunity.
Anyone knows if Australia is going to accept "tourists" anytime soon? I would love to spend a few weeks there and get away from the chaos. (and of course I would get tested before going, etc)
Unless you accept people that have been tested, in which case you are not reintroducing anything. You can also enforce a 10-12 days quarantine to make sure.
Australia has recently introduced a “travel bubble” which allows residents of New Zealand to visit without quarantine (albeit with a couple of edge cases). Interestingly, residents of Australia aren’t permitted to travel in the other direction yet.
I'm sure they would, but they don't currently have the quarantine capacity to accept all of their own citizens that want to return, so there would be public outrage if the capacity were used for tourists, no matter how profitable.
Many Australians (including loved ones of mine) are currently stuck overseas with flights repeatedly being cancelled. It's really shameful the country isn't doing more for its own citizens.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 414 ms ] threadAlso, don’t forget to vote.
Edit: spelling
By "hopefully provides a temporary relief", I was thinking on a longer scale as in maybe sometime next year and more along the lines of getting to come up for a breath when we've had a hand holding our heads below water for four years.
I mean this election is basically a forced choice between two grandpas and both are representing values from before I was born.
Where's the political party that I would trust to do what will secure a good future for my kids, because they, too, have young kids?
Where's the political party where people roughly my age are calling the shots?
US, France, Germany, UK, ... All I see is conservative old people. Germany and France tried to establish new center parties, but in both cases the newcomers quickly got infiltrated by old politicians and drifted far right, meaning conservative again.
If I've learned anything atop my 33 wise years old, is that any political candidate that looks like a clean break from the old guard, is exactly the same if not worse than its predecessors.
And this is just my cynicism: the corollary is that any candidate, new or old, is a bad choice, except extremely rare exceptions.
Labour’s last leader was magic grandpa boomer. The new one is slightly younger, come the next election he’ll only be in his early 60s.
Lib Dems had a young leader who (aged 39) managed to convert from being second in the June elections (led by a 70+ year old) to losing her seat in December, with a 7 year old and a baby.
There are relatively young leaders - Finland and New Zealand come to mind, but leaders tend to be reflections of the population. When the UK Labour Party was taken over by hundreds of thousands of young socialists via momentum in 2015, they didn’t chose the 45 year old (since christened king of he north), or the 46 year old with teenage kids, or even the 44 year old with no experience.
They chose the OAP career politician.
This is transitional and we'll see changes in the next political cycles. In the US it will be the post Nixon, post Reagan politicians, in the EU it will be the post Berlin Wall/unification politicians.
The problems of the 20th century are fading, but the problems of the 21st are crystalizing. Climate Change, the effects of 40 years of laissez faire capitalism and dergulation, the effects of casualisation of the work force and in many OECD societies, lack of wage growth or wealth of the lower/middle classes.
Needless to say, this is unlikely to change without a fight, since the status quo benefits the people in power on both sides.
Europe isn't looking much different right now.
The past year has had irreparable damage to the U.S. It's hard to know where to even start, from slow production due to job loss and just everything going slower, poor health due to active cases and the decades of health care reverberations done from permanent damage and repeat infections, poor education due to an already broken primary and secondary school system basically being put on pause for a year, etc. The U.S. is literally fighting whether to re-elect a person who likely has clinical personality disorders and is probably well below even average intelligence, at the very best.
Realizing it's "only" 180 cases, yes, China is firing on all cylinders:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/large-covid-ou...
Although parts of continental Europe are struggling, there are others that have done okay - Norway and Finland, for example.
Outside of "the west", democratic countries in East Asia like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have done alright too. Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have their political issues, but they're less authoritarian than Vietnam and China - the whole lot of them are doing well. Most of Africa is too. South America, not so much.
So, it's not just about politics, and it's not just about geographic location, and it's not just about climate.
It will be interesting to see the analysis after all this is over. There must be something we can learn from why it was that certain countries failed at managing this virus while others succeeded.
Throwing up your hands and claiming it can’t be controlled in the west for some reason is a cop out and is also incorrect.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/hawaii/
Politically, yes, but being islands with a significant distance to other countries does make them very different. It's somewhat easy to restrict travel to NZ or AU, but it's much harder in Europe.
Geographic location seems to play a role. Japan and Taiwan are islands, for all intents and purposes, so is South Korea (a mine field inhibits travel). Singapore and Malaysia have much fewer land-borders.
Restricting movement in Europe between countries is more comparable to restricting movement within a country. They don't have hard borders, generally no controls etc. Probably doable, but not without very authoritarian policies which I don't see happening (during the migrant crisis in 2015, the general narrative was that it's literally impossible to enforce borders in Europe).
Which is another significant policy that was implemented in Australia, both this year and during the Spanish flu pandemic. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/coronavirus-border-cl...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MljLpcD0VWM
Deaths flat in case you were wondering: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sweden%20deaths%20coro...
And I don't give a shit about the market.
I in no way meant to imply that anywhere else was less deserving of worry.
If someone enters the country they’re quarantined in a hotel room for 14 days. If someone tests positive during that quarantine period we report it, but count it separately.
Title doesn't seem to match data.
Aside from them there were no new cases, even between close contacts (household etc).
So, the title is true for locally acquired cases, which I believe is the point the submitter is trying to make.
(Also there was only one locally acquired case the previous day, in the state of South Australia, which has barely had an outbreak at all, thanks to having a sparse population and relatively little international air traffic).
There were over 76000 test results processed to achieve that result, and there is a strong message through the community to get tested with even the mildest/vaguest of symptoms. Testing is free and stations are located to be easily accessible to most of the population, particularly in Victoria, which had a serious outbreak from June to September.
Yes. I went with the headline Australian newspapers are using, which in hindsight lacks sufficient context for HN.
What I find remarkable is how many things Australia stuffed up, but was able to recover from by brute force and social cohesion. Procrastinating over quarantine for international travellers, obsessing about ventilators while ignoring prevention, identifying that aged care was a massive vulnerability but doing nothing to mitigate it, gross recklessness in setting up hotel quarantine, failing to anticipate that although the virus went away it was bound to come back: it's a long list.
Normalized by population the worst non-tiny (10M+) countries to be right now seem to be France, Italy, Belgium and Poland. And it'd be even worse in France, Italy and Poland in terms of new cases if they had the kind of testing throughput the US has been able to muster (1.24M tests a day). Belgium has comparable normalized test throughput. As far as cases, new cases = positivity * throughput. The higher the throughput, the more cases you are going to get.
But even below USA, before we get to France, Italy or Poland; Peru, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia ranks in before.
And most of these countries are testing at lower rates than France.
Australia for example has a 25mill population at ~3people per km2. This is effectively worthless as a measure as ~95% of the country's population lives in major cities with population density of 4k-8k per km2.
Everyone wants to downplay our results. But we went hard and obeyed the rules. I really do think we acted exceptionally as the public.
I see what other places with outbreaks are doing, and it seems very lax.
You mean "only" given most people another year or two with their elderly?
No you aren't. There's no "getting rid of it". Spanish Flu (!) is still with us. It just kinda fizzled out after just about everyone got it over the course of 2+ years, but the virus still endemic, over a hundred years later.
We have testing in industrial environments that are known to be dangerous (eg abbatoirs, health care).
We have tracing that in the last week caught a single case in a school that ended up with over 800 people in isolation while being tested. Our tracing is not only close contacts, but the close contacts of contacts.
This test/trace infrastructure is being replicated across the country and by next winter, we should have standardized processes.
Work is ongoing in areas like health and aged care, and we are planning for how to bring international students (an important part of our economy) back for the start of the university year in March.
Yet we don’t really worry about it in the US: people are (mostly) vaccinated, and getting a visa to enter the country requires vaccination.
Covid might be similar, except given anti vaccine sentiment the US, Australia might have to throw the US on the list alongside Brazil, Nigeria, and the Congo.
We're feeling pretty relieved to be getting these results and excited to be tentatively emerging from nearly four months of fairly strict lockdown.
Much is being made of the fact that back in August when Melbourne was reporting over 700 new cases on some days, UK and France were reporting similar new case numbers, yet we are now getting zeroes and those countries have out-of-control spread.
At the same time, there's much debate and political ruckus about the merits of the lockdown - i.e., the economic and human costs, vs the benefits of suppressing a virus that many consider to be not very serious.
There's also the ongoing attack on our state government from political opponents and parts of the media, over the fact that the virus was suppressed here back in May, as it was in the rest of Australia, but then started spreading rapidly again in June, when poorly-trained security guards acquired the virus while working in quarantine hotels, then took it back to their families and communities, with the outbreak then tearing through aged care homes and leading to a total of 800+ fatalities.
What isn't being talked about here, but has been mentioned by another commenter in this thread, is weather. Melbourne is the only large/dense city in Australia that has quite cool winters, similar to the weather that prevailed in Northern Asia, Europe and the US in Feb-April, and that is returning to Western Europe now. As we now know, given the serious outbreaks that have happened in warmer regions, warm weather is not a strong enough factor to halt this virus altogether, but it does seem to have an influence, and it's striking to note the progression of this virus in Melbourne, relative to the weather.
AMA!
I haven't seen good polling numbers around this, but I suspect it's not actually 'many', but rather a highly vocal small number of people, blessed with hubris, ignorance, and/or partisan agendas.
I appreciate that there's some significant impact to a lot of people, and that my world view is significantly skewed because I'm not in that category, but what we continue to find out about the way this disease can affect otherwise fit & healthy people, and with the unfortunate benefit of seeing what is happening in countries that aren't as committed to controlling this, indicates we've probably made the right decisions here.
Four newborn babies died because the South Australian government did not want to risk flying them to Melbourne for treatment.
Lockdown primarily harms young people (ostensibly to save old people, the primary victims of the virus). I think this is such a sickening calculation.
We're enslaving our children to debt, depriving them of social lives (this can have permanent impacts), some of them commit suicide, some of them are denied treatment by government and die and they're not getting as much exercise and are also eating poorly.
I'm really tired of seeing people gloss over the effects of lockdown, because lockdown is dangerous in itself. Is the virus or the lockdown more dangerous? Well, that remains to be seen.
In Australia, an additional 4,000 - 7,000 suicides were projected beyond the norm as a result of lockdowns. [1] This is significantly higher than the death toll of the virus and is only a single datapoint. It doesn't include people skipping preventative appointments and dying as a result, or the long term effects of massive depression and obesity spikes.
[1] https://ama.com.au/media/joint-statement-covid-19-impact-lik...
[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/suicide-an...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-r...
>"We still think we're going to see, over the course of a 12-month period … and then subsequent years, in the order of 30 per cent increase [in] suicide rates," he said.
30% of 3,048 is 914. 5 years of that is 4,572 additional suicides. I got the 5 years data point from the Australian Medical Association. [1]
[1] https://ama.com.au/media/joint-statement-covid-19-impact-lik...
A restaurant owner who saved their entire life to open up a business was forced to shut down for the greater part of a year with inadequate government support. Of course that causes depression and even suicide in some cases. Their life's work has been eviscerated through no fault of their own.
During the lockdown, the government's message was essentially "do not open your business by threat of enforcement action, but by the way you have to keep paying your rent/mortgage and we're going to give you a token amount of money to help".
While this was happening, governments around the world were throwing cash at banks and big business. Small businesses got screwed. As usual.
As for the specific medical reasoning, I'm no medical professional and would not pretend to know how the Australian Medical Association comes up with their claims.
If you were questioning the source, I'd implore you to post counter-evidence.
Remember that Australia has not had a financial recession for 25+ years. Recession for any reason causes bankruptcies which leads to those personal impacts.
But the lockdown has meant that our economy will be closer back to "normal" earlier than it would have been. Our primary markets in Asia (in particular China) are all recovering rapidly.
So not sure what your argument is here. Yes, all of the effects you state are correct. However, what was the alternative?
Some of these restaurants had $20,000/week expenses and the government was offering significantly less than that in support.
>But the lockdown has meant that our economy will be closer back to "normal" earlier than it would have been
That sounds like wild speculation. Thousands of businesses closed permanently. Sure, giant banks and huge corporations that were specifically bailed out by government will be more-or-less fine. But that family restaurant? They went out of business months ago.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-10/melbourne-second-coro...
But all that is beside the point, which was suicides from lockdown effects will be substantially higher than virus deaths currently, according to Australian Medical Association modelling. I don't think you attempted to refute that with any counter-evidence (beyond your speculation).
Irreparably? Using restaurants is a terrible metric since most of those fail even in a booming economy. I think restaurants and hospitality will be one of the fastest areas to recover once people feel it's safe.
A lot of these things would've happened even without a lockdown, since if the pandemic goes badly enough, huge swaths of the population would've shut themselves at home to avoid risk of contagion.
Also, the virus is clearly more dangerous than the lockdown: you have seen what happens when the lockdown is applied to the whole population, but you haven't yet seen what happens when the virus has spread to 50%+ of the population (and it's especially ugly if it'd happen all in a short amount of time).
It's sad to know about additional suicides, though the reports I've seen say that there hasn't been any increase in suicides during the lockdowns (but again: it might've been specific to the situation in Europe)
This is important to repeat and add also add economic toll. People blame the death and economic toll on lockdowns or other mitigation measures, but the toll is from the pandemic itself.
Even if no state mitigation measures were implemented, there would still be a huge economic and mental health toll.
Raw infection numbers are scary, but not very telling since testing is far from universal or error free.
Death stats aren't that reliable either. Covid seems to be deadly and a miracle cure at the same time - it's amazing how death rates for other maladies all seem to be dramatically down. I'm sure that is just coincidence.
This is False (obviously).
Germany: 126 deaths by million
Portugal: 247
France: 549
Sweden: 580
Spain: 764
I steeled myself to read this post in the most charitable possible light. Yes, lockdown most likely has some death toll. But the specific points you're making are very dubious and also very recognisable as the effect of consuming specific kinds of media.
Firstly, the point about "not getting as much exercise" is frustrating. Back when we didn't have data on this, it was annoying to me to hear people's absolute conviction that (a) people would exercise less and (b) the effect would be so large that it would lead to a decrease in obesity significant enough to offset the number of life-years lost to COVID, especially since the lockdown personally prompted me to start exercising MORE due to my new surplus of idle time. We now have some suggestion that for previously sedentary people, it led to more exercise (my experience) and for previously active people, it led to a decrease. I'd love to see any suggestion that the net effect of this was so colossal as to produce the adverse health outcomes of whose existence you seem so confident. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312512/
> In Australia, an additional 4000-7000 suicides were projected
At least in Victoria, it seems like these predictions were unfounded. Of course, that is not going to stop people from repeating this talking point. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-r...
The Australian Medical Association projects 750-1,000 additional suicides for 5 years. [1] That's an increase of 3,750 - 5,000 additional suicides.
Some have projected a 50% increased suicide rate, if that happened for 5 years it'd be 7,500 additional suicides.
[1] https://ama.com.au/media/joint-statement-covid-19-impact-lik...
I specifically said Australia, and your claim is incorrect according to the Australian Medical Association which forecasts 750-1,000 additional suicides for 5 years. [1] I can't find my original source for that figure but the AMA source still proves my point.
>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312512
Belgium did not have a Melbourne-tier lockdown at any stage. Why would it be comparable?
>But the specific points you're making are very dubious and also very recognisable as the effect of consuming specific kinds of media.
Ah yes, "specific kinds of media" like the Australian Medical Association. Those darned far right Murdoch-leaning doctors.
Your own source proves my point in fact. [2]
>"We still think we're going to see, over the course of a 12-month period … and then subsequent years, in the order of 30 per cent increase [in] suicide rates," he said.
30% of 3,048 is 914. 5 years of that is 4,572 additional suicides. I got the 5 years data point from the Australian Medical Association. [1]
[1] https://ama.com.au/media/joint-statement-covid-19-impact-lik...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-r...
What are you talking about? Yes we did. Curfew, essential services only, no non-essential travel, etc etc.
Above all of that, Melbourne has had one of the longest lockdowns globally (surpassing Wuhan in length).
I find that an unnecessary slight. Since that topic is very taboo, you won't be able to read about it in mainstream media sources, but only in opposition sources and professional journals. Attacking it on those grounds is weak.
It would be extremely surprising if a multi-month lockdown didn't have a death toll, "most likely" makes it sound like that's probable but remains to be seen. I don't think that's a reasonable position given all we know about the cost of policies, mental health and economic depression.
The argument shouldn't be "lockdown is painless" (because it obviously isn't), it has to be "no lockdown is more painful". We won't be able to tell whether it's true for quite some time, but there's a good argument for erring on the side of caution.
However, the effect of these needs to be balanced against the effect of not controlling the spread of COVID. There were also other benefits, for example, much lower influenza and other winter diseases due to lack of contact and masks and social distancing.
By controlling and reducing the number of cases, we had lower rates and now almost eliminated hospitalizations. There were interruptions in "elective" surgeries, but required surgery and hospitalization for other disease suffered much less than it could have.
Both my and my wife's weight went up. I was able to beat it, she wasn't, so she's about 8kg heavier now than she was in February. The only exercise I get now is half an hour of stationary bike a day. I used to seriously lift weights 4-5 days a week, in addition to it.
It's not even a question for anyone not completely brainwashed that lockdowns are very psychologically hard on people.
Where I currently live in BC (Canada), there have been more overdose deaths than coronavirus deaths in 2020[0]. It might be the case that the overdoses have increased precisely because of lockdown. It might also not be the case. That remains to be investigated.
I think it's superficially easy to blame suicide, overdose, domestic violence etc on the lockdown, but that's hard to prove, because who's to say it's not a reaction to the overall situation of people dying of a brand new disease?
Personally, I really resent lockdown/movement restrictions and I think it's a garbage policy, right back from when I lived in China during the initial outbreak. However, I also have to admit that the countries that locked down seem to have successfully knocked this virus on the head, whereas those that didn't are still suffering the effects. Perhaps a lengthier lockdown pain at the beginning is better than this drawn-out shitshow of half-assed measures that other countries are going through? I dunno.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/overdose-dea...
All it takes is for one person to start the virus up again and the entire country has to go back into lock down.
They're playing a permanant game of country wide lockdown whack a mole with the virus.
No one can ever get comfortable again until herd immunity is reached which lockdowns delay.
However, it's much easier to test, trace and isolate small outbreaks ("whack a mole") than if its widely spread and uncontrolled.
Recently we had a single case of a school child that went back to school before they should have. Two days after he tested positive, the following happened:
* The school was closed and deep cleaned
* Close contacts and close contacts of those contacts went into quarantine. This ended up being approximately 800 people.
* All of them were tested within 48 hours and even further contacts (not "close") were also tested to the point that approximately 5000 tests were done and no additional cases were found.
You can't do that tracing and isolation if there is wide community transmission.
People go to the grocery store and come into contact with hundreds of people in an hour.
The infectious dose of COVID is not known, but believed to be somewhere in the several hundred to a thousand viruses range.
An infected person breathing normally near you might expose you to something like 20 or 30 per minute (breath is normally expelled with low force, so it doesn't contain viruses from the lower parts of the respiratory tract). Talking might do around 200 per minute. A cough or sneeze can do millions.
Thus, if I have COVID and go shopping at the same time you do, wearing a mask, and don't cough or sneeze pretty much in your face when we happen to pass each other, you almost certainly are not going to get it from me, and it makes little difference for contact tracers to find you.
It is the people that I spend a few minutes talking face to face to or that I spend a long time near that contact tracers need to find.
Note that it doesn't depend on who you get the viruses from. If a lot of people in the grocery store have it, then even though you might only get a handful of viruses from each person you pass you still might accumulate an infectious dose during your time in the store.
To control it, you need to get the number of infections down enough that people won't be getting it from casual transitory contact, like when grocery shopping, and people need to limit situations that involve more extended contact to times/places where the people they have extended contact with can be identified and traced, and need to limit the frequency of those events so that there is time for contact tracing to work.
You could have stopped there.
It is clear that the death toll is overwhelmingly skewed toward the elderly. Many of whom died in the first wave as corona prob got into many nursing homes before we knew better. We are now very careful w nursing homes/ elderly, we might see cases go up but as long as you protect them the deaths/ hospitalizations shouldn’t show similar levels to spring 2020. I don’t think you can deny this, so pro-lockdown people are now mainly using this “it can affect young people” argument to avoid cognitive dissonance - I have yet to see proof. I only have seen an article that says there is lung damage after infection which diminishes over the course of weeks. This is what you would expect with any kind of damage but the article had a ridiculous title like “coronavirus may lead to long lasting damage.” Lastly, I see a lot of ambulances these days - it serves as a reminder to check myself. But we’re all probably pretty analytical here and you can’t justify a strict lockdown from a utilitarian standpoint.
Not so much an argument of, than an observation regarding, the unpredictable mid to long term impacts of this infection in the demographic that includes most of the 'it's harmless' crowd. Ie, the 20-40yo, relatively healthy individuals.
Most of whom, I hasten to add, are cautious rather than cavalier -- but within which group there are sufficient case studies of severe debilitation lasting very many months, and occasional signs of much longer term damage.
Basically my position is 'we don't know' with a consequence of 'let's assume it's worse than we hope'.
> It is clear that the death toll is overwhelmingly skewed toward the elderly.
Almost definitely. And if you're not in the 'elderly' demographic, or care about people who are, this is probably less worrying for you.
> ... similar levels to spring 2020.
Spring 2020 started two months ago.
I mean, TFA is about Coronavirus in Australia, and Australia is where I am right now, and Spring is what's happening here now.
> I don’t think you can deny this, so pro-lockdown people are now mainly using this “it can affect young people” argument to avoid cognitive dissonance - I have yet to see proof.
Apologies -- but I do not understand the point you are trying to make here.
> I only have seen an article that says there is lung damage after infection which diminishes over the course of weeks. This is what you would expect with any kind of damage but the article had a ridiculous title like “coronavirus may lead to long lasting damage.” Lastly, I see a lot of ambulances these days - it serves as a reminder to check myself. But we’re all probably pretty analytical here and you can’t justify a strict lockdown from a utilitarian standpoint.
You mention 'here' without describing where that actually is. And you mention an article that said something you didn't like, but don't provide a reference to that article. Apparently there are ambulances near you. You then conclude that a lockdown is not justifiable, despite TFA being about how lockdowns have effectively halted the spread of SARS-CoV2 within Australia.
I think that the parent was referencing the improvements made in covid treatments over the past handful of months, which have been significant - not as many people in hospitals are dying
>Apologies -- but I do not understand the point you are trying to make here.
Young people, as a population, are not much impacted by this virus. As of Oct 10 there have been 5.3 deaths per 100,000 people under the age of 35 [0] in the United States. The headlines are often misleading about this. I think the parent may have been implying that young people are being misled.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
Reporting seems to focus exclusively on mortality, which I suspect leads to people feeling much more confident than if long term health impacts were more clearly reported.
Apparently any virus that attacks the lungs and.or nervous system leaves behind a lot of damaged people. Most of the time things like heart swelling go away after a couple months. But some people are permanently damaged. This can happen with all viruses, even the common cold kills people, and there is no indication yet that this virus is any different.
[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...
Edit: I eat my vegetables and you probably don’t eat your vegetables either
When the roadmap was published the first step of lockdown relaxing was:
> Residents will need to stay within 5 kilometres of their homes and will still only be able to leave home for shopping, exercise, care-giving purposes or permitted work.
> The city's night curfew starts at 9:00pm rather than 8:00pm, and residents can exercise for up to two hours a day, up from one hour.
Pretty strict, but I think the clear steps and threshold being announced were a brilliant approach.
It changes every week or so depending on the cases.
We'll be able to meet with the relatives hopefully after the 9th if everything goes well.
* Essential industries (food, health care, logistics) were working, some, like abbatoirs, with reduced capacity
* Retail food sales (supermarkets/butchers/bakers etc) open. Cafes/restaurants for take-out or delivery only.
* Other retail closed except for online or click&collect contact free.
* Night curfew 8pm - 5am, relaxed later to 9pm.
* Maximum 5km radius from home unless for work/medical care.
* Only 4 reasons to leave home: essential work, medical care, one person shopping once/day, one hour of exercise.
* Masks whenever in public (not just inside).
Over time, some things got slowly relaxed. The curfew was changed when we got to the start of daylight savings. The radius was relaxed from 5km to 25km. A "singles" or "intimate partner" bubble was established, that allowed people to have one other person outside their household. Then two households were allowed to meet outside the home, but still masked.
At the same time, the government support included $150 if you were being tested and had to quarantine until the results (usually 24h). Then if you were positive or were a close contact and had no sick leave, then there were payments of $1500 for the 14 day isolation/quarantine period.
The Federal government introduced Jobkeeper, which was a subsidy of $1500/fortnight for businesses to maintain employment, and Jobseeker was an extended unemployment payment.
"Penalties of up to $19,826 (for individuals) and $99,132 (for businesses) will apply to employers who issue worker permits to employees who do not meet the requirements of the worker permit scheme or who otherwise breach the scheme requirements.
There will also be on-the-spot fines of up to $1,652 (for individuals) and up to $9,913 (for businesses) for anyone who breaches the scheme requirements. This includes employers, and employees who do not carry their worker permit when travelling to and from work"
https://www.acfservices.net.au/index.php/melbourne-and-victo...
Congrats on getting to the magic 0!
I know it can seem weird that Europe didn't lock down over the summer, but here we mostly use Health care capacity, not active cases, as the most important number.
Being a relatively small island [0] on a remote corner of this planet makes the case for going to the 0 cases a viable one.
Going into a 4 month lockdown in Europe would be useless, since it would just pop up again since we don't have a few international airports as only places where you can enter.
So we're going into lockdown in Europe to prevent swamping our hospitals, and will resume life when it's okay again. And probably will keep going back and forth until a vaccine.
[0](in terms of population)
And while mainland Europe is not a "relatively small Island", the UK surely is...
Driving case counts down to zero isn't useless since any outbreaks that flare up again due to gaps in border security will be localized and can be kept in check with localized lockdowns instead of shutting down the whole country.
Not in continental Europe, not without involving the military.
And they’ve had in-Schengen passport checks on “temporary for 1-year” bases for several years now without the EU doing too much about it.
Police road blocks. Geography no doubt helps: there are only so many bridges across the Murray River, passes through the Australian Alps, and roads across the desert to Adelaide. And it's a bit far to ride a bicycle cross country.
We have had 0 cases for over 2 months.
You should stop with the "it is only viable in a small island in a remote corner of the planet" line of argument because it doesn't hold much water in my mind.
English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGoodWEtV8c
But the borders vietnam shares with those countries are hard borders. You need a visa and pass a government controlled checkpoint when you enter.
Europe (mainland) has no internal borders. There are no checkpoints, customs agents or chokepoints between countries.
There's thousands of roads leading from every country into others.
That, plus the fact that both the government and the population have had no experience with this make it very hard to control the virus.
I'm open to learn, though, so if you have some time to explain what we could learn from Vietnam I'm all ears.
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/06/29/na062920-vie...
... but somehow cases are still not under control.
Borders can be shut, it was done earlier this year. Lockdowns can be enforced, it was done earlier this year. Governments can provide financial support, it's been happening all year.
All this could be over in 4-6 months, and were going into the miserable 4-6 months of the year anyway.
But somehow it's all too hard and the economic damage would be too severe.
What people won't put up with, and rightly so, is an incoherent strategy across Europe. Why make sacrifices if everyone is then encouraged to go on their summer holiday to save the economy and undo everything?
Its frankly disappointing.
What makes you think another lockdown would eradicate it entirely in stead of it just coming back again?
I also don't believe europe would be capable of implementing an eradication strategy. The required social capital has already been burned, and at no point has europe demonstrated it's ability to work together on this. Now we can only wait for the technocrats to deliver us salvation in the form of a vaccine.
Even if the entire EU would agree to do it, we're still surrounded by other countries who might not do the same. And who's people will come into the EU whether we close the border or not.
(the guy who beheaded someone in France came to the EU illegally over the Mediterranean 2 or 3 days prior.)
Thinking an eridication strategy would've worked would've been a worse plan than lowering the curve I think.
We couldn't keep it out even if we wanted to. And yes, on that aspect, it's a huge difference to be an island far away from other countries.
As someone who lives in Vietnam, I think your conception of the hardness of the borders is mistaken. The land border with Vietnam-China is 1,300 kilometers long. That's longer than Germany's combined border with the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.
"The 1,400km border between Vietnam and China is extremely porous, with a complicated geography characterised by mountains and rivers – especially in the north – that makes it difficult to monitor cross-border traffic, according to Mimi Vu, an independent Vietnamese-American anti-trafficking expert based in Saigon."
> Europe (mainland) has no internal borders. There are no checkpoints, customs agents or chokepoints between countries.
Yes it does. Germany closed its borders on March 16.
https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/germany-introduces-bor...
France, Spain, and Italy also closed their borders. Something like a dozen countries in the EU closed their borders.
One thing we have learned is that it is easier for authoritarian regimes to deal with pandemics, because having a police state that knows everything about you makes it a lot easier.
So, the answer is, a number of things matter, and it will take many years to parse these things out.
Being a small island helps, being remote helps, having less public transportation helps, living in a police state helps, etc. etc.
You mention weather here but, having followed the news, is clear that the primary factor in Melbourne’s outbreak was breaches in quarantine, so much so that there was a government investigation into it. Weather seemed to have very little to do with it.
There’s really no comparison with Melbourne winters and those in most of North America or Europe either. Melbourne climate is pretty mild all things considered.
You seem to be pinning this on poorly trained and paid security guards but there’s credible evidence that there were incidents on security having relationships with those in quarantine (and the responsibility for that falls on both parties). Plus the quarantine didn’t seem to be that strict. People leaving to go out shopping, that sort of thing. Again those in quarantine should also know better.
I've been paying close attention to the weather factor since the epidemic spread beyond China in Feb/March. It was notable that the places that had the biggest outbreaks then (Milan, Qom, NYC, London, Madrid, as well as Wuhan itself) had similar weather in those months to what Melbourne has in winter - cool but not freezing, and not too rainy or humid. When I saw that, I immediately felt Melbourne could be more at risk of a serious outbreak than other Australian cities - all of which have either warmer winters and/or lower population density (EDIT: and also more sunlight in some cases, influencing Vitamin D). Of course, if quarantine was better managed it could have been prevented. But I also find it hard to believe that there was not a single serious lapse in any of the hotels in any of the other cities that were running quarantine.
When weather is raised, people are quick to point out the warmer regions that have had major outbreaks, like India and Brazil. What these places also have his highly dense populations with many people living/working in close quarters, which obviously also facilitates spread. Nutrition/health may also be a major contributor.
As another commenter has pointed out, research has found Victorians to have higher rates of Vitamin D deficiency in winter compared to other states, so weather can play a role in different ways.
Clearly this is a highly complex illness with multiple factors that combine in different ways to influence the outcome.
Take England. I’ve lived in London. There’s a large segment of British social life that revolves around going “down pub”. People will gather at pubs in confined spaces for long periods of time. Those seem like the perfect conditions for community spread. It comes as no surprise to me that England is in another lockdown.
Boer I’m sure weather plays a part on that. Nicer weather and people might go on holiday out do things outdoors but once the weather starts to cool? They’re back to the pub.
I suspect you’ll see patterns like this in other places.
As for your theory in cool climates, well you’re also hitting the climate barrier for high density living and high population centers.
There are outliers (eg Moscow) but generally speaking big cities aren’t in Arctic-like climates.
I don’t know Melbourne at all but o suspect there’s a predilection for pubs, bars, nightclubs and restaurants and there’ll be some relationship there between colder weather and indoor patronage.
I think you're being too specific, pinning it on pubs, etc. It just needs people intermingling in confined spaces of any kind; homes, apartment buildings, workplaces, hospitals/care homes, churches, schools, sporting events, public transportation, and sure pubs/bars too, but any/all of these are conducive to spread.
... is vitamin D, HNs favorite topic:
> Rates of deficiency were shown to be lower in summer (14%) and higher in winter (36%). There was little variation between the states and territories in summer, when deficiency levels were low across the country; ranging from 6% in Queensland to 19% in New South Wales. A divide was apparent in winter, with rates of vitamin D deficiency particularly high for those living in Victoria and ACT, where nearly one in every two people (49%) were vitamin D deficient in winter, compared with only 16% and 13% respectively in summer. In comparison, vitamin D deficiency remained relatively low in winter for those in Queensland and the Northern Territory.[10] Differences were also seen across each state or territory - vitamin D deficiency was more common among those living in major cities (27%) compared with those living in inner regional (16%), outer regional (13%) and remote areas (9%).[10]
https://wiki.cancer.org.au/skincancerstats/Vitamin_D#Vitamin...
(For non-Australians, Melbourne is the capital city of the state of Victoria.)
So it's a race between economic damage and global vaccination.
The political leaders at both state and federal levels are banking on an effective/safe vaccine being widely available in the next 12 months.
If that doesn't eventuate, I don't know what the Plan B is.
Was this kind of mindset as common when the world irradicated Small Pox and Polio, as it is now?
This kind of thinking has become extremely common across many different topics, ideas and issues.
Improving healthcare, climate change, making better cars/public transport, etc. etc. It's like people have wholesale given up on trying to actually improve anything.
My personal suspicion is it comes from most people struggling under crippling debt, and desperation and no way out in their own life flows over into their broader thinking.
One effect of the virus has been a rise in geographic realism among Australians. Over the last 50 years or so, we have been very gradually coming to think of Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan and Japan as medium size, more-or-less democratic countries like Australia. This year, we've been forced to give up on America and Europe, and we're thinking more seriously about how to live in our part of the world, where many countries have the virus under control. Though not yet seriously enough to learn the languages they speak, or anything like that.
Seriously, I think that we'll have to live with one Southeast Asian country (including Australia) having an outbreak at any given time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/world/asia/coronavirus-th...
Also, isn't Thailand a dictatorship where if you insult the royal family verbally you can be beheaded?
How do we know Thailand isn't just executing anyone testing positive for Coronavirus?
Would anyone report it if true with free speech laws like that?
Pandemic Problem solved!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se_majest%C3%A9_in_Th...
Thailand has actually reopened to Chinese tourists to some extent.
The southern hemisphere had only to battle COVID for a single Winter, and that delayed too, having had already the advantage of all the lessons learned in Europe. It’s very likely that their second Winter will already see a vaccine so by pure chance when the virus emerged countries in the Southern hemisphere have had a much better situation and therefore should expect better outcomes.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Given the graph provided by the linked site, it looks like cases started really dipping in late August. August and September are still bloody cold in Melbourne, where most of the cases have been recorded. Additionally, Australia is heading into a La Nina summer, generally characterised by a slower onset of warmer weather and greater average rainfall.
Edit: Anecdotally, Adelaide weather for the last few months has barely registered as spring. Melbourne is typically a few °C cooler than Adelaide.
Summer starts here in Australia in a month from now. (We'll then be contending with the return of bushfires.)
I think it's disservice to assert the weather is what will keep our case count low -- when a lot of people have gone through a whole lot of shit (and still are) to achieve & maintain the situation we now have.
I think there's sufficient contra-examples in both hemispheres to suggest that the weather is not a major factor -- though it is politically expedient & convenient to point at the weather to distract from mismanagement.
I'm not a politician, I'm not a nationalist, my birthplace is not the culture which I've been raised under, where my parents come from I've never lived and where I live now I have no ties whatsoever, so simply I don't care about country politics and trying to suggest anything different is the real disservice.
It's a fact that warm weather plays a huge role. In Europe we have seen a first relief during Spring and all countries have seen a huge dip in cases during their warmest summer months, completely irrespective of the countries individual measures. That's just a hard fact that you can't argue away in good conscience.
Furthermore, irrespective of how well countries have done, how many sacrifices people have done and what measures countries have taken (e.g. Germany vs. Sweden vs. UK vs. Czechia, etc.) all European countries see the same acceleration of cases. The only difference is the baseline where the spike starts, but the curve upwards is literally identical, so it further underlines that the weather has a bigger influence than any other measure except a full lockdown on the infection rate of coronavirus.
If people that repeat this claim, asserting it as fact, don't have citations -- then that's a different but related problem.
In Australia we got this under control through winter. Several states (South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, Northern Territory) had it so well controlled they had little if anything resembling strict lockdowns. Also through winter.
If 'all of Europe' (I'm not sure if you're talking mainland only there, or are including the very warm bits down the south, etc) is having the same results, then absent a control set to compare to, we can't know if that's an effect of comparable politics / culture, lack of controlled border controls, that a tipping point has been reached, or, as you say, 'because it's cold'.
Given that we have a lot more measures in place now (masks, distancing etc), something else has to play a role. February and March were unusually warm and sunny. I don't know whether that's relevant, but it seems unlikely that the counter-measures predict the peak - they are much stricter now than they were at the beginning of the year.
The current assumption in Norway, based on testing and WHO guidelines) are that we detect about 1/2 of the active cases through testing now, compared to 1/10 back in March. Applied to your numbers, the current outbreak in Germany is about a fifth of what it was back in March.
Be careful about assuming the numbers represent the same thing over time and between countries; in general the ratio of positive cases compared to the number of tests has changed a lot during the last eight months.
Some of the reports from the Norwegian health authorities has explicit notes about where reporting and testing criteria changed during the timeline.
From what I understand the current daily test capacity for Germany is about twice as large as it was in April. I do believe that they're still only testing those who exhibit symptoms or have been in contact with somebody who tested positive.
Speaking of test positivity, their all-time high is 9% and the most recent week for which information is available isn't that far off that at 5.6%, and I think that number's effectively a week old at this point. All indications are that Germany really, genuinely does have a bigger outbreak this time around.
At low humidity, water evaporates from droplets, making them lighter. The lighter they are, the longer they can stay suspended in the air.
At higher humidity it is more likely for droplets to accumulate more water, which makes them heavier until they fall down.
https://www.tropos.de/en/current-issues/press-releases/detai...
Don't know if this trend holds outside the US.
The result comes down to a competent government response to a public health crisis. Not the weather.
I will remember our experts telling us to intubate early and withhold steroids for a very long time. We killed a lot of people because a minority wanted to show off. This is depressing.
Yes, they were show-offs and they still are. There is no justification for throwing away years of clinical experience with ARDS based on the personal opinions of a few who want to steal the spotlight by relying on novelty. They deserve to be despised, and I can say that with full confidence because I know a few of them personally.
BTW yes, they said that. And now we see that using them and trying to keep people breathing by themselves, we do much better (big surprise).
I do a lot of medical research and I am fully confident in saying that to decide to go against the grain based on preliminary data is irresponsible in medicine.
As a personal note, the attitude of medical researchers and the loosening of ethical and legal boundaries pertaining to research I saw in the first wave make me puke.
Appreciate it (and your reply!)
I think the issue was that most of the decisions made, over-reliance on intubation, withholding steroids, etc where made in the beginning, in places were the hospitals were overloaded and there was this sense of urgency and panic. Then some random study is showing a 18% fatality rate in severe cases with steroids Vs 14% without, giving the impression that this virus works like no other
> some random study is showing a 18% fatality rate in severe cases with steroids Vs 14% without, giving the impression that this virus works like no other
Exactly. And I think that this goes to show that the current dynamics of medical research are highly toxic. The synergy between the 'publish or perish' motto and the myriad of Excel spreadsheet warriors who go on to become influential professors kills a lot of people.
How do you picture different kinds of measures per risk group going? People can already choose to isolate more, disinfect more, keep distance more, etc. if they find themselves at risk. The compulsory measures are a bare minimum to prevent unnecessary deaths and keep the long term impact to a minimum. You can find a new job next year and live on government benefits in the meantime (or is the worst-case scenario for you not unemployment and boredom? Well, infecting loved ones would be worse in these times but you don't seem to find that very worrying) but if you're one of today's corona deaths you can't find another life.
Are you really claiming with a straight face that the chance of a young person who gets infected dying is 1/100?
Would love to see you try to provide a source for that...
The problem with that kind of thinking is it doesn't account for how the government gets money, which generally taxes on stuff being produced. If you don't produce stuff, you cannot redistribute it. There's no magic "the government takes care of it, we can all stay home forever" concept.
Increased government spending now means increased taxes tomorrow, that ought to be obvious.
A recovering economy and greater economic activity leads to greater tax revenue without necessarily increasing taxation rates.
This is a natural "budget stabilizer" effect that happens during recessions and expansions.
Debt funding is currently at historically low, almost zero/negative rates. Australia's debt-to-GDP is relatively low (42% prior to the current recession), our debt ratings are AAA.
That's just a path for hyper inflation when no increased production is included. Money is a placeholder for value. If you don't create value and print money, the money doesn't magically create the stuff that gives it value.
It might not ruin a country, but I very much dislike this "whatever, the state can pay" hand-waving that just assumes the products magically appear if you just increase the money supply. There's no perpetual money machine, you can't just spend a billion as a state and generate 1.2bn in taxes, rinse & repeat.
[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/deaths-a...
0-19----99.997%
20-49---99.98%
50-69---99.5%
70+-----94.6%
Also you: never invented anything
First, deaths aren't the only measure. For every death there are many more people that just barely survive after a hospital stay, and data suggests a significant amount of those people will have long-term problems.
Second, if the hospitals are overloaded by such people (even if most of them survive) then the IFR of Covid can rise higher than 0.5-1%.
...where long-term means a few months at most. People do recover, just uncomfortably slowly.
> Second, if the hospitals are overloaded by such people (even if most of them survive) then the IFR of Covid can rise higher than 0.5-1%.
I'm not so sure about that. These IFR estimates haven't changed much since spring, when half of those hospitalized died.[1,2,3] Our treatment methods have improved since then. If the estimates reflected the IFR with treatment, they would be lower today. So I think an IFR of 0.5-1% is actually the worst case.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any source explicitly comparing death rates with vs without treatment.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
[2] https://in.dental-tribune.com/news/new-estimate-by-the-cdc-b...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32234121/
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
> The parameters in the scenarios:
> Are estimates intended to support public health preparedness and planning.
> Are not predictions of the expected effects of COVID-19.
> Do not reflect the impact of any behavioral changes, social distancing, or other interventions.
Estimates are the realest thing we have.
> Do not reflect the impact of any behavioral changes, social distancing, or other interventions.
How would these things affect the IFR negatively?
I recognize that Sydney might still be due for an outbreak, but I have more faith that the chances of that happening is low. I am incredibly thankful to be living in a country whose people and its government seem to be doing the right thing when it comes to this pandemic.
My other half is a high school teacher - she's had I think 4 cases of cough / sniffles that have required a test, with the process being free (as you say), convenient (walking distance - there are many places that offer the swab test), and fast (results back within 48 hours, usually faster, via SMS & email).
I've caught a train into the office 3 times since March - public transport utilisation is wonderfully low (though I'm avoiding peak times), and most people seem to be good about wearing a mask. I've eaten out a half dozen times only, in that time, and again people seem to be behaving and handling things admirably.
Looking around at the rest of the world, it's equal parts encouraging & astonishing just how well we're doing compared to, well, not just the obvious examples, but almost everywhere else.
I'm not sure why this needs explaining still. But this virus, like all viruses will evolve and change over time. The vaccine today won't be effective in a couple of years.
I have no idea what that has to do with anything.
If we take the deathtoll from Sweden (lower than the USA, Spain, Italy, Belgium), Australia could have expected 15,000 deaths, adjusted for population. Less if we consider only excess deaths.
This is $33 million per life saved, typically for a person in their 80s.
Is this a good use of funds?
If this money was devoted instead to tackling climate change or domestic air pollution (basically the same thing), how many lives would have been saved and improved instead?
Its likely that the country could have been completely decarbonised - all coal power plants shutdown, urban wood burning banned and new efficient gas heaters and insulation subsidised, and all new vehicle sales replaced with electrics.
In Australia the tax on them is continuously ramped up every year and fewer and fewer people take up the habit. It's obviously an elimination strategy there as with COVID.
Considering that the Australian economy is based on digging and has an economic complexity just below Uganda[0], most of that damage was unavoidable anyway.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Complexity_Index
$25,000 per person is a huge amount of money, far greater than for any national scheme, ever. Probably approaching Australia's expenditure for a world war or major international conflict.
Keep in mind that currently in Europe - there is very limited excess mortality. For example in Belgium right now, there are less excess deaths than from a heatwave in August:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country
Sweden and other non-lockdown countries are already back to normal. The only thing preventing normality is politicians who insist on lockdowns for a virus which is currently not causing excess deaths beyond what we would expect from regular influenza.
https://chrisbillington.net/COVID/Belgium.svg
Monetarily, it's no different than any other medical expenditure. Would you spend 25k for an extra year of normal life? What about if you're 20-30?
Colour me jealous.
Would you pay $25,000 in order to have a 1 in 1,666 chance of living an extra few months when you are 80 years old?
No one would take those odds - but it has been forced on the population.
I live in Denmark, with arguably more restrictions than Sweden. I'd happily sacrifice 25k in future lifetime earnings to have 2020 back. (BTW, as a startup founder, the possible costs of COVID may wind up being far more disastrous to my lifetime earnings)
It doesn't seem to take into account internal economies, but I don't know how we fare there.
But if you subtracted these industries from Australia, I would expect there to be more knowledge and technology industry remaining than in some of the countries with a higher ECI. So if ECI is not normalised by total economic output, I would be surprised.
Normalising by economic output makes it a bit of a misleading metric. Australia could have world-class knowledge and tech sectors (they don't, but they could), and yet ECI would be low just because some low-complexity sector was booming.
Not normalising at all is pretty fraught too though. I guess it has the potential to mislead in both cases.
Which is probably not a big deal, overall, because as you say rates are low and it's basically gone at this point. Some places are taking it seriously though, I know for example a relative with a child in daycare had to get her daughter tested multiple times. Every symptom needs a test, and kids tend to have snotty noses even when healthy, which gets them pulled aside and parents called for a test before they can come back.
Edit: Donuts.
For those who don't know, when we went into lockdown, our Premier said "This is no time to gather with mates at home and get on the beers".
He had a daily press conference every day, 111 days straight. He announced the current situation, what was being done, what was changing, and then stood and took questions from reporters until they ran out of things to ask.
When we recently started to relax the lockdown, he was asked whether it was time to "get on the beers" and he said "I don't know that I'll be drinking a beer tonight. I might go a little higher up the shelf."
Edit: and also instead of making personal attacks please address the substance of what I'm saying I've been on HN but just created an account to respond to the new wave of germ theory denialism I see on this site.
Does anyone have a plan to get the world out of COVID? Previous pandemics such as SARS/MERS were contained but had no vaccine, Spanish Flu wasn't contained but there were lasting antibodies (up to 90 years![0]). For COVID all we've been doing is "hoping for a vaccine" which by all accounts[1] will only be 70% effective and will likely require boosters. The world is on a roller coaster of going into and out of lockdown (see Europe this week instituting stay at home orders again) and all the while _there is no plan_ for the world to get past this.
So I ask again, does anyone have any kind of plan to get the world back to normal? In Melbourne, Australia, people are wearing masks and "buying time for a vaccine" but when it comes it won't help the at-risk portions of the population. In the US there seems to be no plan at all. Nowhere in the world has anyone come up with a pathway forward to return the human race to a way of life similar to where we were at in 2019.
So, given there are so many people in here skilled at decomposing problems and articulating effective solutions, and given there most likely won't be a >70% effective vaccine in the next 2-3 years, what is the way forward for the world? Or are we to be mired in an endless cycle of lockdown/open/lockdown for as far as the eye can see.
[0]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080817223642.h... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/health/covid-vaccines.htm...
But we can get to something very close to normal, with differences from before. More mask-wearing, more government powers to do contact tracing, more health checks on borders and other travel limitations, more remote work, etc. So it might not be the same "normal" as before, and some of those things will be unpleasant, but we can live with them (and some will have other benefits, like remote work and a decrease in flights will help against climate change).
And specifically I think you're downplaying a vaccine. Even a 70% effective one would make a huge difference in how the virus spreads, potentially decreasing R below 1 even in Europe and the US and other hard-hit areas.
The response is handled at the state level, not the federal level (though it can make recommendations). Most states have reopened or are planning to. Others, like mine, have in their plan that they won't completely reopen until there is a vaccine (and it's looking likely we'll be re-locking-down soon).
Whether people return to normal activity after restrictions are removed is its own question.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...
Isn't that a temporary win?
Once a person enters the country with the virus its back on.
Are we pattong our selves on the back too soon for these kinds of wins?
The modern news cycle is so short sighted that the media makes money off this kind of thing without reporting the full picture.
Afaict that has been the plan all along in the US as well (in terms of what scientists and infectious disease experts were saying), but most states and the administration gave up on that months ago, e.g. the national "testing czar" declaring the required testing capacity impossible.
By the time an out break is identified hundreds or thousands of people have possibly been infected.
If every time you get a symptomatic case that tests positive, you isolate contacts and secondary contacts, you will have isolated enough of the asymptomatic cases and false negative tests to get R < 1 and halt the spread of the virus.
Its odd that you believe that only contacts and secondary contacts are susceptible.
With an natural r naught of three and the and the fact that it stays on surfaces for days...it's just a matter of time until another outbreak happens.
The proof is in the pudding: we are seeing this strategy work.
Those grocery store shoppers might be susceptible, but it turns out that not enough of them get infected for this strategy to fail if it is stuck to for long enough.
I'm posting this from Victoria, where we've had zero new COVID cases for three days now. I'm telling you, it works.
Has any virus ever just gone away.....
Once society lets down it's guard, if your country hasn't reached herd immunity when the virus returns you're back to lockdown. Perpetual corona whack a mole.
There's no realistic way out of this other than herd immunity through a vaccine or natural means.
Non vaccine human control of this virus is impossible long term.
It's a virus. It has no reservoir but currently infected people. In fact, if we could all stay isolate for 2 weeks it would be gone from the earth. Of course that's impossible but combination strategies can (have) worked.
Ebola's reservoir has yet to have been discovered but it's still there.
Obviously the bigger risk to Australia et al is reintroduction from other countries. So Australia's borders will continue to require 14 days of quarantine until there is a good enough vaccine. However, New Zealand has now seen three re-introductions, and they have managed to suppress them just fine so far. So if this is what delaying the inevitable looks like, I'll take it too. Seems like it can be delayed an awfully long time.
Maintaining quarantine at borders is an option, if a country decides they want to do it. Australia decided it wanted to. I see no reason why this can't be sustained indefinitely, it's merely a matter of how long Australia is willing to have a border quarantine system in place (which comes with all kinds of costs due to reduced international travel).
There's no epidemiological reason the virus can't be suppressed and kept out of a given region. The only remaining question is how soon we expect a vaccine such that this isolation is worth it in the long run. If a vaccine never comes then it is not a viable strategy, otherwise, it does seem like a good call.
Just want to remind you that I'm writing this from Australia where there is practically no virus in the community and are freedoms are increasing rather than decreasing. I don't expect there'll be widespread COVID in Australia ever again, as we've gotten quite good at suppressing small outbreaks now.
These are very optimistic beliefs of yours and time will tell.
You have to keep in mind that even if the virus is able to be contained by human intervention..there is a cost of perpetual repressive policies: closed borders, mask wearing, burden on small businesses, social distancing, etc.
Herd immunity via vaccine or natural acquisition is the only way we'll ever fully go back to normal.
And I do wish you all the best over there, and hope that all of this is as manageable as it appears.
Either way if a vaccine reappears were mostly back to normal.
The virus isn’t magic. If you have a testing and tracing system in place and act quickly with temporary restrictions you can squash any outbreaks that do make it through.
And meanwhile life in those areas is basically normal. I’m in one now. Functionally we’re much more free than people in places with heavy lockdowns and fear.
We know the virus is asymptomatic yet contagious in people for weeks.
All it takes is for one low paid person at a checkpoint to have a bad day or be bribed and let an infected person through and you have a pandemic again.
Additionally the tests aren't 100% accurate so even with perfect testing of borders someone could slip by given a large enough sample size.
I think those countries have either:
1. Reached herd immunity already due to wide spread infections or pre-existing cross immunity(possibly regional exposure to a related corona virus)
2. Living on borrowed time
Something doesn't add up.
I think you all may be patting yourselves on the back too soon.
Or the population actually has herd immunity already due to having been exposed to similar viruses.
That would explain why a lot of Asian countries in China's orbit are reaching minimal infections sooner. They may have had Corona or something similar for years.
When it had its foot on the neck of the peasants for a thousand years during Egyptian times or a thousand years during medieval times?
The only thing that ended massive repression by the government during the middle ages, was the black plague which killed indiscriminately and allowed redistribution of the wealth and subsequently the enlightenment.
What about when gov't started started holocausts, genocides, crusades?
When it invaded Vietnam and many of the other frivolous wars the human race has been in?
This is not hand wavy this is history.
SECOND OF ALL, this is not a temporary hit this is permanently hurting hundreds of millions of peoples lives increasing real poverty around the world destroying small businesses and people's livelihoods.
This is rewriting society and culture.
This is increasing homelessness, suicide, drug addiction and overdoses and more.
If you think this is a temporary hit you and the rest of the people like you are truly in your own bubble.
And we have a huge border control service.
Are you arguing that it's possible to close the borders in the United States? Like that is an actual option?
Do you think other countries don't have illegal immigration as well?
Do you think those illegal immigrants are going to voluntarily present themselves to get tested?
To have a sustained outbreak breach quarantine, you’d need:
1. An infected person to arrive (probably less than 2% of arrivals are infected)
2. This infected person must breach isolation protocol. (Most people are honest or fear or penalties)
3. They must be infectious when they breach protocol (you are only very infectious for five days or so)
4. They must go to a place apt to superspreading (not everyone breaching isolation will go to a bar or a party)
5. The newly infected must all remain asymptomatic and not seek testing
6. Once community spread is detected, the government must delay taking action, fail to contact trace, and avoid implementing new measures
This is obviously possible. Outbreaks have happened in Australia, Vietnam, New Zealand, New Brunswick. But it is much, much less likely than you suggest, which is why you’re being downvoted: you’re completely failing to consider the system dynamics.
And in each case step 6 has put things back on track pretty quick. Australia is the exception, but there the local government was slow to respond and so they needed a big, long lockdown. Other areas responded quickly and so the necessary lockdown has been short.
I’m in the Atlantic bubble. Frankly it leaks like a sieve and yet it’s still been enough to keep out infections for now.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...
I think the system dynamics you're using may be purely academic.
I was saying one person as an example...but America has millions of undocumented people that snuck across the border here. Do you honestly think other countries don't?
Borders are very fluid.
Humans are social creatures by nature. They're going to come into infectious proximity of hundreds if not thousands of people a week at grocery stores, restaraunts, gas stations, bars, salons, etc.
Also theres's science showing corona virus stays on surfaces for days which means if they cough on a surface like a doorknob that can spread to people they weren't in contact with.
Contact tracing is useless.
Like I said.. once again.. youre just lucky and are patting yourself on the back too soon... or your region has reached some form of herd immunity.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...
Assuming a vaccine comes out, Australia can make US visitors get vaccinated before visiting.
I would expect that if your country hasn't gotten covid-19 under control you won't be allowed to travel here in the next two years.
Many Australians (including loved ones of mine) are currently stuck overseas with flights repeatedly being cancelled. It's really shameful the country isn't doing more for its own citizens.