- Stay home. The only allowed reasons to leave our homes were essential supplies (eg visiting the supermarket), caring for family, going to work (if you couldn't work from home) or exercise (eg going for a walk). Or if you needed medical care.
- Unless we had a really good reason, we had to stay within a 5km radius of home at all times, and couldn't leave home for more than 1hr each day. We also had an 8pm curfew - though I'm still not sure what that was for.
- No visitors unless they're an intimate partner
- Masks mandatory any time you left your home. On the spot fines from police if they catch you outside without a mask.
Basically everything indoors was closed - no gyms, takeout only at restaurants, etc. Supermarkets had security guards to make sure nobody entered without a mask on, and they had complimentary hand sanitizer at the entrance.
That strategy was enough to go from 700/day down to 0/day in a couple months. Those months were awful, but just about everything has opened up again now since we've been sitting at 0 local infections in the whole country for the last few weeks. We only broke our streak today - a hotel quarantine worker was infected in Perth. The city has immediately locked down to make sure it doesn't spread.
If the whole world followed the same strategy, covid would be gone already and international travel could have resumed months ago.
The United States can't stop illegal immigration and cross-border state travel with or without a pandemic. The laws and expectations are significantly different in connected regions like the US and EU compared to a singular island nation.
Being an island has nothing to do with it. The difference is due to different health policies.
- We had mandatory masks in all public places here in Melbourne with on the spot fines by police. Over in the US lots of people thought covid is a hoax, and even your president refused to wear a mask.
- Australia declared mass gatherings to be illegal - it went through the courts and the judges decided public safety trumped a citizen's rights to protest during the pandemic. Germany's courts ruled in the opposite direction for an anti-mask protest. And meanwhile the US had BLM protests for months, presidential rallies and the capital hill riot.
And so on. These differences have nothing to do with sharing your continent with Canada and Mexico. They have everything to do with culture and public policy.
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/coronavirus/index-of-covid-...
And it sounds like that is based on official statistics, which the Mexican government has admitted is way off.
It isn't completely irrelevent that the US shares a border with another country that has done horribly badly at managing the pandemic.
Exactly. I live in Washington State and even now, one major party in our Legislature is trying to get at least three bills through that would declare "Emperor" (language not used in the bill, but definitely on Twitter) Inslee's emergency orders, including the mask mandate, void and tell everyone to do what they think best. Which, fine, except for the whole community transmission and insisting on businesses be open--with those employees being told "work or starve"--things.
We've been hearing for many months that masks are required and must be worn and put them on and yet...everyone disclaims all responsibility for enforcing this. I don't blame retail employees from saying "we do not want to be on the other end of a screaming patron in exchange for minimum wage," but when even the government tells us that they're relying solely on people's discretion and good sense, things fall flat. I'm not saying arrest everyone who has their nose hanging atop a mask, that would be disproportionately unwise, but we absolutely can and should be having people in authority out day and night at shops, buses, parks, ferries, and so on reminding people that your nose goes under your mask.
They could've easily continued that and added mandatory hotel quarantine.
Just like now with Macron they instead prefer to choose populism instead of tough, early, decisive action.
Because of the incubation period, covid numbers are effectively delayed 2 weeks. That is to say, there's a 2 week delay between the time your government changes policies and when you see the effect of those policies on covid case numbers. It took us awhile too - after they brought the lockdown into effect our numbers kept going up for awhile - which was terrifying. But the numbers trended down eventually.
Looks like the policy is working and you'll hit 0 if you keep it up for a few more months. Why are you stopping?
Shouldn't it be the courts who issue fines?
CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported.
That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.
On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.
Those policies sound even more strict than what we've been doing in Australia, and we had 2 weeks with 0 locally transmitted cases. With procedures like that it makes sense they have covid under control.
(The times when news got out.)
The ability of Chinese authorities to suppress the information domestically (again, recent crackdowns on using social media for self-journalism), as well as to influence Western sources, shouldn’t be underestimated. I wouldn’t mind listening to that podcast though.
I know about COVID test results required for travel, but I don’t take it as much of an indicator if you consider people outside major cities who do not travel much (especially now that there’s an extra barrier to it) and may just suffer from virus outbreaks in localized clusters where they live.
Either way, what we don’t have is reliable numbers of how many people were tested, and how many of them were positive, across China.
I am tired of wearing the god damn masks, having to worry about my elderly parents,
Are you tired of the god damn pandemic? I know I am. Because we already have no freedom.
It doesn't. No amount of hiding temporarily solves the problem. Authoritarian rules would be in effect until immunity rates are above herd thresholds at a minimum. There is no "one month" shutdown in the US or a connected EU country that solves the problem permanently unless you ban international travelers / force them to quarantine for 14 days in a hotel.
Thats the sticking point for you? Who cares about international travellers. They can wait, and visit when covid is over.
Well, that for you are ordinary people (govts just echo their sentiments). They will enslave you for their benefit ( real or imaginary). They will take away your freedom under the guise of concern for your health.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
https://fullfact.org/health/evidence-shows-masks-do-offer-pr...
Please stop perpetuating this myth that masks don't work all because you just don't like wearing one.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/
Linking me a bunch of public health websites isn’t convincing because these organizations don’t actually maintain epistemiological rigor, they just parrot whatever the dogma is.
The only RCT of masking for COVID-19 ever performed showed an insignificant benefit in terms of self-infection at best.
Meanwhile studies in HCW can’t rule out cloth masks causing bacterial pneumonia and increased self-infection.
And it's not "self-infection" that masking is a protection of. Nobody has claimed that. You wear a mask to protect those around you, and they wear their's to protect you.
Though it figures you are obsessed with the self and have no regard for the other.
You need to provide affirmative evidence before undertaking societal interventions with guaranteed negative impact. Does the hippocratic oath ring a bell?
For me the most annoying thing is the idea that lockdown is somehow "saving" lives. People who are dying from COVID would have died from something else 2-3 years from now. These are old, sick people, whose lives are (mostly) behind them.
If I was an 80 yo and my grand-kids were put in prison to allow me to live a couple more years, I would be even more angry than I am right now.
edit: also, I thought our pretense for harassing prostitutes was to stop the spread of disease. If we don't actually care about disease we should stop harassing them so they can have have a few years of freedom from interference before a strain of covid mutates into the death rate of MERS and civilization falls because we can't live like the awful Chinese.
Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
All of the European countries were able to implement border controls as the Schengen Borders Code permits.
They easily could have had a mandatory 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals and had a similar result to Australia and New Zealand. They chose instead to mimic themselves after Sweden and opted to contain rather than eliminate the virus. Even now Macron refuses to impose a lockdown.
Maybe the real difference is that we're an island. But much more likely is our different public policies. And if you need evidence, the UK is an island (like Aus/NZ) with policies more like the US and - surprise! They have case numbers more similar to the US than similar to Aus/NZ.
If you really think the island / continent thing is relevant, I'm excited to hear the story of why the US's covid disaster is somehow actually canada and mexico's fault.
Maybe it’s because they’re islands, and maybe you’re right and it’s because of the policy in place. I believe it’s the former, because it’s way more difficult to control influx of people in a connected economy like the EU for example.
It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I'm convinced the most important difference is policy, but I wonder if there might be some psychological effect of living on an island all by yourself which makes you think "Well, can we just pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?". Those thoughts might be harder to think in Europe.
> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I think Canada could drive covid down to zero by closing the US border, then enforcing strict lockdowns. (And apparently they have closed the border to the US.) I think the US or the UK could do the same if they wanted at a national level. Well, at least in theory. I acknowledge it would be much more difficult to do the same in a small european nation. At least, it would be difficult to do it alone.
However, bear in mind that Europe has become super interconnected in the last decade or so. There are millions crossing borders to work on the other side. Germany is a great example. Those counties close to the Czech border had way higher incidence levels, most probably due to the constant exchange with Czech Republic.
But you aren't in this alone. If Europe worked together, and your neighbors adopted similar policies it would have worked fine and covid would be under control by now.
The fact that you aren't on an island doesn't excuse the EU's bad covid policy decisions, at both the scale of individual countries and as a collective body.
This is exactly what Western Australia did. The Australian response was not nationally coordinated and each state has been doing their own thing. They have land borders between each other and yet the Victorian outbreak didn't spread to either NSW or SA because they implemented border checks by lining the roads with police and fining people who attempted to circumvent them, while WA implemented a hard border even earlier as soon as there was a non-zero number of cases.
The Australian states are geographically larger than many European countries, so I don't think it's that it's an island. The only effect nationally was hotel quarantine for arriving flights which is possible for landlocked countries as well.
It shouldn't also be noted that the borders don't have to be hermetically sealed. As long as cross border contamination is minimized other tools (contact tracing) can deal with it.
Europe has a lot more people living in much less space and much more integrated than isolated places with so much land like New Zealand and Australia.
> 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals
This would grind EU to a halt. Tourism alone results in 750 million international tourists visiting EU a year. Counting travels of EU citizens between EU countries would result in billions.
Sure, island countries the population size of Croatia and Romania maybe can isolate. EU as a whole? Pfff
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...
Keep the (potentially) sick people on the "air side" of the airport terminal and then directly into quarantines on arrive at the final destination.
Those who bridge this gap (air crews, terminal staff) need to follow very strict measures (PPE, cleaning, regular testing) to make that work.
Perhaps more places need to decide they don't want to be a major transit hub during this pandemic? You know, restrict non-essential traffic a bit to make the essential traffic and local populace safer?
Well, if your country isn't a transit hub, then you avoid hub problems completely. If you are a hub, then you have additional problems that New Zealand doesn't, that you have to work to mitigate.
People are going to be crossing borders at relatively few and well understood locations.
And they could've simply imposed large fines for anyone who tried to sneak through.
It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania
This was already done and the infection rates are still sky high.
Lots of posters here seem convinced that being an island makes it easy to control covid. If thats the most important factor, I'd love to hear some theories on why the numbers in canada aren't coming down to 0, like they have in Australia and NZ?
The numbers are coming down (slowly) in Montreal now that they have a strict lockdown. I think the process could work; but at this point it might take so long to get the numbers under control that people wouldn't tolerate it. Especially not when the vaccine feels so close. We'd be talking like, 4 months in a row of strict lockdown + business closures.
The other aspect is contact tracing. When numbers are very low, its much easier to do diligent contact tracing around every infected person. In the recent outbreak in Sydney they tracked down and personally contacted everyone they could place in the vicinity of an infected person and asked them to self isolate. By the time a handful of those people tested positive, most of them had already been isolating and as a result didn't infect anyone - which broke the chain of transmission. We could do that because the number of new cases was only around ~10/day. That would be way less feasible at Montreal's 1600 cases/day.
What seems to have worked in Wuhan was, in addition to lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing and isolation of symptomatic patients and their close contacts in centralized quarantine facilities.
Once all of this is done, I hope we learn more about how China actually contained this. But the answer is likely authoritarian measures that no democracy can legally or politically afford.
This effectively reads "closed."
But yes, tourism or business trips are now infeasible. Fortunately it turns out that they were never essential.
HN user doesn’t see the need for something, therefore it must not be essential.
I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok with someone arriving at their doorstep, taking you to a prison basically whether you agree or not, and quaranteening you there for at least 10 days with other covid people. Perhaps they also take your family too, in case they are also infected. Are you willing to pay that price?