Overall I feel we managed the pandemic fine so far without lockdowns. Sure, people died and I'm sure in much larger numbers than Australia. But if we ever need to experience something like this again, I would still prefer this over strict lockdowns after a few new cases like in AU. I'm not against strict lockdowns, there might be times when they are a good solution, but nothing longer than a couple of weeks.
My experience of Covid, which is the same for almost everyone in Australia, is nothing remotely like yours. For the vast majority of people living here, Covid is a minor inconvenience that doesn’t materially affect our day to day life.
I meet friends at bars for drinks and dinner, my kids take public transport to school and go on school camps, I go to the office for work, and I’m even flying to Sydney this afternoon for a couple of days.
Australia is basically operating normally with almost no restrictions. Situation normal.
You seem to be saying that lockdown was too heavy a price to pay for the freedom I now enjoy, but I respectfully disagree.
It was totally worth it.
The only thing that I’m unhappy about was that Melbourne stuffed it up the first time and we paid heavily for that. But you know what?
Still worth it.
In Melbourne we have had three lockdowns, the first was a couple of weeks, the second was extremely long (several months; I think it was one of the longest hard lockdowns in the world), and the third was 5 days (2 of which were over a weekend).
Importantly, the second lockdown was due to what seems to have been preventable problems, including a significant delay before enacting the lockdown itself; by the time we did it, the virus had taken a firm hold across the whole city (Melbourne's population is a bit over 5 million). If we had locked down a few weeks earlier, the duration of lockdown would have been much lower (easy to say in hindsight).
That said, the rest of the county didn't suffer the same fate as Melbourne, and they only had to endure a few weeks of lockdowns at worst. I don't know the specifics from other states because I live in Melbourne.
I think this parallels most of the rest of the world: had everyone agreed to one or two really good, solid, early lockdowns, much of the pandemic could have been avoided. The countries that did this - NZ, most of Australia and I think some of SE Asia - have not suffered nearly as much as the rest of the world.
The second Melbourne lockdown was super hard on everyone, and of course we had government support in many (but not all) cases, but I still say it was totally worth it.
People seem to be OK discussing hundreds of daily deaths from Covid as if that's something that can't be prevented, but it could have been. Our lockdowns have literally saved tens of thousands of lives here.
https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-covid-19-d...
I've had one lock-down for about 6 weeks, starting on 30th March 2020. That's been the extent of it for me.
Lockdown meant the family stayed home with the children doing school remotely. We were allowed out for exercise (family group only) within a few km radius, supermarket shopping, medical and looking after aged family. I could have gone to an office, but was able to work remotely.
Other areas have been through more due to localised outbreaks. Parts of Northern Sydney did several weeks around Christmas due to an outbreak. Victoria's second wave was the most intense lock-down. That went for about 3 months. It was tough on the Victorians I know, but as a comparison at the beginning of the lock-down the UK and Victoria were in a similar situation. By the end of the lock-down Victoria was on zero cases whilst the UK was at risk of the NHS being overwhelmed.
We've now settled into a pattern of 3-day lock-downs at the first sign of any outbreak, these being lifted if there is no further transmission detected during the lock-down. So far there have been about 4-5 of these in different state capitals but all have been lifted at the end of the 3 days.
Vaccinewise, Australia's dropped the ball a bit. The government under spent on mRNA vaccines and didn't invest in local mRNA manufacturing. We're making the AZ vaccine locally, but there turns out to be a low risk of blood clots. Given the low COVID numbers it's borderline whether the risk of blood clots is outweighed by the risk of COVID for under 50s. The medical recommendation is for mRNA over AZ, but decent supplies won't arrive until the end of the year. I mention this as low COVID numbers makes decisions about vaccines more complicated.
Life here is "normal" in that there aren't many restrictions beyond overseas travel, but a significant number of people are choosing not to go back to their old ways, partly due to COVID risk and partly because they have figured out that some of their previous activities weren't actually that important and that life is good without them.
When a case is detected, the NSW government's contract tracers conduct confidential phone interviews to determine all contacts, both forward and backward. A forward contact is someone to whom you may have given the virus. A backward contact is someone from whom you may have received the virus. The "backward" contact is the more critical one, as it can lead to previously unknown community cases. The contact tracers are aiming to trace the new case back to an already known case. If they find any intermediate transmission or close contacts, they recursively do the forward/backward thing on the intermediaries and close contacts until they reach limits imposed by COVID's known incubation and infection times. The aim is to locate every person who has any chance of having COVID, given the known properties of COVID.
If the contact tracers successfully traverse the tree to all possible cases then lockdown is avoided. Close contacts are required to isolate at home for 14 days (with a support payment), whilst casual contacts are asked to get tested and monitor for symptoms. If the contact tracers are unable to traverse the tree or are overwhelmed by the numbers then a lockdown occurs. NSW has put significant resources into contact tracing as it recognises that the cost of a lockdown will always be greater than the spend on contact tracing.
Beyond phone interviews, contact tracing is assisted by a requirement for all public venues to keep a 14 day digital log of names, phone numbers and time of attendance of people who have visited. Patrons provide details on an honour basis, but most people do this honestly as they realise that it is their own interest to be contacted if they have been exposed to COVID. There's also a certain amount of pride that the country has weathered the storm (so far) and people don't want to be the one that stuffs it up.
Now what they have done is kept me here living in Australia. Which has been a particularly big deal for my specific lifestyle in which I was living overseas in a dodgy visa abusing way, meaning I couldnt qualify for an exception to the international travel ban by showing I was legitimately living elsewhere. Day to day though its like it almost didnt exist except online.
Most shops were still open but had reduced numbers allowed inside. High risk venues like nightclubs and casinos were closed, restaurants went to takeaway only. This was early in 2020 when nobody knew what they were dealing with, really. They were talking about "Keeping numbers down until we can build capacity", but they just found out they were really good at keeping numbers down, and I don't even know what we did with our 2K extra ventilators when we peaked at about 60 patients in hospital in NSW I think.
We switched from a suppression to an elimination strategy and have been mostly normal since then.
One small group of suburbs had a lockdown around Christmas/New Years, but it only affected about 100K people I think and only for a few days.
The model in Australia seems to be to keep community transfer to zero, and if a case is detected, a 3 day lockdown of the suburb/city in question to let Contact Tracing and Testing travel faster than infections.
(One might think that borders would only have to stay closed until local vaccination has been rolled out. However, several of the scientific advisors recommending the "zero COVID" approach à la Oz and NZ, also want borders closed – except for strict hotel quarantine – for some years into the future to prevent variants from arising, or even in perpetuity to prevent the next pandemic from ever starting.)
And a mere 48-hour disruption had pretty disruptive results [1] - and week-long quarantines simply aren't an option.
With regard to the proposal that borders stay closed – except for strict hotel quarantine – until some indefinite date a few years from now when COVID has been eradicated not just locally but worldwide and there is no more threat of variants, see, for example, the interviews which Devi Sridhar (one of the main advisors to the Scottish government and a fan of Australia’s approach) gave over the last several months.
Not true. There's repatriate flights weekly out of both NZ and AU. You just have to quarantine coming back in.
There's a process for approval, but it's fairy straightforward. If you can afford a ticket and the destination country will take you, you can go.
The hard part is - most countries or connecting countries if you can't fly direct require 2 week quarantine or limit people entering. ANY inter-country travel is a bureaucratic nightmare.
What if you are not taking a "repatriate flight", but rather you are simply an Australia citizen who wishes to travel abroad e.g. to see family or be with a lover? My understanding is that Australia has forbidden its own citizens from freely leaving the country over the last year.
And having to do a strict hotel quarantine upon reentering definitely does not qualify as being able to freely travel, and as I said in my original post above, many people would not stand for it. Most European countries that require quarantine, for example, allow one to do it at home and it is easily gamed.
Australia’s policy of a hard lockdown followed by strict hotel quarantines worked for Australia, but it wouldn’t work here, and it is always tone-deaf when Australians recommend it as some kind of universal solution.
It was also arguably “unconstitutional” [1] for Australian states to close their borders with one another over the pandemic. Business magnate Clive Palmer sued Western Australia over its border closures, in fact, and even received backing from the Australian federal government [2].
Particularly in light of the patchwork framework surrounding state-mandated church closures in the US, the difference between Australia and the United States as it pertains to interstate border closures seems to be more a matter of cultural expectation, than legal impossibility. But IANAL.
US airports are highly controllable ports of entry. I think a lot more could’ve been done there had the population willed hard border closures into existence.
[1]: https://auspublaw.org/2020/08/border-closures-and-s-92-clive...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/02/feder...
As time passes so does the understanding of civics in the US. People think the President is like a king and just decree things willy nilly not appreciating the federal and state jurisdictions and that there aren’t departments which run things without direct intervention. Cheers!
More than half of the eligible voters in each state voted (either directly or indirectly through preference based instant runoff voting) for their government. This is significantly higher political participation than almost any other country in the world, and I’m sure it contributed to the outcome.
If you want to see "porous borders" you only need to look at Africa, Asia or Europe, all of which can be walked in-between. Walking from the ME to America? Not gonna happen.
Crossing the Mediterranean is very doable with limited resources while crossing the Atlantic/Pacific with the same resources would be impossible.
So I don't think the current situation is a result of iso but rather a result of Covid, and the fact that we are no longer fearful of it.
The unemployment support was missing/inadequate. Had it been adequate, I doubt we'd have had over half a million deaths from this.
This could really use some additional context for non-Australians.
Melbourne is the largest city in Victoria. The Premier of Victoria enacted interregional border closures during its several months-long lockdown.
(This wasn’t unique to Victoria — Western Australia did the same thing at the start of the pandemic.)
If hospitals are “filling up” now, that could be at least in part due to the logistics previously not allowing it.
However, as someone who avoided getting stitches for a finger laceration due to fears of catching Covid in a medical facility, I’m convinced people avoided necessary medical procedures to reduce exposure risk primarily. Hence I’m not sure how much of this surge in delayed medical procedures is due to interregional border closures, and how much of it is due to the public’s fears of catching Covid having been assuaged by the successful Covid safety measures taken by the Victorian state government.
Lockdowns have become one of the most politicized aspects of the pandemic. It’s really a shame they’re so unpopular amongst Americans: I think many there would happily subject themselves to 4 months of hard lockdown — in unison with generous unemployment support ofc — if it meant eradicating Covid completely in their local area.