Victoria took 110 days of lockdown to get back to "normal" in lockdown number 2. We are now on lockdown number 6 and have spent over 200 days in lockdown. Can't go more than 5km at current have a 9pm curfew. I would not say it is working well.

It depends on the perspective. From government's perspective it's working as intended.

You mean places like Australia, that are still in strict lockdowns 18 months later and deploying soldiers to ensure people aren't leaving their house without government permission?

It boggles my mind that some people desire to live in a system like that.

I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high. I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk) than the long, drawn-out yo-yo lockdowns (where we lock down too late and open up too early - meaning community transmission remains high) we've been having. Better to rip the band-aid off quickly than slowly.

> I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high.

I'm truly sorry you've had to go through that. My mom has a compromised immune system so she went through much of the same until she was able to get vaccinated. I still worry about what would happen to her with a breakthrough infection.

> I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk)

If that was a choice, I'd gladly take it. But Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam, etc. have shown that even the best lockdown implementations fail eventually. New Zealand may be the single outlier, but I'm not sure what their end game is as it requires completely sealing their country from the rest of the world, which is also unsustainable.

And what, pray tell is a “proper lockdown”?

I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.

Why not NZ?

We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.

How has the NZ tourism sector been going - eg QT/Wanaka? Did domestic tourism pick up the slack?

I can't speak for NZ, but in AU domestic tourism has more than picked up the slack - domestic tourists have spent more money than international tourists

When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.

So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.

It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.

I guess I'd be worried about the rate of breakthrough infections amongst vaccinated people in Israel, the first good data we have (the reason for booster shots). That same data showed that natural immunity was much better. [0]

It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.

[0] https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

Taiwan had only a few weeks of full lockdown last year, and then a few months of softer lockdown during the second outbreak this year. During the recent outbreak it was WFH and takeout from restaurants with certain businesses closed. About 100 days later most things are open again.

They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.

Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare.

> Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

George Orwell, who actually died of an infectious disease ( Tuberculosis ), being recruited posthumously to the "lets spread disease without restraint" brigade is quite low.

Don't understand how him dying of TB invalidates his ideas.

Contact tracing is looking for people that came in contact with infected individuals. When a coworker gets covid they investigate where they went and who they came in contact with so that person can get tested. Not sure how that is Orwellian.

What people would consider Orwellian is the app you can use to scan in at places. That's voluntary, but almost everyone uses it and you still have to sign in on paper if you don't.

Personally, I don't mind. We all carry around GPS tracking devices every day, and it's silly to think that governments can't already track those. Even with GPS off you can be tracked if hitting wifi or different cell towers.

Honestly, it all sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

Actually in terms of Orwellian nightmares, normalizing mask wearing in public is an incredibly significant blow you can strike against the surveillance state.

I mean, on the one hand, you're not wrong.

I suppose one "solution" is one of those fake masks that looks real, but does nothing. Technically compliant with the letter of the law, but still striking a blow, with the bonus of hiding your face.

So comply with the government in order to get our freedoms?

Makes sense....

Good point. Phew. Slowly being normalized.

It’s been done for at least a hundred years, well before Orwell. Nice try though.

Not with this level of technology and with this big of scale.

Come to think of it when has contact tracing been done before?

All communicable diseases (measles, etc) in western countries, especially starting with smallpox eradication in the 1950s. Look it up!

Can you flesh that out? Emulating New Zealand's death rate in the USA would have saved at least 600k lives so far.

NZ and AU are faring pretty differently. AU is wracked with crisis and NZ has been business as usual for ages. The key difference as I understand it is that NZ sacrificed easy international travel for domestic wellbeing and AU didn't.

NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.

Agree that there's no guarantee of success. However, the political environment and compliance with lockdowns is very different between the two countries. For example, New Zealand is seeing nothing like the widespread protests in Melbourne and across Victoria.

The impression I get as an internet observer from the West Island is that on the whole the NZ government has done a much better job of public communications, maintaining social cohesion, and not trying to police their way out of a pandemic than Australia has. But we'll see whether that lasts. The political environment can change - see NSW - and if level 4 restrictions last more than a few weeks I think you might see the protests start up.

Give it a month

AU has certainly sacrificed international travel also - there are still Australians trying to get back. Aus outbreaks were mostly from escapes from hotel quarantines, and the quarantines were in the major cities.

And NZ is having outbreaks from hotel quarantine in the middle of major cities too, exactly like us.

Australia has far more restrictions on travel.

For outbound travel Australians are required to get a government exemption to leave the country. Australia also has far fewer inbound quarantine places per capita.

Also internally most states require entry/exit permits and frequently close thier borders to one another.

Australia sacrificed international travel too. It still leaked in which led to occasional limited lockdowns. Until Delta strain hit and spread too fast for the small lockdown strategy to contain it.

Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup plan.

But even the AZ rollout was a debacle with no one sure if they were eligible or how to get it. And the Prime Minster excusing it all by saying "it's not a race".

If Australia had the vaccination rate of the US or the UK (which was absolutely achievable) then Australia would still be the envy of the world.

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.

Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).

The issues with the non-AZ vaccines was that they didn't lock in early supply dates soon enough. For example, in June (which was already late for what was needed) Australia only had 1.7M Pfizer doses available[1] and now the PM is putting out press releases about obtaining extra supply from Poland[2].

Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/australia-to-get-pfiz...

[2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/vaccine-operations-centre-wee...

I'm not saying the Australian rollout has been good. I'm just saying it's been better than New Zealand.

the states that do actual hard and fast lockdowns do well. See WA, QLD, NT, SA.

You mean Israel and nowhere else, yes? Because nowhere in Europe had lockdown so short. Australia managed to make all its work for nothing by comprehensively fucking up the vaccine rollout.

Do you have any direct source for that statistic? The article that you've linked to is the Babylon Bee -- a site best known for their satire and fake articles -- lifting some infographics from an (uncited) article in the Daily Mail. Neither of these sources inspires confidence.

What about this one? https://www.gov.uk/government/news/alcoholic-liver-deaths-in...

That actually says something subtly different than what the other article was claiming. Not only does it point to the pandemic as a whole as a cause rather than lockdowns in particular, as the Babylon Bee article did, but it suggests that the most problematic changes in behavior were increases in drinking among people who were already heavy drinkers, not people "becoming alcoholics" who didn't previously have a drinking problem.

Sorry I saw this circulate a few days ago and linked the first thing I found on DDG.

I have no reason to think it's fake news.

> I have no reason to think it's fake news.

Very sound logic (/s)! With this sort of reasoning people invaded the Capitol on January 6th, because they were certain their country was about to be taken over by a Chinese-backed coup. Guess what, they also think what they heard was legitimate, and they think their reasoning work(ed) perfectly fine.

Everything in Babylon Bee is 100% satire and fake. It's used as a fake news source by people wanting to spread misinformation.

But the running joke is that it often turns out becoming true. That's why they spun off NotTheBee to do real news. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/alcoholic-liver-deaths-in...

I'm always amazed when people try and use The Bee as a legit source of misinformation. They make no bones that they're a satire site.

Folks gotta be pretty gullible to not see that.

Ref this

> Sorry I saw this circulate a few days ago and linked the first thing I found on DDG. > I have no reason to think it's fake news.

I think the expectation is that you should have a reason to think that it's not fake news before spreading it.

> ... https://notthebee.com/article/nearly-1-million-more-brits-ad...

This is very clearly a link to a satirical comedy site (in the same category as The Onion).

Actually, notthebee.com is very clearly not babylonbee.com "Not the Bee is a humor-based news, opinion, and entertainment site from the creators of The Babylon Bee and Disrn. Like the name suggests, it'll feature some absurd and hilarious (but real) news that seems like it should definitely be satire."[0]

That link that apparently got @jmnicolas flagged, actually does cite an external source[1] which says, "the alcohol-related death rate increasing by 20 per cent in 2020 to the highest level since records began.[...] PHE data showed there were 6,893 deaths blamed on alcohol in 2020, compared to 5,819 in 2019 before the virus reached Britain."

(edit) This seems to be backed up by a gov.uk press release.[2](/edit)

NotTheBee definitely has a opinion/bias to their articles [3] but I don't think it deserves to be called "fake news."

[0]https://notthebee.com/article/welcome-to-not-the-bee [1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9884297/Covid-19-... [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/alcoholic-liver-deaths-in... [3]https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-all-these-crazy-cons...