If your pursuit of "best covid results" (and all the goal post shifting justifications that come with it) requires that your ostensibly democratic, free country turns even more towards something resembling East Germany, i'd say you've failed in some more fundamental way. Many other countries also managed to decently deal with a highly difficult and fluid situation like this without imposing absurd Stasi-like equivalents of exit visas. What a shameful thing for a western democratic state to shift to and what a shame that so many idiots defend the normalization of these things in their terror of this relatively moderate virus.

No. You're confusing public health measures with political ideology.

This confusion is one of the reasons that the US covid response was, and continues to be, such a failure. The US is at 649,754 deaths from covid and counting.

The U.S. response has been extremely variable and has operated under circumstances entirely different, geographically and politically from those of a much smaller, island country like Australia. Comparing the two as countries is absurd. With that said, there are many legitimate criticisms of the Australian government reaction, and yes, on authoritarian grounds as well. The U.S response is in many ways worth criticizing as well. Furthermore, what has Australia really gained? Endless rolling lockdowns and a fragility against covid upticks that's laughably tenuous while also being highly authoritarian. It's wonderful to see the exceptionally low death count among COVID cases in the country (taking into account its unique geographic situation) but had vaccination not become available, this would have been a very fragile, unsustainable thing bought at enormous social cost.

> Furthermore, what has Australia really gained?

A lot, economically. Australia & NZ returned to growth faster than just about anywhere else on the planet, and the states that locked down hardest returned to growth fastest.

So it was a big win heath wise, and a big win economically. Whether the new rules were a big loss of freedom is a matter of taste I guess, but we already have lots of rules like don't drive too fast, don't yell Fire! in a theatre, your kids must be schooled, don't has sex with minors. More rules than you can poke a pointed stick at in fact. In comparison the new ones were a drop in the ocean, and they disappeared as soon as they weren't needed (ie, when the lock downs worked). I sincerely wish the other rules were reviewed as quickly.

> The U.S. response has been extremely variable

Yes, the US has failed as a nation in its covid response.

You claim Australia's health measures are now "normalized" which is absurd. They are abnormal measures to deal with an abnormal situation.

Let's make a bet: I bet Australia will remove its lockdown restrictions when either the covid case numbers are under control or it decides to just give up and let covid infections rise (like the UK did).

You bet the lockdowns are "normalized" and Australia remains an "authoritarian regime".

Let's see who turns out to be right.

In WA we've been pretty much living a normal life sans about ~4 lockdowns, most of which went for 4-7 days. It feels like ancient history. Last one we had was around April 24

At what cost? Hasn’t NSW been under a severe lockdown for months now? And it’s being further tightened because cases are at an all time high and still going up? I mean they had to designate approval of friends for single people so they at least have human contact.

So sure, great job on keeping Covid numbers down until now, but it’s not like it wasn’t costly in other ways.

And I say this as someone with family in Vietnam who took a similar approach. They felt like it would be a great time to create a domestic vaccine industry since they had zero cases for most of last year - plenty of time to develop their own Covid vaccine.

Well in the past 4 months cases have increased by almost 200x (2,000 to near 400,000), same with deaths and it still hasn’t peaked. Total number full vaccinated is a little under 2% (though 1 dose is almost 20%).

Now they are scrambling like mad to get any vaccine they can. And they have the military distributing food in their biggest city because nobody can leave their homes - unless for medical care.

To the grandfather’s point, the control of Covid was admirable, don’t get me wrong, but it was squandered out of complacency that they could always get it under control.

> At what cost? Hasn’t NSW been under a severe lockdown for months now?

It's a meaningless question without any numbers. Show me the economic impact for, for example, the UK versus Australia. Who comes out better in growth and GDP?

Why is growth and GDP the determinant? How about mental health?

Singapore had the highest suicide rate last year since 2012. No doubt the lockdown contributed to it.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/suicide-highest-re...

Well, they have lower numbers of confirmed cases, but they have a higher death rate than some countries. As an example, Norway has registered 3 times as many cases, but fewer deaths. And while Norway, especially Oslo, has had strong lockdowns, they were nowhere near as onerous as what Melbourne and Sidney have gone through.

Australia bought themselves time, but squandered it rather than ensuring that as many people as possible were vaccinated.

> Well, they have lower numbers of confirmed cases, but they have a higher death rate than some countries. As an example, Norway has registered 3 times as many cases, but fewer deaths.

Norway's population is 5,469,887. Australia's population is 25,839,176.

Norway's covid deaths per million is 149. Australia's covid deaths per million is 38.

Australia's doing much better than Norway.

Our, Norway's, economy has already recovered to pre-COVID levels. We have never needed a lock down. We expect to have 95% of the eligible over 18s fully vaccinated before the end of October.

We have never been forbidden from travelling abroad, just advised against, always been able to return. Now that I am fully vaccinated I can return without having to quarantine, without tests, I don't even have to fill in a passenger locator form.

We have never had any violent protests, or violent reactions to protests, about COVID restrictions.

> Australia's doing much better than Norway.

It seems to me that reducing performance to a single dimension is counter productive both literally in GDP terms and qualitatively on a personal level.

> We have never needed a lock down.

You chose not to. That's why your deaths per population is four times higher than Australia's.

And yet, Canada did do lockdowns and is around 4.7x worse than Norway. Plus the gov’t spent $240 billion by Dec 2020; a significant part of which ($80B) was the unemployment program introduced so that people didn’t go broke when they couldn’t work.

The retrospective studies on all of this across different countries is going to be really interesting.

Squandered is not really an appropriate take. Australia's cases are just about to leave triple digits daily and we've already got 30% of the country vaccinated, and most people have been given at least a first dose. This is an enviable position, the edge is going to be taken right off when the case numbers are get high. And the elderly have nearly finished with the vaccination campaign.

And we were struggling to lay hands on the vaccine a few months ago. Supplies were going to countries that honestly needed it more than Australia (cough India cough).