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.