This only applies to specific people in home quarantine and only for a short period of time - 14 days. i.e people that have returned to the country from overseas that would normally be in quarantine in a government facility for that same period.
People now have the option of quarantining at home, and if they choose to do so, have to show that they are quarantining at home rather than saying they will, and then heading off into town and infecting others. (As many people have done).
You are trying to portray this as something being forced on all citizens, indefinitely when that couldn't be further from reality.
...
> people that have returned to the country
I do not know who's being deliberately misleading here.
Please note[1]:
> It will start this week for people returning from New South Wales and Victoria.
> People wanting to return to South Australia and home quarantine will have to apply to SA Health.
So this is clearly applicable to Australian citizens within Australia. Citizens of Australia are not allowed to move freely within Australia. Before an Australian citizen can travel from one part of Australia to another part of Australia, they have to ask the government to allow them to do so. They must accede to the points I listed.
After that the government will expand the program to international travelers.
Once a populace accepts that they are not allowed travel and that the government can arbitrarily place people under house arrest and subject to torture (and knowledge of random intrusions into your life can happen at any time - even during a long, relaxing shower or something is psychological torture), there isn't much that will stop people with the power from expanding their control.
[1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-23/how-will-south-austra...
Instead they are being allow to quarantine from the comfort of their home, and if they choose to do so they have to use an app to prove they are staying at home, but again this is only for the short duration of their quarantine period.
You are scare mongering and trying to make this something that it isn't - it isn't being forced on large numbers of people, let alone the entire state. It's not intended to be used by people not in quarantine, and for those are in quarantine, they only need it _whislst they are still in quarantine_
However, if your outrage is actually about a states right to enforce a quarantine on potentially infected incoming travellers during a pandemic fullstop .... well my friend, that's a ship that has long since sailed - literally hundreds of years ago.
That is false dilemma. In free society law-abiding citizens are trusted to observe the law even without persistent surveillance.
We also do not carry persistent surveillance tool to control whether we do not steal or assault, so why not handle quarantine the same way?
Anecdotally, I received an automated speeding ticket in the mail today. I went 36 in a 30. I really try to be a good driver, and generally watch my speed, but apparently I didn’t that day. But was I confronted by the officer who clocked me? No, I was the only car in sight. I received high resolution photos of my car and video is available online for my review. If that’s not persistent surveillance, I don’t know what else to call it.
What you describe is what should be, but we are witnessing disturbing trends unfold.
for something like a pandemic, the public cannot be trusted to make a personal sacrifice for the public good.
As long as such surveillance is limited to such medical emergencies, and rescinded afterwards, it is acceptable. Of course, this requires that the citizens be vigilant, but the current protesting, and fear-mongering and misinformation is beyond just being vigilant, but is instead defying health orders and delaying the end of the pandemic. If that's not stupid, i dont know what is.
The government is made up from persons in the "public." If the public cannot be trusted to act in the public good, the government cannot be trusted to do so either either.
It sounds like your argument is towards some sort of authoritarianism / monarchy which removes power from the public so that someone can force them to act for the public good. I do admit you have a point that authoritarianism/monarchy has its advantages, and one is the ability to put a tighter control on populace undergoing a pandemic (short-sighted thinking is a fundamental weakness of democracies electing leaders for only a few years at a time).
that's a false equivalency.
An action on the part of the gov't does not equate to the "average" action of the general population. The very fact that there must be gov't mandated laws against stealing is evidence of this - otherwise, people would steal and loot!
Plenty of people opposed to the draft in war, and yet it must be done in the public good. The only saving grace, because of western democracy, is that any gov't who continue to flounder the power granted to them, would (ostensibly) get voted out. This doesn't happen in an authoritarian gov't - like china for example.
But people who claim mistrust of the public institutions are destroying that mechanism - leading to the very last US election, where some people are de-legitimizing the outcome because they believe that some "authoritarian" entity is forcing it upon them.
I dont know whether these people are stupid, or brainwashed by something.
People like stories that they can grasp in general, and populism as a political tactic provides an extremely simple narrative of a clear-cut "elite" group onto which almost any grievance can be projected as being caused by - and that makes it easy for people to paint themselves as heroic figures fighting evil and thus allow them to justify whatever means they use to get there.
And the effects of deprivation on people's health, cognition, mental health and relationships make it harder for people who are struggling to avoid embracing simple narratives that fit their biases. People who have everything and have never struggled a day in their life do the same after all, people are people at the end of the day.
Populism is the enemy of liberal democracy - and institutions in general - but the problem is that as a tactic it's easy and effective as a way of whipping people up as long as you don't care about and aren't affected by what happens after the angry mob is unleashed. Or if you're the rare true believer instead of being another cynical rabble-rouser.
Most people would probably say populism (political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite" [wiki quote]) is pretty rational given the human condition of the modern US and the influences of our elite.
It doesn't, but in a truly democratic country it would.
>that's a false equivalency.
In a democracy the government is all drawn from public. The government of democracies is all members of public (save some essentially powerless queen/royalty as in UK). So no, it's not.
>The very fact that there must be gov't mandated laws against stealing is evidence of this - otherwise, people would steal and loot!
People do steal and loot under virtually every democratic government. Laws are mostly to tell you what happens if you do it, not to set up surveillance to invade you privacy to check that you don't (although I must admit this has been more common lately).
>Plenty of people opposed to the draft in war, and yet it must be done in the public good
Your words not mine. I vehemently disagree "it must be done." Our last draft was disregarded in a widespread fashion, and ultimately the dodgers were essentially pardoned because the government had to yield to the "average" action of the general populace.
>But people who claim mistrust of the public institutions are destroying that mechanism
The loss of trust in public institution are in large part a result in the fact they have destroyed the mechanism of their legitimacy, the constitution. We now live in a society where 4th amendment is void (drug dog can "alert" on your car/person and you can be searched at any time, and even patted down without even that). A policeman can shoot a woman in the middle of the night on a bogus warrant, and the only guy looking at prosecution will be the guy who missed (see: Breonna Taylor). I can be tossed in jail for 5-10 years if I decide to remove a brace from a pistol and put a stock on it instead (2nd amendment is dead). Same 5+ years if you own a pot leaf and a gun at the same time and did nothing else "wrong" (see: conviction of RussianFPS, although he did not get this much jail time).
Posse Comitatus Act is essentially dead as now our police force is essentially another military branch armed by relinquished items from the military and sees itself as a military like force for controlling the populace, complete with armored vehicles, machine guns, explosives, urban warfare type training, and virtual invulnerability from prosecution for killing the populace and special privileges the common citizen doesn't have like qualified immunity and the ability to own different weapons than civilians even when off duty.
Either the public institutions as they stand are powerless to stop the erosion of liberty and rights, or they are the ones perpetuating the erosion. Either way they are illegitimate.
Because the pandemy has a huge societal cost that can be alleviated quickly if you get people to follow the law.
If you get people to stop stealing or assaulting for a month using measures, it won't cause less stealing or assaulting afterward.
That's the problem. People are not obeying the law.
It doesn't matter. Enforcing the law is not my job. That is the police's job. They should do it, instead of trampling innocent people's freedoms.
We shouldn't expect police to do the impossible trying to enforce our Orwellian quarantine restrictions. We should eliminate the restrictions.
And yet a large percentage of the US still refuses to wear masks or vaccinate, effectively prolonging the pandemic they so loathe to begin with, and go against simple mask mandates for the sole reason they're laws in the first place.
So so much for that theory. We've proven it's not a rule, but a baseless fantasy.
We also had high mask use, fairly low deaths, and fewer restrictions than most of Europe.
That's an easy answer. Consequences.
When one single person not following the rules can force the entire state into a lockdown (as was the cause in NSW) the trade off makes a lot of sense.
As a person that had to stay in quarantine for going back home for the last weeks of my mothers life due terminal cancer, I had to stay 10 days locked in my home, even having countless tests, not even knowing if she would be alive and being told that they can make an exception for the funeral - so kind of them. We were treated like some sub-human criminals by the police, being called and checked (some friends who had their daughters coming from university back home had to come to the window every morning, all 4 members of the family to get "counted" by a police officer). What's funny is that 1 year before the pandemic my house was broken into, never heard back from the police, but it's good to see that they are doing their job in checking up on us, the virus criminals.
And yes requiring 14 day mandatory quarantine for interstate travel is insane. The virus is endemic. You all in Australia are struggling in futility against one of the strongest forces of nature, its virome. Most of the rest of the Western world is looking on in horror. Even writers at The Atlantic. Best of luck, though. Sincerely.
I can almost guarantee the infrastructure this is running on is USA owned AWS.
> You all in Australia are struggling in futility against one of the strongest forces of nature.
Well actually, most of the states in oz have delta either under control/trending down towards elimination again, or in the case of tazzy, totally eliminated. It's only NSW that's struggling (which co-incidentally is the state giving people the option of quarantining at home with the use of this app).
Personally, I'm from over the ditch in NZ. Our delta cases peaked at 84 a week or so back, down towards 28 today after two weeks of a pretty relaxed lockdown. Most of NZ is now out of the hard lockdown, and probably should be back to normal in another couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to yet another covid free summer, with no worries about masks, crowded sports stadiums and camp grounds or me/anyone I know personally getting the virus.
Yup, we're bound to catch it eventually I'm sure, but I'm looking forward to getting it much later when we have better treatments that don't involve horse worming medication. Treatment/mitigation is much better now than it was 18 months ago, and I'm sure in a year or so, it will be better still.
Actually it is South Australia, which is COVID free.
Right! And make sure you do everything possible to keep us out until it's safe. Don't let your politicians do stupid deals with ours that would make things worse for you/NZ (love the place). Yours I'm not sure about but ours are as slimy as they come.
Not just NSW, Victoria has officially given up as well.
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews said just yesterday covid zero is no longer possible.
Tasmania will receive a repatriation flight from the UK next week, 100 people have n to hotel quarantine in Hobart. I won’t be surprised if it leaks in to the community.
The vaccines we have are not sterilising. They don’t prevent infection nor transmission, looks like they only reduce the severity and transmission.
Australia has definitely lost this fight, the virus will spread to all states, it’s just a matter of time.
Quarantine is leaky, people will mit perfectly abide by restrictions.
But please, continue looking on in horror at us from (I'm assuming) America. Your post is a wonderful mix of condescending tone and factual inaccuracy, with the added cherry-on-top that you have absolutely moronic states like Florida "fighting for their freedoms" by banning mask mandates. This would be infuriating if it wasn't so painfully stupid.
Australia, despite being a wealthy country with strong ties to vaccine manufacturing nations, did not prioritize these vaccines and instead has relied on rolling lockdowns and other invasive measures.
Perhaps I misunderstood your point, but it appears that you are arguing that Australia preferred the option of rolling lockdowns?
When you have no vaccines available there are two options. Overload your hospital system or lockdown. Everyone would have preferred having vaccines when the US and the UK received theirs.
Furthermore, the state governments that are actually in charge of lockdowns, are not responsible for procuring the vaccines. The federal government were under minor scrutiny for making a mess of that. This reflects the media landscape in Australia that is dominated by NewsCorp.
I think most people in Australia would strongly agree our vaccine policy was a complete and utter disaster. Probably the most expensive mistake in Australia's history.
Yes, our federal government absolutely failed when it comes to vaccine supply. It is our state governments that have instituted lockdowns, because of this failure on behalf of the federal government, to squash cases and stop our hospital system from reaching breaking point.
Yes, our federal government screwed up, and I don't know anyone who doesn't agree with that point, but given that, and given the outcomes America experienced before vaccination was prevalent, it is the height of hubris and arrogance to suggest that you and the rest of the Western world (this "data" being pulled from where, exactly?) is "horrified at us".
Unlike many Americans, most Australians would prefer to yield to principle than to suicide over it. The pathological notion that your country has for so-called freedoms (which never really existed anyway) is something the world watches with aghast amazement—right, you don't see it as you're in the thick of it but the rest of the world does (the fact that we also speak a form of English is now a source of an embarrassment to us). (And it's now even worse since the Afghanistan fiasco—sorry I mean the Vietnam repeat exercise.)
Let's get a few facts straight: clearly you—along with many of your fellow countrymen—haven't a clue about what happened during earlier pandemics in the US. Right, you're clueless about your own US history in respect of previous pandemics or you'd be much more circumspect in your criticism of others. I would strongly suggest that you examine the rules, laws and regulations that were in place in the US during the 1918-20 Spanish Flu pandemic and you'll find that some of them would put anything we've done over here to shame! Go on—do a search, then read and learn!
Let me continue: I'd also suggest that you Americans had absolutely no qualms about quarantining Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon. Her life must have been hell because of her forced incarceration. Your antiquated health system had no proper way of managing her so you just locked her up then let her rot until she died!
And more, let me quote "Quarantined for Life: The Tragic History of US Leprosy Colonies - Stripped of their most basic human rights, patients nonetheless built lives and communities": https://www.history.com/news/leprosy-colonies-us-quarantine. I've nothing to add as the story speaks for itself.
There's much more but I've proved my point.
Now to the local facts here. The fact that we were not strict enough in policing the disease is the reason that it got away from us. That we let international people in and some damn taxi driver idiot drove an infected aircrew to a hotel without protection started it all. If we'd implemented the strict quarantine measures that we had had in place in 1918-19 for the Spanish Flu then it would not have escaped anywhere near as easily.
"Most of the rest of the Western world is looking on in horror. Even writers at The Atlantic."
Oh yeah, if most of the rest of the world is looking at us then it's turned away from looking at you out of horror, we're comic relief by comparison.
Next factoid: the per capita death rate in the US leapfrogs over ours here in Australia by at least an order of magnitude. Why? Because millions of bloody-mined Americans won't wear masks or get vaccinated out of principle (lunacy). Right, they'd prefer to suffer COVID and likely die rather than to admit they're wrong—very grossly wrong (frankly it's sickening to watch it playing out like a tragic soap opera on our TVs every day—all this from the so-called leader of the free world). Even your president says 'it's now a pandemic of the unvaccinated.'
No wonder the Chinese are gloating and laughing themselves sick. If the whole horrible shemozzle weren't so utterly tragic then one would reckon we were watching an episode of the Keystone Cops.
Next time, do your research, get your facts right (I know that's a damned hard ask given that in the US the word 'fact' has come to mean anything or utterance that its utterer thinks it ought to be).
P.S. Keep the downvotes coming, they're further verifying my points!
Like a holy ascetic hermit mocking the commoners.
Things are not going back to normal, no matter how much we act like they are.
(I'm sorry I never studied psychology. I've always wanted to know why some people can state categorically that black is white or vise versa when the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary.) :-)
That's actually not correct. I don't expect you to believe it but you'd be able to ascertain that's it's incorrect if you read some of my earlier posts on the subject.
Several points, as I've said previously, I rather like lockdowns as they allow me time to do things that I've not time for otherwise - or time that I wouldn't normally be able to justify. Check for yourself (it's there in writing).
My main point is that I've precious little time for bloody-minded fools who: (a) deny science - that's to say the best advice available, (b) clearly haven't studied the facts - not even superficially so, (c) are acting in ways contrary to their own health and best interests and (d) their lack of concern for the health of others who do actually care. People who are knowingly prepared to infect others who may die as a consequence are a dangerous menace to society and throughout history we've locked them up - as I've mentioned Mary Mallon is a case in point (the tragedy of that case was how she was treated after she was locked up).
Throughout history - even going back to the Black Death/plague and before, people were expected to follow protocols - locked up in their houses etc. This is not a new requirement. So what gives the right of stupid people to do so now? None I'd suggest.
BTW, in response to the ludicrous, inaccurate and often dangerous memes circulating on Social Media and elsewhere, a colleague of mine coined the phrase "We've reached peak stupid". Not only do I concur but I'm sorry I didn't think of that myself. It says it all really.
Quarantine is voluntary. If you choose to leave it, you face the consequences.
This is a personal responsibility problem not a society wide problem.
Simple as.
What if you do not possess a smartphone? What choice do you have, then? Are you just forced into hotel quarantine or do they lend you a smartphone? (Genuine question.)
If you prefer, you are also able to use the app and stay home.
What is the span of temporary here ?
I'm a little surprised we didn't see similar moves in the US, but COVID spread so quickly there that it would have been kind of meaningless. The maritime provinces of Canada, though, had a very similar arrangement at one point, effectively cutting them off from the rest of the country.
All that said, I do think Australia is on a very slippery slope here and the current government is no fan of civil liberties. The restrictions on leaving Australia are particularly indefensible.
if those leaving would sign a waiver that they may be refused entry back (e.g., people who left australia after the first wave, but decided to come back when delta variant first appeared), then it would be ok to let them leave.
Aussies have the whole empty continent nearby to banish the wrong-thinkers to exile /s
But we don't. Because we don't restrict freedoms for responsible 99% just to take care of the remaining 1%.
BTW, there's historical precedence, check what happened during the Spanish flu pandemic.
Sanitation expectations and standards fluctuate wildly amongst different cultures and populations; that doesn't mean your ethnocentric view on sanitation makes your civilization better than other ones.
Specifically, I am wondering whether similar methods were used to deal with the following[1]:
> #How common are notifiable infectious diseases?
> More than 593,000 cases of notifiable diseases were reported to the NNDSS in 2019. Four infectious diseases accounted for 82% of these notifications to Australian health authorities in 2019:
> * influenza—more than 313,000 notifications
> * chlamydia—almost 103,000 notifications
> * campylobacter (a gastrointestinal infection)—almost 36,000 notifications
> * gonorrhoea—more than 34,000 notifications.
[1]: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/infectious...
Public health gets involved in notifying the partners of STD index cases, with varying degrees of coercion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-are-australians-so-accepting...
> I see, so you are claiming that governments in Australia have always dealt with infectious diseases using oppression?
Ignoring for the moment the prerogative term "oppression", using the rule of law to stop the spread of hazards is pretty common.
In South Australia we've had to throw put fresh fruit when bringing it from interstate because of the risk of fruit fly infection, and there are currently strong restrictions stopping movement of fruit between postcodes because of an outbreak, eg: https://fruitfly.sa.gov.au/outbreak-restrictions/red-area
This is a restriction on movement of potential infection vectors. SA remains free of Covid, and until we can get our vaccination rate up I'd prefer to have this restriction than a lockdown.
There is no room for debate or testing how deep your beliefs are, because you’ve been clear on your position - so from a communication perspective you’re good.
From a perspective of self-determinism, I think you’re my antithesis.
If you think it tends toward the former—to do a job that we don't have all individually have time for, and so to represent our interests by doing that job, not just by voting how polls say the average constituent with little relevant education or experience on a given topic would vote—then the "representative" part of "representative democracy" is indispensable. If you think it's wholly the latter, then direct democracy is a suitable, and superior, replacement.
[EDIT] and obviously there's room for a spectrum of opinions on the topic, not just binary extremes—though I actually don't think the representative-democracy position is the extreme version of that side, like the pure-direct-democracy is for the other—but I use those for illustrative purposes.
So for the general case where we have representatives doing the voting, we should have a mechanism where we can switch representatives in cases where we don't agree on specific issues. And that's where principles from liquid democracy could bring solutions to the current coarse system that we have.
But I don't think there is a silver bullet.
Like Brexit?
Big issues tend to be complicated issues on many levels. I don't see how you can agree that full-time politicians are required because people don't have the time or expertise to be involved in every aspect of the political process, but also that for big, important issues - almost certainly requiring the most time and expertise to fully understand the arguments and ramifications of all options - suddenly the same non-expert people are suddenly better than full-time politicians.
What happens is Brexit. A ridiculously complicated process (the UK leaving the EU) that could be done in all kinds of different ways (in the single-market or instead in the EEA, in/out the customs zone, free movement or not, a Norway-style semi-in arrangement, tariffs, regulations, membership of other EU institutions and so on) each with their own trade-offs and complications, on top of the ridiculous difficulty of simply trying to predict the known unknowns arising from unpicking a 50-year political and economic union.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uks-brexit-options-explained...
Instead we got:
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”
[ ] Remain a member of the European Union
[ ] Leave the European Union
where option two could mean anything, and in practise it let the Euro-hardliners and UKIP types define it as the hardest of hard Brexits and fuck the consequences. When it took years for Parliament to agree on the final result for what Brexit was (and the UK's system of government makes passing legislation easy ie. the govmt. has a majority in one house and can override the other house) it just shows how the idea that direct democracy fails at a certain scale. All nuance, complexity and context are stripped away and replaced by a single sentence asking a yes or no question that only shows people's feels over reals.
The fact that parliament became gridlocked for years afterwards as it failed to agree a sane way forward is not a great argument for avoiding referenda and relying on the wisdom of elected representatives.
The U.S. election system, campaign finance laws, and lobbying effectively result in a corruption machine for representatives.
- Low levels of corruption [1]
- Easy voting with elections run by an independent body [2]
- Very strict election financing rules coupled with public funding of elections [3]
- A proportional election system [4]
- Relatively low inequality (though admittedly this is worsening) [5]
The result is high trust in our government and public institutions.
One thing noticeably absent is much direct democracy. We do occasionally have referendums -- for example, we recently voted on euthanasia (accepted) and legalization of drugs (rejected) -- but those actually have mixed reception as people can think of them as "cop-outs" by politicians.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/table/nzl [2] https://elections.nz/about/about-the-electoral-commission/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_funding_in_New_Zeala... [4] https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
- Publicly funded journalism [1] and no Murdoch press.
I don't think you understand.
In Australia, the strong lockdowns are widely supported. There was an election in Queensland during 2020 where the Queensland government bore a lot of criticism from NSW and other governments for their restrictions.
They were returned with an increased majority.
I'm in South Australia and I support the policy outlined in this piece.
It's a freedom tradeoff - we are lockdown free, can go about our business without getting COVID.
Until the vaccination rate is high enough, I support measures our goverment is taking to keep it like that.
It's true people are getting tired of this. But in general people (correctly) blame the slow vaccine roll out rather than the lockdown policy for their unhappiness.
I do think the NSW govt is hoping that with a high vaccination rate, they can treat delta the same as original covid, and completely eradicate it without doing lockdowns. Will see how that goes.
Essentially let's say you are responsible for helping run ministry of finance, and then you are rotated out to manage some rural agriculture thing, and so on.
> In return for trading away their liberty, Australians gained a huge safety dividend. COVID-19 has killed 194 of every 100,000 Americans, 77 of every 100,000 Israelis, and only four of every 100,000 Australians. That low death toll is a tremendous upside. What remains to be seen is whether Australia can maintain that performance without permanently ending core attributes of life in a liberal democracy, including freedom of movement, peaceable assembly, and basic privacy.
We’re still in the middle of this. If we could have nice things, these restrictions wouldn’t need to be enforced. We’ll have to see what happens once the country is adequately vaccinated.
I would not in a million years trade Australia's restrictions for those of the United States just to exchange Australia's death rate with that of the US, and it's hard to imagine that any reasonable, well-adjusted person would want to do that.
so tell me if you know personally anyone who has died? What if that trade includes someone from your family? Does your tune suddenly change if the lack of restrictions would affect you?
All i hear is that you feel you don't want to make any sacrifices, because it only benefits somebody else.
We tolerate --- even demand --- higher speed limits because the time saved by driving faster outweighs the additional deaths caused. It may sound callous to put the trade-off in those terms, but it's true. And I bet you, personally, would absolutely hate it you weren't able to drive more than 25mph ever.
Why should COVID be different?
When you optimize for "safety" to the exclusion of all other considerations, you create a dystopia.
A non-zero number of COVID deaths is a fair price for restoring our society to normality. The weird refusal of people to apply cost-benefit analysis to COVID mitigation is gravely concerning. Without cost-benefit analysis, we can't make good decisions.
1) You leave out the long list of ways we've tried very, very hard to make driving as safe as possible while not sacrificing the entire point of the car, to get somewhere faster. There is a trade off, but the equation isn't nearly as callous as you make it seem.
2) The equation for Covid isn't "live free or die" either. There's a lot of middle ground that mostly involves taking up limited medical resources for something that could have been avoided while still conducting your normal day to day activities with some minor modifications. That trade-off is a simple one.
We don't drive above 25mph because there is already cost benefit analysis done, at the governmental transportation department level. The average person assumes this analysis is mostly correct, and thus agree (implicitly) to follow the rules.
How come all of a sudden, people stop believing that such analysis wasn't done for the actions undertaken for lockdown?
How come, conveniently, that people who oppose such lockdown are claiming that their preferred option - that of opening up - is somehow a better trade?
45,000 people in Australia are alive right now who would be dead if Australia had the USA's death rate.
I'm quite sure the family and friends of every single one of those 45,000 people strongly disagree with you.
And the AZ deals the gov't has made was not transparent, which reeks of corruption, and it bit them in the ass now. Even now, the gov't (note, the gov't, not the medical community) is recommending that young people talk to their GP and take AZ (conveniently, this absolves the gov't of the responsibility of providing more pfizer, and force the young people between a rock and a hard place in terms of risk).
So if there are any australians here reading this, you will do well to never vote for the liberal party in your life time.
The Aussie population, by and large, really wants to be vaccinated. There's some who are a bit illogical about the perceived risks of AZ blood clots, but that's firmly on the media who played up that risk at a time when the risk of covid proper was minimised due to our success. This has created a subset of people who insist on waiting for Pfizer.
But that wouldn't be a problem if our government hadn't fucked up ordering vaccines so badly in the first place. Their work was truly atrocious.
Am I reading that correctly?
The federal gov't almost didn't want to have lockdown in the first wave, and fortunately it was the state gov't doing it (by medical advice) that pushed it over.
The fact that you somehow confuse it together into one lump, and attribute it to a singular government entity decision, either means you did not really do any research or look into it. Or you are maliciously spreading FUD to cause distrust in existing institutions.
You trust the government decision to implement lockdown but not the decision regarding the AZ vaccine?
For example, my partner goes for a daily walk along the foreshore of the beach. On the weekend she'll go for a bush hike. This is all within the strict Sydney lockdown laws because she's staying within a 5km radius of her home.
Moreover, their lockdown means that I can go about my life more or less uninterrupted, because their outbreak is limited from reaching me.
There are 45,000 people in Australia who are alive right now who would not be if Australia had the same death rate as the USA. So they're doing pretty well.
the idea that the difference in death rate is due to some intrinsic policy or mandated behavior rather than something more simple like population density/metropolis commonality/average temperature/humidity, etc seems like a pretty big leap -- and that seems to be your point , no?
is there already some big comprehensive list of social policies that provably worked to reduce death rate during the covid-19 pandemic across the board with environmental factors normalized out?
I thought we were still in the middle of this experiment, but i'd love to see some data if it exists.
Also, Australia is ridiculously dense. Most of our pop is in capital cities. it's big and empty.
You might have missed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391548
Seems unnecessary to use an app when the network can triangulate pretty well in densely populated areas.
2. Australians overall are less frightened of their government. Any Indigenous Australians on hn can attest that does not mean everybody is safe from state violence. Police still kill people, power is still abused, but comparing my life in the US and in Australia, most people experience the government as being more benign, and helpful than people in general experience in the US. It's not black and white, its just a few nudges along on a spectrum of grey. So most people are viewing the these laws as clumsy collective effort that they do not imagine will be abused.
There are many things that can be said about the problems with this view, but the acceptance of these laws does come from a reactionary hard line position, but rather that people find it hard to imagine that they will be abused
We're talking about Australia, after all.
PS: Watch this short clip for an idea of what news looks like in Australia at the moment: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1429786126815010820
These four points seem to be in contradiction with each other:
1. Most of Australia's media supports the lockdowns
2. Most of Australia's media is owned by Rupert Murdoch
3. Rupert Murdoch's media is right-wing
4. The right wing opposes the lockdowns
Yet I hear combinations of those points all the time. What's happening here?
https://twitter.com/joshfrydenberg/status/131622619140619059...
Once the conservative government in NSW implemented lock downs they were (mostly) suddenly on board.
This of course is more of an indictment than them just being opposed to lockdowns. They aren't opposed for ideological reasons, just for political convenience.
This has been the fishiest thing for me during the entire pandemic. It seems the slightest questioning of the mainstream narrative results in censorship. Even pointing this out can result in censorship or people lashing out.
What has amazed me is how there are many Aussie's who agree with the rules and are happy to comply. It's amazing.
In those countries people die all the time due to reasons which could have been prevented with regular health check ups and care, COVID restrictions were only making it worse for people who have to work everyday to pay for that days food.
5 states have fewer than 10% of their ICU beds remaining. The public death rate of victims who receive treatment when necessary has virtually no relation with the reality of "number of people requiring medical care > medical care available". If those 5 states weren't doing even the minimum of vaccines/distancing/masking that they're doing today, they would be at 0% capacity, without question.
Definitely what Australia is doing is too much, but opening everything and leaving it to individual choices is an incomprehensibly bad position.
Is there evidence of that? From my limited and non-expert perspective, it seems that states that had substantial restrictions (California) experienced the same types of waves that states with barely any restrictions (Florida) experienced at different times. It seems like we have a lot less control of these waves than we think we do.
Wouldn't this be how we would expect things to work? Places with more infections need more resources. It seems to me like the "strong reason to believe bias" is the exact same evidence as "this is how I would expect it to work in absence of bias".
Then delta came. Turns out being infected with one variant doesn’t offer as much protection against another variant as being vaccinated. (https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...)
> The new evidence shows that protective antibodies generated in response to an mRNA vaccine will target a broader range of SARS-CoV-2 variants carrying “single letter” changes in a key portion of their spike protein compared to antibodies acquired from an infection.
So yeah, life is back to normal in India. Until the next variant.
So no. Next variant might affect India but no more than the other countries still enforcing crazy lockdowns.
Source: all over the news
There were tough curfews in India and police literally beating up people on the streets.
https://scroll.in/video/957293/watch-indian-police-are-beati...
Screw everyone else though right?
> Stop mistaking our country for your own.
I'm Australian
It's also convenient that these suburbs are not the ones being targeted by huge police operations
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/08/weste...
Have a moment to ponder the existence of immigrant small business owners facing bankruptcy in Parramatta, the furloughed truckies in Blacktown, the working class kids in overcrowded government housing in Penrith.
Some measures become targets, sometimes. Sometimes those become less useful; other times they are both useful and not useful in different ways.
Determining when something is useful is too nuanced and multi-dimensional to reduce it to a catchy phrase.
If you are simply critical of my brevity and not my message, I agree with you but am surprised that you would be less critical of the message to which I replied.
If you believe there is no evidence of society conforming itself in drastic ways to attempt to control infection rates, we may be operating with different facts, but I unfortunately remain unaware of which facts yours are, and apparently you of mine.
Edit: It is my position that the actions of authorities should be aligned with the preferred outcomes of the governed, and any relevant information made transparently available to the governed to be fairly evaluated. My assumption is that in the case of Australia and others, a mandate to fight a virus has become an outsized metric in the role of governing and some other leading institutions, and other issues are not being addressed that should be.
Often repeated on this forum: positive assertions require the support. In this case, something like, "here is how the current situation resembles this abstraction and thus we can conclude XYZ". You seem to feel the work is done just by making a passing comment that superficially resembles the situation. Some dots that would be worth connecting:
1. What is the a priori difference between measure and target?
2. How can we tell when we have passed between the two?
3. Can a measure be a target and still be useful?
4. What if a measure is sometimes a target to some people, but sometimes purely a measure to others? Or at different times, or different locales?
5. Is there any context to expand the problem dimensionality to beyond an artificial difference of Measure/Target?
There are plenty of other explanations that could be offered, and would fit the available facts. If alternative explanations could fit the same facts, it requires additional work to disprove other explanations before deciding on "the right answer" (which doesn't really exist). Or one could, ya know, acknowledge that any particular interpretation is just an opinion and not particularly insightful.
Looking for alternatives and seriously considering them is a critical step for reducing bias. I will leave it as an exercise for you to work through your own biases - anything I suggest at this point would be dismissed. However, if you find yourself seeing this as either this-way, or that-way, you are probably experiencing tunnel vision and not seeing the complexity and messiness of real life situations.
Regardless, a glib phrase that might apply in some ways, and doesn't apply in others, is not a particularly useful or insightful approach.
NSW (a state of 8.1 Million) had just over 1000 new cases today, and 12 deaths - and that is the worst day of the whole pandemic.
That's... not like other countries.
France is 60% fully vaccinated, Australia less than 30%. There's the real problem. At that disastrously low vaccination rate it's only lockdown keeping the death rate that low.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
We are also vaccinating like mad right now. The vaccination numbers for the UK were about 160K, and for NSW about 140K, but that's for a pop of 67mil vs 8.1mil.
Our first doses for some age groups are also hitting 90%, so I'm taking that to mean there's less vaccine hesitancy here too.
NSW did have it's worst day, but I reckon overall we'll be fine.
Micheal Tam's modelling is probably the best widely available a frequently updated[1]. The new daily infections is still increasing, but the rate of increase of new daily infections is finally beginning to decrease. This is probably an effect of the lockdown, and shows how unlikely it is to be free of this before the end of the year.
The increased vaccination rate is fantastic. Once we are above 60% or 70% we should be more worried about hospitalisation rates and deaths than infections.
The second amendment is holding this back from happening in the US.
No guns the population has no chance and the government can do anything they want.
Funny thing is, all the people who are most fervent about it are the people who think trump won the election and yet they lay down and took the loss, the exact thing that the amendment is supposed to prevent, like impotent little children.
What a very effective amendment! /s
Let's see:
* Forced to download an app by the state
* Forced to jump when the state says "jump!"
* Acceding to the concept that there is a state-sanctioned place where everyone is supposed to be (prison colony?)
* Acceding to whatever punishment the police may decide to mete out for failing to confirm that one is where one is supposed to be even if one is already there
That's the thing with slippery slopes. The farther you go down, the more impossible it becomes to climb back up.