A doubling rate means it doubles within a period of time.

Let's arbitrarily pick 10 days as a doubling rate.

If, at a time when the doubling rate was 10 days, a particular mitigation measure had been taken, sufficient to knock R0 below 1, ten days earlier than it actually happened, then for the population in question, the situation is half as prevalent. Project that forward, everything that happens since that point flows from a situation that is half of what it actually was. It's a huge difference.

The situation isn't discrete, it's continuous. Getting hung up on 100% prevention is beside the point. Knocking it back by 50%, or even 20%, or 10%, is huge compared to the alternative.

People check the weather every day. I wish our nation had developed a very clear signal that everyone could check every day. Just check it in the morning to know whether it's advisable to wear a mask that day. Back in the post-Delta pre-Omicron days, I did a project of my own to develop something I could check every day. (https://tunesmith.github.io/covid-dashboard/) It's messy and hacky and some of its math is out of date and I haven't gotten around to updating it for omicron, but imagine something like that that is funded, tailored for everyone's county, and really easy to report and communicate. It would have helped, just to know whether today is a mask day or not.

Even in spite of those knockdowns it spread, and in spite of high vaccination rates it spread. It's not a solveable problem, citizens would not (did not) accept the terms necessary to be covid zero forever, so why delay it once everyone is vaccinated?

I was on team Covid Zero to begin with, but it was never meant to be a long term strategy. You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.

We have the technology to lock things down at borders as hard as we'd need to, if Australia doesn't have that capability now they'd better start working on it. COVID-19 has (so far) only ranked as the fifth deadliest pandemic in human history, but it was the perfect opportunity for Australia to test and evaluate their ability to defend against deadly viral outbreaks which would rank much much higher. Experts agree that global pandemics will be increasingly more common in the future and that it's only a matter of time until we face something else like this or worse. We couldn't even make it through this pandemic before seeing another one starting!

Cleaners, hotel/airport/quarantine center staff, security, staff, screeners, etc. could have been in full HAZMAT etc. just as they'd absolutely have to be if the virus were much more deadly anyway. It would have been better to make sure they could do it right last year when the cost of failure would have been limited to locking down one city for a few weeks to contain the spread than to scramble to figure it all out when a single fuck up could wipe out a huge percentage of the country's population.

> You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.

As long as people were still coming in and out of the country (albeit with a 7-14 day delay for those coming in) the nation wouldn't be "exiled" and it would have been the people of Australia who got to "move on", by living their lives without the virus, while the rest of the world was stuck in our ongoing cycle of wave after wave of infections, new variants, new/lifted/renewed restrictions, increases and decreases in hospitalizations, increasing numbers of deaths/disability, exhausted healthcare workers, economic uncertainty, etc. all while we try our hardest to just pretend that the virus around us doesn't exist.

I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.

What do you think they did?

> I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.

That isn't enough, that is what we did. Whilst that remains the case it makes that stance pointless to have. I agreed with you, I did all the right things, I advocated for lockdowns and was happy to see the 14 day quarantine periods. Guess what, expections are everywhere. It wasn't enough. It is absolutely not possible to lock down and still let people in and out. We are messy, shitty and selfish. Either borders stay closed or you accept cases will come in. The half measures are a waste of time.

Australia is a good example, because we had the 14 day quarantine period in an isolation hotel, and were technically closed borders to anyone but exceptional circumstances yet outbreaks kept happening. Melbourne was in full home isolation for months and months, while borders were closed to interstate and international, and that didn't stop the spread.

It really doesn't seem fair to call their efforts "somewhat half-assed" given that they did so much better than other countries, but they didn't go to the extent or take the care that they would have if the virus were more deadly.

The staff at hotels and airports weren't decked out like this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Hazmat_D...) or this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Army_tra...), proper ventilation wasn't considered and staff weren't even being tested properly leading to the virus spreading amongst staff, in hallways, between rooms, and as a result of the generally lax attitude (in deadly plague terms) the virus got out of those hotels and into the public not once or twice but over and over, tens of times!

I do agree that Australia did do a lot to try to stop the virus! The 14 day quarantine was a good idea (at the time), severely limiting the number of people coming in was good too (although I doubt that would have been sustainable for long) and there's no denying that people's shitty actions hurt their efforts, but I just can't believe they gave it everything they had. There were reports that they didn't even have a plan to work from initially, and were just kind of making it up as they went along. That's just tragic, but it means they also had the benefit of writing a plan with our current technology and understanding on the subject in mind from inception. You could have asked a random person on the street decades ago to come up with a plan on how to quarantine a family and prevent the spread of a deadly possibly airborne virus and and you'd get something that looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn0-nPOb_KM and while moves are fiction and not sound policy, they'd have had the "protected staff" and "ventilation" boxes checked at least.

It's clear that for all Australia did to stop the virus (and again, I'm not bashing their efforts here which were well above what others were doing) it was clearly not being taken as seriously as it would have if they were dealing with the next Black Death. I'd really like to think that if they had tried their best in this scenario to keep the virus out they'd have been more successful and that while some people will probably always act terribly selfish, that it is still possible in 2022 to let people in and out of an island nation while keeping out a highly deadly virus. I'd really like to think that because one day we might not have the choice to do otherwise. If Australia really can't manage it, what chance do the rest of the nations have?

I'm sure they've since used this experience to help shore up their defenses for the future, I'm sure it was eye opening for a lot of people, but not going all out in their containment efforts while they had the chance to stay ahead of covid was a lost opportunity. The good/bad news is that they're certain to get the chance again with a new virus sooner than they'd like and hopefully the stakes won't be that much higher.

When we think about international travel, I think it's the same discussion. I do believe you that it's technically possible to have that level of containment, but I'm skeptical that it's possible at the scale that humans want to move about. The scale of travel is easy to underestimate, even mid-pandemic when the world was closed.

Australia only has a population of around 25 million, and in 2019, 4 million people flew in or out of Australia every month. In 2019 we moved close to the equivalent of the entire country across the border TWICE. For all of 2020 and 2021 it was still above 100,000 people per month, while we were locked down and international travel was banned, that's a lot of movements to get perfectly right to prevent a breach. Trying to scale that up to levels people are happy with is going to be really tough to get right. ( https://www.bitre.gov.au/statistics/aviation/international )

I think you're right that if a disease we decide is deadly enough comes along that we'll have no choice but to reduce throughput entirely, but at the moment I think you can reduce part of this discussion to a tradeoff we're making, between throughput and level of containment.

Better testing, giving people options to isolate from their household, etc, all could have reduced the spread. I think they don't make as much sense after vaccines are widely available (but we haven't necessarily hit that point globally).

Figuring out how to do good public health messaging would also probably be worthwhile. Vaccine uptake in lots of places was pretty bad.

No, it's kicking the can down the road.

The virus is highly infectious, always was. There's no prevention, just delaying the inevitable, and possibly waiting for a variant that is more severe (to someone without any prior exposure), and not having any protection other than vaccines that are based on much earlier/different strains. I'm a little worried about this for my parents, for what it's worth.

The Omicron targeted vaccines likely provide a worthwhile improvement in protection against the recent variants. Hopefully the public health apparatus chooses to release them, rather than doing nothing.

As difficult as it was to live through, I'm supportive of what was done here in Melbourne to suppress the virus in 2020-21 when the variants were more severe and the vaccines weren't around. It's what enabled our fatality rate to be kept to one of the lowest in the world.

It doesn't make sense to keep doing it now, and doing so could make the problem worse. In a complex system these issues aren't without tradeoffs.

Luckily our health officials agree so we're all good.

(Btw saying “if you read my comment” is poor conduct here as I’m sure you know.)

you literally can as long as you keep on kicking and you keep road in front of you.

- I ask a parent commenter who has asserted that society should still be preventing transmission of a highly infectious virus if they know of a system that could actually achieve that;

- A few commenters invoke China's approach (whilst conceding it was excessively draconian), others insist that it's not about preventing transmission, just slowing it, conveniently avoiding confronting the fact that the original point was about prevention, and even if it wasn't, slowing spread still means infection is inevitable;

- Nobody suggests an approach that would have been effective or palatable;

- Many hours later, a new commenter slides in to point out that it really is literally possible to keep kicking a can down a road forever, as if this is either true in practice, consistent with the rhetorical point of that metaphor, or relevant to the point at hand.

I'll ask the central question again: can anyone describe a system that would have (a) been effective at preventing spread of the virus, and (b) resulted in a society that anyone wanted to continue living in, or that could even function at all?

More testing would have been worthwhile.

Supporting isolation from households would have been worthwhile.

Improving ventilation is probably worth the cost.

And on and on.

The question is: how can spread of this virus be completely prevented, so that nobody gets infected? This is clearly what the root commenter and the XKCD cartoon they shared are asserting should be happening.

Methods that just slow the inevitable are clearly sidestepping the point. And methods that make society into a dystopian nightmare may be technically argument-winning but not practical and thus make lame contributions to the discussion.

Testing, ventilation, supported isolation are fine; we’ve had and still have some of those measures in Australia, and I agree it’s helpful to slow spread and protect those most vulnerable for a while. I’ve been fine with that happening here. But that’s not the primary topic of this discussion.

Please stop with the ad-homs and side-stepping and address the point.

I'm in Melbourne, Australia, which locked down hard to suppress the virus in 2020, then for several more months attempting to suppress it again in 2021.

Since everyone had had the chance to be vaccinated by Nov last year, restrictions have been lifted and the virus has been allowed to spread, and almost everyone is much happier living with the virus than continuing to be locked down.

What is China going to do? Keep locking everyone down every few months forever?

For myself, having a young child at daycare means getting exposed to infections and being sick with something different almost every week, which is of course annoying but it's a part of life. I had covid for the second time last week (must have been BA.5 as it's dominant here), and it was no big deal; I felt a bit off for under 48 hours. It certainly felt like my body knew what to do with it having first encountered an earlier omicron variant in Feb.

How is shutting down all of society for weeks/months at a time preferable to that?

Starvation is not an exaggerated description of some of the Shanghai lockdown experiences:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/03/shanghai-food-shortages...

What are some examples of lapses of judgement to support the claim that he "let the outbreak get out of control "?

Shanghai health officials tried to control the outbreak with testing and neighbourhood-wide lockdowns; in hindsight they should have done the full lockdown earlier.

People screaming and begging for food and basic supplies may disagree