The lack of media coverage of the Covid outbreak in Australia is . . . funny. I mean, back when Trump was in charge, all we heard was how great New Zealand was handling things, and if only Trump was more competent, we, too, could be like New Zealand. NZ being an ISLAND nation with a population of 4 million and, literally, more sheep than people.
Australia has far more favorable conditions than the US, being a remote island with 1/10th the population density of the US, but it’s still a better comparison than NZ, since it has 25 million people. (It turns out contagious diseases like larger populations. In fact, there is a minimum population below which a virus cannot survive, based on its infectiousness and severity.) In any case, Melbourne is back in Lockdown. This is, for those who are counting, the FOURTH lockdown.
Now, here in the US, the term lockdown is bandied about, but what it has really meant, even in conservative states like Washington, is restaurant closures and capacity limitations across the board, as well as limitations on gatherings. Many states explicitly allow demonstrations, a la the George Floyd demonstrations, but also anti-lockdown demonstrations.
In Australia, and in Melbourne in particular (and to a lesser extent in Europe), in means something very different. People are literally locked down, and not allowed to leave their homes without permission. Even when one has secured a permit to, say, go to the grocery store, that store must be within 5 KM of your house, if such a store exists.
The current lockdown is not this severe, but it’s still pretty bad. Last week, people were restricted to staying within 5 KM of their house. This has been increased to 10 KM this week. But they are enforcing it.
- In Melbourne, the five reasons to leave home will remain the same — shopping for food and essential supplies, authorised work or study, care and care-giving, exercise and getting vaccinated.
- The list of authorised workplaces will also expand to include outdoor jobs like landscaping and painting.
- After months of concern about QR code compliance, the Service Victoria QR code check-ins will now be mandatory across the whole state for places like supermarkets and shops.
- I believe this is to verify people are staying within their 10 KM or not exceeding their allowable shopping trips – not sure which but standby for when I have time to Google it.
- Food and hospitality venues will be open for “seated service only” with the density rule of one person per four square metres.
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Regional Victorians can only travel to Melbourne for a permitted reason and the Melbourne restrictions apply once they are there.
- Regional businesses will be compelled to check the IDs of everyone they serve to ensure they are not from Melbourne.
- In other words – people who live in Melbourne are not allowed to leave, and they are checking IDs to ensure this is enforced.
To put this in perspective, the population of Victoria is 6.7 million. Yesterday, there were SIX cases detected. But, because they have put all their marbles in the no Covid ever basket, this is basically catastrophic.
If I lived in Melbourne, I would be in a cold fury over how the virus got in in the first place. With so much at stake, how could it be allowed to happen?
But lately, I’ve been wondering what Australia’s end game is. How do they open up? They would need to have a very high percentage of the population vaccinated to even allow vaccinated individuals in, given that even Pfizer and Moderna are only 90% effective. And J&J doesn’t necessarily prevent people from transmitting the disease, though it reduces the severity. So someone with a J&J vaccine isn’t a safe entrant by any stretch. Once they whole population is vaccinated, do they just let Covid in and let it spread? God forbid a variant emerges against which the vaccine isn’t effective. Things have not been looking great in the UK lately, if you’ve been watching the numbers.
Maybe its because we do it every day as engineers and we’re better at it… but the public (including their leadership) is just extraordinarily bad at risk assessment especially (unfortunately) when it involves science or statistics And the politicization of the lock downs have made it so much worse – because you have to be all in or all out regardless of what the science says. The goal can’t be and will never be “no transmittable viruses that can kill people” without locking us all in self-contained bubbles. The goal has to be “risk levels so low its what we already accept for diseases that circulate in the population despite effective vaccine (flu, etc.).”
Yes, I was just reflecting on how indoors when people are together for a long time, like during a ballet, physical distancing doesn’t really seem to matter. It indirectly facilitates what does matter – total number of people in the building. But I was just reading about how they are enforcing physical distancing for the performers as well, which basically makes no sense, since the number of performers will not change.
(I will need to find a link, but they’ve basically discovered the 3 ft / 6 ft rules were more or less made up, and recent research suggests after an [hour] or so (maybe less?), everyone is breathing everyone else’s air regardless of whether they’re 3 ft away or 30.
I have heard about Melbourne a lot, but nowhere else in Australia. Is Melbourne taking a stricter approach than the rest of the country?
HI Sarah – no. All of Australia eliminated Covid in spring 2020. Then, Victoria’s hotel quarantine system broke down, and they ended up with a large community outbreak that took about 5 months of stringent lockdown to eliminate. This involved particularly rigid sanctions in Melbourne (which is located in Vic) including a policed “ring of steel” that prevented anyone in Melbourne from leaving the city.
There have been other smaller outbreaks pretty much everywhere in the country, including the Sydney area, but they have all been eliminated quickly – within 2 to 4 weeks.
I’m not necessarily criticizing the measures. If you want to eliminate Covid and keep it away, I think this kind of lockdown is absolutely the only way. The rational thing to do would have been to abandon the approach for Melbourne / Victoria when they lost control of the disease, but no country in the world has been able to maintain a secure land border against Covid save Korea and the DMZ. So, they would have had to abandon Covid elimination for all of Australia.
Instead, I guess I’m suggesting that (a) trying to eliminate Covid is not worth the cost for most nations (b) most people advocating for it outside Aus don’t appreciate the magnitude of the cost and (c) the larger the country / population, the harder it is, and it would likely be impossible a country with land borders.
What’s interesting now is that Aus politicians are now talking about Keeping Aus closed except for limited entrance via hotel quarantine until 2023. I just wonder what the end game will be. Apparently there is substantial vaccine resistance there in part because there is no Covid at the moment. In the US, in places where there is vaccine resistance, we are helped a lot by natural immunity. Aus doesn’t have that.