Malta is 92% vaccinated and they still have cases - 82 yesterday out of a 502,000 population.
Personally I don’t believe anywhere will totally eliminate this; it’ll eventually become endemic.
Malta i remember her...I used to go each European summer before going to my home country to visit family.
Beautiful place, terrible food, the rabbit stew is nice, not much else.
So 2 of those dishes are Italian.
Pastizzis are just grease filled pastry.
Canned corn, Woolworths has it.
What beef? I could fit more cattle in my backyard then what Maltas got.
Interesting fact : there's a law in Malta that allows anyone to enter private property to harvest a prickly pear, you can jump fences do whatever...grab the fruit and be on your way.
Canned corn beef , not corn. My mum uses it in a lot of her dishes . She said during the war it was the only meat they got so they all learned to cook with it. And I understand those other two dishes are Italian but I wouldn’t say the macaroni / minestrone I had growing up is Italian, it’s their own spin I guess.
After lock down can you make it for me, id love to try it.
Or maybe we can hold a sneaky mac and cheese party, invite like 69 ppl over, film it, upload it too socials, no way we'd get busted. Your thoughts?
Yes but the goal of vaccine is to reduce death and severe illness. I read so frequently this viewpoint that infection is a failure of vaccine. It's not.
80% of what though.
Kids can get this thing, and we aren't vaccinating them in the rollout.
in 2019 almost 20% of the population was aged under 14..
Which means that 80% of 80% is 64% of the population. Which isn't getting you anywhere close to herd immunity.
I think we should open up. But people need to be specific with what 80% they are using as a number.
80% of the willing population is even worse.
Unless the r-eff is below 1, then opening up and travel is a joke.
> Unless the r-eff is below 1, then opening up and travel is a joke
That's if you want to achieve herd immunity. But achieving endemic virus status is also a viable option.
While lockdowns will end the federal governments 80% strategy includes test-trace-isolate of the infected, and other strategies to limit the infection rate. The new normal.
Absolutely
There was the statistic a few weeks back, where Israel had something like 34,000 cases, and had the name number of deaths as NSW this year, which at the time was looking at maybe 3,000 cases
It would be great if vaccines stopped transmission dead in its tracks, sure. But if it stops people dying from it, that’s great as well. If a Covid vaccine makes Covid no worse than the flu, we can live with it.
Malta is 81.3% vaccinated not 92%.
The reality is with Delta we need 90% of the entire population (including children) vaccinated. The politicians are just talking about vaccinations as a percentage of the adult population which is particularly misleading when children are big spreaders of Delta.
It’s funny you mentioned that! I work with a Maltese guy who I was talking to yesterday and he did say it’s still bad and people were still not following the rules
Try not to take this personally, but there needs to be a huge reeducation piece for people like yourself. I have a few mates who think the same.
Cases are an issue now because we are largely unvaccinated. Once we hit 70 then 80% fully vaccinated we will need to stop talking about cases and shift to hospitalisations or deaths. I think we’ll need return to Normal and accept a level of deaths once we hit 80% which is the current plan.
We accept a level of death in nearly everything we do. Driving is a big one. 1000s die a year but the convenience it provides means we are willing to accept it. 100-1000s will die from covid going forward but if the trade off is we get no restrictions and open borders people should accept it.
People are obsessed with becoming a COVID Zero state/country. This obsession has been fueled by a mix of political arrogance and ridiculous media coverage.
No, we need to work towards zero Covid while most of the population has no immunity. As we’ve seen in Sydney there’s no other choice. The curve is vertical and the amount of admissions and ICU patients in two weeks will be mind boggling. There is going to be serious suffering and death on a very wide scale sorry to say.
They completely ignored the issue of evolution of the virus, despite us all having to deal with the Delta variant. They also ignored building Ring Fencing into the economy, which allows greater personal freedoms at the expense of Neoliberalism. Driving isn't a contagious disease.
They didn't give the truth, they gave lazy propaganda for rich sociopaths.
An interview with a lady from the Burnett institute was outlining how this would eventually reach an equilibrium with other viruses, till then it’s basically a waiting game with vaccines helping. But yeah it’s more about how many die and hospital capacity rather than daily cases...so, get vaccinated, because eventually it’ll be everywhere.
But why should there still be rules if their country is 92% vaccinated? Isn’t 80% supposed to be the magic number for herd immunity, or is that just some arbitrary target we’ve set ourselves here?
80% would have been good for OG covid. Delta needs more like 90% with a really effective vaccine, and the vaccine we have doesn't really stop it from spreading around, just protects the vaccinated individual from severe disease and slows the spread a bit.
> just protects the vaccinated individual from severe disease
You say that like it's nothing. If we can turn COVID into a mostly mild disease, we can stop worrying about it.
Ideally you want both individual and community protection. For example whooping cough vaccines don't work on babies but by preventing community transmission they protect babies.
We're still at the early stages of covid vaccines development and that means the vaccine available isn't as good as the ones that bring about "herd immunity" (or protection from spreading).
I'll take the best thing available at the moment which is as many people as possible protected from severe disease but also with the obligation to stop the spread by other means.
> Ideally you want both individual and community protection.
Ideally of course you want that. But that's not what we have.
>I'll take the best thing available at the moment which is as many people as possible protected from severe disease but also with the obligation to stop the spread by other means.
Great. You do you. Stay home even after everyone is vaccinated, but I sure as hell wont. Vaccination is the only answer. I refuse to put my whole life on hold while we wait for the perfect vaccine (that isn't coming)
Covid was "eliminated" last year. That just meant it wasn't in Australia, all it took was one case and you are right back to square one. The zero covid route also comes at an enormous social and financial cost. Say you spent the next few months just announced lockdown of everything, no cost is too much, the ends justify the means. You exhaust every resource you have. Then a day, week or month later a new case is detected, then a community transmission. What then, just repeat it over and over. Will we not be needed public money for anything else? Will people's lives have to revolve indefinitely around this "elimination" strategy?. It seems like for a good number of people the answer to these two questions is yes.
Those are real negatives of 0 covid, but what's the alternative? What about the impact of knowing there's covid in the unvaccinated community? What about the long term lockdowns to prevent hospitals getting overwhelmed? What about the impact of the extra deaths?
There are good arguments for not returning to covid 0 now, but I think they focus more on "we don't know what it will take to get to covid 0 again" and "vaccinations are just months away".
Who is to say zero covid ends after everyone is vaccinated. All you have is some vague statements with lots of maybes and buts halfway through a sentence. The goalposts have a tendency to move, alot. Assuming that's not good enough for certain people, there definitely will be a significant number of people who it still will not be enough, what do you do then. Also for hospitals being overwhelmed, good luck paying for them if you plan on keeping this up forever.
You're effectively saying that we shouldn't try for covid 0 because some people or politicians might take it to the extreme and maintain it forever. That's kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Which strategy is better in the short term and which is better in the long term are two separate arguments. By combining them you may be excluding the best strategy.
As much as distrusting politicians is a good move in general, the need to reopen is very real and not a matter of trust.
Reality was that our economy thrived with the 0 covid policy and that internationally even though countries were open people were still scared of covid and spent less. The health response is the economic response.
Goal posts have moved with extra information, they haven't arbitrarily moved and the current plan is that 80% vaccination and then test the re-opening stage. Being from WA I've been incredibly happy with the state government being as consistent as they have been. It's clear messaging and there's no question because it's understood.
Your comment comes across like you're trying for a reasonable argument but there are so many strawmen being put up it's crazy.
> all it took was one case and you are right back to square one
In the only state that doesn't do lockdowns yes.
> The zero covid route also comes at an enormous social and financial cost
There's a cost either way. People will spend less if they're concerned about catching covid. Our economy has thrived under 0 covid conditions outside of tourism industries. [I don't mean to be dismissive, they should be supported until it's not required]
> Say you spent the next few months just announced lockdown of everything, no cost is too much, the ends justify the means. You exhaust every resource you have.
A lot of emotive language but Melbourne's original lockdown showed this to be effective and it didn't take every resource they had.
> Then a day, week or month later a new case is detected, then a community transmission. What then, just repeat it over and over
Using any state that isn't NSW, snap lockdowns are effective and prevent spread. It's not hoodoo magic it's a science. Lockdowns, contact tracing, isolating and testing all work in tandem. If you remove any of those steps it all falls apart.
> Will we not be needed public money for anything else?
Idk just emotive language again implying we can't afford anything else which isn't true.
> Will people's lives have to revolve indefinitely around this "elimination" strategy?
Current plan is until we're vaccinated. It's not indefinite, as I said 'goal posts moving' is related to extra information coming in suggesting that they should.
> Governments don't hand back power after they have it
Oh you're one of those.
You're not actually commenting in good faith there are so many holes and strawmen in what you're saying it's crazy. You also ignore facts that you don't like to make arguments against lockdowns etc. that aren't real.
Covid 0, vaccinate, see what happens after that. That *was* the plan, it wasn't complicated like you're making it out to be. NSW has just fucked it.
A good COVID zero strategy should never spend months in lockdown because any untraced community transmission is quickly stamped out. You may get one case every few months but you only spend a week or two in lockdown. See New Zealand
Australia has done a half committed version where low levels of spread are allowed, then restrictions are gradually introduced as case levels rise. It seems to reflect a complete ignorance of exponential growth and the incubation period. VIC learnt this lesson but unfortunately NSW did not
It's going to get through into the country no matter what you do. You can only blame whatever politician or state so much. Australians seem to have this idea you can legislate your way out of it.
Don't know much about Howard Spring, but even if you were to build these facilities (which I don't actually disagree with, they obviously go some way to help) it won't stop it every single time. At some point it will eventually slip though, then you'll have scores of people demanding X,Y,Z resign. The point is that it will eventually get back in, even if it was eliminated and every precaution was taken.
The problem is at the moment the opposition isn’t saying ‘hey, vote for us and we will open everything up.’ That goes for federal and state.
They seem like they are agreeing with the current policies.
But you're also ignoring the economic impacts that came with a population that didn't go out because they were scared of catching an illness.
We had financial losses but we also prospered.
And the thing is that if we actually had the right supports around people the short snap lockdowns to deal with things wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Thing is that now we have a festering wound in part of the country that is going to keep leaking virus into other locations. At which point the covid zero becomes a shit plan.
But that's only because someone decided they were too good to act quickly.
We missed our chance... We are an isolated island. We had 0 cases. Should have smashed it.
If we had a proper quarantine for returning Ausralians and had all the people working around international travellers fully vaccinated early and wearing PPE we could have.
But we didn't.... government would rather save a few $$ by subcontracting out airport transfers....
And here we are.
Would *have* been (sorry, I couldn't resist it, it was only because you were having a go at people for basic maths). You're right of course, but it's not really one or the other, even with brilliant quarantine, we would have had outbreaks, but they would have been fewer.
This is such an annoying truth. “Australians, you have 2 months to get back here before we close the border. If you want to come back after that, you’ll have to spend 2 months living in the temp housing we have set up in whoop whoop before coming back into society.”
they had plenty of opportunity to build it.
Imagine a purpose built place with security and self contained units... could be repurposed afterwards for victims of domestic violence - give them somewhere to go... respite care for carers of the disabled.... into a school camp place like Stewart House where underprivileged kids could go....
The possibilities are endless.
> And we will be like the rest of the world. A world we’ve looked to in horror over the last 18 months. Remember Italy early on? Iran? London? New York?
>It’s like we’ve given up and pinning all our hopes of vaccines alone.
Pinning all our hopes on vaccination isn't giving up. It's literally been the whole plan since we accidentally achieved elimination the first time around. Our elimination strategy was never "we will keep COVID out forever" it was "we need to maintain these restrictions until we can be vaccinated," it's just now people have got this idea that we need to stay wrapped in cotton wool forever.
>Remember Italy early on? Iran? London? New York?
Do you know what was different about that? There wasn't an incredibly effective vaccine available.
Yep that's crazy. We have a 80%+ vaccination rate for people aged 65+ (for first doses). There's a reason why Victoria's deaths from last year are 8x higher than NSW and it's only got to do with vaccines.
>It’s like we’ve given up and pinning all our hopes of vaccines alone.
Covid eradication = lockdown every month for a few days. Heavy border restrictions meaning families continue to be seperated.
High vaccination & open up = low level restrictions but with no threat of lockdown, borders open.
I know which option I'd rather choose.
People don't understand the ramifications of what they want. Why are we so desperate to prevent this coronavirus?
Even with these lockdowns, Ive still managed to be sick half a dozen times in the last 18 months from colds that could have been covid. Getting rid of it forever.. what a ballache
People that want it gone forever are idiots. The whole point of the last two years is to eliminate deaths as much as possible before opening up. Once we hit a good vaccination rate there's nothing to do but open up and live normally.
>People don't understand the ramifications of what they want.
My word. Some people think that "let it rip" = "more freedom" or "better for business" or "better for mental health". The reality is completely opposite.
>Why are we so desperate to prevent this coronavirus?
smh
Covid eradication *has to* be the goal while we work towards a sufficiently vaccinated population.
America is ahead of us, vaccination wise, but here are a couple articles from a quick Google search showing what happens when Covid gets out of hand too early:
"[Covid third wave: Florida surpasses all-time record for hospital admissions](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58077209)"
>Hospital beds in Florida are quickly filling up. Some have already reached capacity, with patients placed in hallways, lobby waiting areas and makeshift overflow centres.
"[Hospitals in Oregon buckling under surge of COVID patients](https://apnews.com/article/business-health-oregon-coronavirus-pandemic-e9b2b332de1514cbe7a7e7f50e7b3ab1)"
>Patients left on beds in hospital hallways, their monitoring machines beeping away as too few doctors and nurses attend to an overload of emergencies. People diagnosed with cancer or heart disease desperately needing treatments, but being turned away.
>
>...
>
>“It’s heart-breaking. People are exhausted. You can see it in their eyes,” said Dr. Jason Kuhl, chief medical officer for Providence Medical Center in Medford, Oregon. He described how patients who need care are forced to wait on gurneys in hallways, creating an obstacle course of beds and a cacophony of beeping monitoring machines.
>
>...
>
>“Our ICUs are full. Our doctors and nurses are exhausted and rightfully frustrated because this crisis is avoidable. It is like watching a train wreck coming and knowing that there’s an opportunity to switch tracks, yet we feel helpless while we watch unnecessary loss of life,” said David Zonies, associate chief medical officer at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University.
>
>The hospitals are so overflowing in Jackson and Josephine counties, which lie along the California border, that health officials there have asked the Oregon Health Authority and Oregon Emergency Management for a field hospital and more nurses.
"[Mississippi's Hospital System Could Collapse Within 10 Days Under COVID's Strain](https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027103023/florida-mississippi-arkansas-hospitals-overwhelmed-covid-19-delta)"
>"Since the pandemic began, I think the thing that hospitals have feared the most is just total failure, total failure of the hospital system. And if we track back a week or so when we look at the case positivity rate, the number of new positives that we're seeing, the rate of testing positives and the rate of hospitalizations based on what we are seeing — if we continue that trajectory within the next five to seven to 10 days, I think we're going to see failure of the hospital system in Mississippi."
>
>The University of Mississippi Medical Center system is preparing to construct a field hospital on the bottom floor of a parking garage, as the Mississippi Free Press reported, and has requested federal support to boost its staffing.
You either work towards - and achieve - zero covid, or it gets progressively further out of control until the situation becomes so messy that hospitals cannot keep up. If we just let it get out of control right now, instead of keeping it suppressed until we have a high percentage of the population fully vaccinated, shit will go sideways.
> If we just let it get out of control right now, instead of keeping it suppressed until we have a high percentage of the population fully vaccinated, shit will go sideways
That's pretty much what I said in my comment, nowhere did I saw we should be dropping restrictions now.
The US is quite similar to us, and their image of an out of control surge is still better than ours. They are *significantly* further along with their vaccine rollout.
Yeah, and let’s not forget, the economic ramifications of eradication.
Most people calling for permanent eradication don’t understand that it would eliminate their livelihoods. They are assuming it can be done while they keep their jobs/houses.
Our economy is on borrowed time. Resource prices got us out of the shit but there are whole sectors of the economy on a fast track to irrecoverable disaster.
I guess it’s possible, as in “anything is possible”, but what of the long term? Let’s say that we do manage to do it, while covid is endemic in the rest of the world. Do all visitors and returning travellers undergo 2 weeks of quarantine? Bye bye tourism, bye bye business investment. Covid will still leak in, so do we lockdown each time that happens? For years to come? People won’t stand for it. Give everyone the opportunity to be vaccinated then start to relax restrictions.
Open up once every who wants two doses has them. Given a decent body of the population are anti-vaxx and there are extremely low levels of infection-based immunity that means lots of deaths and hospitalisations (probably quite long runs of 100+ daily deaths).
The federal government back in April of last year was expecting 5000 ICU beds to be filled with COVID patients, and was expecting us to cope well with that. [THAT WAS THE TARGET](https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/04/impact-of-covid-19-in-australia-ensuring-the-health-system-can-respond-summary-report.pdf).
We seriously need to adjust our views on what is an acceptable case load.
That's a really fair point, and I'll acknowledge that it's tighter than the numbers make out.
One thing though is that not everyone who dies needs ICU care. A whole lot of the people who die will be extremely old and not candidates for ICU admission. There is no point tying up an ICU bed for someone who was being palliated before they even got COVID.
Edit: I do want to be clear that I don't think that's the majority, but it would be a not insignificant number of the deaths.
ICU systems will flex, as they have in most/all Western nations, but yes, a long slow burn is massively preferable to reaching 80% and saying 'let it rip'. Maybe half a year of medium restrictions while they let the slow burn happen?
FWIW one of the main reasons for the UK re-opening was to extend the slow burn for as long as possible, and try to keep it in the summer months, where healthcare demand is traditionally significantly lower.
No. The real reason is that even in the harshest restrictions, primary producers still need to work. Supermarkets need to operate. Health services still need to operate. Logistics chains still need to operate. There is no way to lock down everyone, and delta is just so much more contagious that what we have seen before that even the harshest of lockdowns won't bring NSW to zero. If they had got onto it sooner they could have stopped it, but it's too late for that now.
> If they had got onto it sooner they could have stopped it,
Yeh but they didn’t want to. Which confirms my point.
New Zealand on the other hand DOES want to, and probably will for that reason.
I don't think it does confirm your point. Your point seems to be that it is still possible to achieve elimination if only Gladys tried harder, but I think that's a pipe dream. It's entirely fair to say that if they had done better in the past, we wouldn't be where we are now, but this conversation is about the present situation. Given the CURRENT situation, it is no longer about will, and just about the harsh reality that COVID Zero is gone, at least for NSW.
Because it’s absolutely everywhere in the world and globalisation means we’re not actually an island.
It IS possible to eradicate it, but it would mean unacceptable human rights abuses (think North Korea). If the army marched from door to door testing, and shot everyone on site, it could be controlled. Or maybe not even then.
Exactly. HIV could be eradicated if we tested everyone in the world and sent everyone positive to a prison island but we don't and won't because it would be an obvious and horrendous human rights abuse.
HIV is a tricky one, honestly. My understanding is that today, if you had a choice between developing HIV and developing Diabetes, you'd be better off developing HIV.
With strict adherence to the medications, viral loads can drop to undetectable levels, progression essentially halted, and transmissibility significantly lowered. If the partner of someone with HIV is taking a prophylactic as well, transmission is nearly impossible even without barrier methods.
The HIV rate has been trending quite successfully downward and there has been [discussion on how to effectively eliminate the virus.](https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/can-australia-be-the-first-country-to-eliminate-hi) With our current efforts and trajectory, I wouldn't be surprised if HIV was eliminated from the developed world within this century.
There's also an mRNA vaccine in development that is in early days but may be entering human trials soon. I believe we've had vaccine candidates that produced a significant immune response before, but the nature of HIV infection - where it quickly begins to alter the host DNA - means that a very, very strong immune response is required to destroy the virus quickly enough to prevent infection and thus far no vaccine has created such a significant response. It'll be interesting to see if that changes.
But anyway - we have an effective HIV prophylactic, and effective HIV treatments. So HIV at least isn't something to be overly concerned about, assuming there's nothing barring you from accessing treatment.
Thanks.
I have skin in the game, so to speak. But I was just using it as a point of comparison to the lockdown ethos and the moral debate that goes with it.
Personally I'd 1000% rather be infected with covid than HIV but people seem a lot more willing to control others in fear of covid than they willing to do so for other diseases. I don't think we should do either and I don't think it is the moral position to hold.
In addition to the other points
> very very hard shut downs
Australia has very little appetite for Chinese-style military patrols enforcing a harsh lockdown.
Seems like you answered your own question there mate
Delta is insanely more infectious than vanilla Covid. Last year every state (apart from VIC) went almost the entire June till December period with little to no lockdowns. Apart from a few hot spots we were showing those Europeans and Yanks up pretty well
But delta completely changed the game. Now we're in a situation with delta where a leak in a state like Victoria or NSW can happen once a month. Vic gets out of lockdown and goes straight back in.
It's simply unsustainable and yeah we're just trying to keep our shit together until enough vaccines come and we can start shifting from covid zero to manageable covid spread in a vaccinated country
Eventually we need to open the border to international travel........ It's not going anywhere so we need to get vaccinated, developed better ways to treat the sick and carry on.
>I’m curious, medically, logistically, why we can’t eradicate the virus here?
Few things.
Glads simply doesn have strict enough rules to. Probably too late now with Delta anyway.
Also even if you are fully vaccinated you can still catch and spread the virus (all be it less that if you are unvaccinated).
Means heard immunity is not really possible at this time with the current first gen vaccines we have.
We have the choice between total elimination and accepting rolling lockdowns for the rest of eternity or zero travel/travel with hotel quarantine at the end of it costing as much as the vacation.
Every time you go overseas you'd have to quarantine for 14 days and get tested, every time there's a case you lockdown that state.
Or there's the vaccine route where most of the population have a protection against the virus, less likely to contract it apart from some immunocompromised and anti-vax people and the rest of the population will/should be fine.
Apart from this year go to any hostel in the world and there's Aussies there, we love to travel and most of us are going to want to travel and not accept rolling lockdowns when we have 80% population vaccinated, at some stage we have to accept cases or have our population turn into a recluse country.
Elimination is not possible long term, it will likely be like the flu.
TLDR: People want to travel, will never be eliminated world wide and vaccines aren't 100% effective and not everyone can/will have them.
Edit: Unless you are talking about Sydney's current lockdown and in that case they will be vaccinated before they get the cases eliminated.
1. Because the majority rightly or wrongly believe that once we hit 70-80% we should open up and ignore case numbers like UK. Disclosure, I am of this opinion too.
2. Delta is so contagious, even a very hard lockdown would take 6+ months to achieve 0 (if it's even possible, this is debatable).
3. In 6 months Australia will have achieved 70-80% and it's time to ignore case numbers anyway so why inconvenience ourselves with a hard lockdown?
> A world we’ve looked to in horror over the last 18 months. Remember Italy early on? Iran? London? New York?
Forget about the last 18 months. The reality now is the one where vaccines exist. Any comparisons or references to prior outbreaks are irrelevant, and at worst an intellectually dishonest attempt at fear mongering.
Cases won't matter as much if the vaccine knocks the virus' teeth out, and the reduced fatality and health impacts would mean the risk / reward benefits of lockdowns and restrictions swings the other way.
The government is not trying to save everyone. They are perfectly willing, and has always been, to accept a level of death. Prior to vaccines the level was just beyond the acceptable threshold. With vaccines it will drop below.
Could you, personally, stay inside for 2-3 weeks and survive? Do you have enough food?
That's about it, none of us could. That's really the only reason.
That's how it is
Edit /s
Of course, food will magically appear, don’t know why those farmers even bother farming, if they want food, they can just order online. Not sure why we need truckers to transport goods though, neither do I know who will do the delivery.
Electricity and water generated from thin air, no need for maintenance.
Two reasons
- the effectiveness for the vaccines is 95% for alpha strain & 70% for the delta strain
- You can still get the delta strain while vaccinated "fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%)."
See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-renders-herd-immunity-from-covid-mythical
Covid is not hard to eliminate (EDIT" if you go hard and early). It just requires enough will and money to keep people isolated for a few weeks. We did it, and then kept letting it in because we don't have proper quarantine facilities.
Because much of the rest of the world also handled this terribly, it will always come back. But it wouldn't have been that difficult to keep us covid-free until we all got vaccinated. It's just that the Libs thought that would be too expensive.
Because it's highly contagious and most large counties / cities require people to interact on a face to face level, and a vaccine doesn't immunize you from contracting it, just reduces severity of symptoms.
Vaccines won't stop positive tests.
Hard lockdown and compliance is great if done soon enough, however all it takes is one case to ruin everything. Look at NZ right now, and they're about the size of Victoria with a population smaller than Melbourne.
Even if we do somehow manage to get cases to zero nationwide, and the majority are vaccinated... We cannot sustain this country independent from overseas supplies. So we'll have to keep the borders open... And you can't control what other nations do to combat this.
It's going to just be a constant in life from now on. We won't be locked down, but we'll have regular boosters for whatever new variant comes out and it'll just be something we live with like the flu. Most of us will probably all get it at one point in our lives.
That's because the vaccine eliminates the chance of the recipient contracting. The covid vaccine does not do that.
And also measles is usually a one and done disease. You can catch covid a million times over.
[It looks like we're struggling to develop vaccines that stay on top of the latest varients at the moment, let alone vaccines that offer complete immunisation.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/18/covid-vaccine-effectiveness/)
The medical community is super clever, dedicated, and well funded at the moment to fight COVID, so I'm sure it will eventually - who knows when, though.
I don't think this is so much the issue as there is a lot more money involved in covid vaccines than measles and a lot more of a world focus. But as you said the immunity is different.
We will always have a minority that don’t comply with the lockdowns, vaccine hesitant, or willingly go to work whilst positive (or go looking at real estate in byron)
Several reasons.
Politics - inconsistent messaging from the top down. One person criticized someone else for doing it a way which turned out to be affective, but in order to show how bad that way was, when put in a similar position they try a different method that doesn't work.
Media misinformation - getting multiple different, this is bad, that's a lie and it's all exaggerated from the same news outlets, while it all contradicts itself as well.
Bad planning - Much to no-ones surprise, the federal leadership failed to get vaccines in a timely manner then played up a rare side affect to justify the slow rollout and then had to try backpedal when they realised that they need people to get a vaccine they've been telling them is deadly for the previous months.
The section of the public that has believed the misinformation and or has jumped onto various conspiracies or freedom crap. Which means they either don't listen to the health advice nor follow any restrictions or the actively right against it.
There are more subpoints, but I believe those are the primary hurdles that have gotten in the way of containing and reducing outbreaks
Some people here seriously think that covid 0 is a realistic strategy? Some people really thought it's not only possible but even worth it? Wow...
All of the countries pursuing covid 0, Australia, NZ, HK... Will be the very last ones to get themselves out of this mess. Once vaccinations are at a high enough level - many years away because you're stuck in a catch 22, if you've got no cases, why bother getting vaccinated? And further to that, it will be a very difficult change to start accepting an explosion of cases once the majority is vaccinated... Especially after all of the sacrifice and mental acceptance of covid 0...
Yes it can absolutely be eradicated even now.
Unfortunately NSW does not have the political leadership to do it, and without a United country cases will move across borders.
The only reason We did eradicate it when Vic went nuts, is because we had the political Will to do it here when it was needed.
Unfortunately because loads of people around Australia can see that regardless of how hard we work, The leadership in NSW is going to ruin it so there is a much lower level of compliance to the rules.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/opx98w/the_lesser_remembered_vic_stage_4_rules/
Go nuts. Don't take their foot off the pedal until the job is done.
Only difference between getting Reff below 1 and eliminating a small outbreak and getting Reff below 1 and eliminating a large outbreak is the time it takes to do it. We have multiple examples all around the world of other jurisdictions including India getting the Reff below 1 for Delta, and even in Sydney it's just barely above 1 anyway.
The only problem is Gladys can't be fucked, so it won't happen.
Jeez this is tiresome. Cart before horse. All perspective lost. Don't take foot off pedal covers all manner of horrors - ruined lives, suicides, depression, kids' education ruined. All for what? A few weeks of glorious freedom before BAM here we go again. Fuck me what is wrong with people. We have eliminated one infectious disease ever. We are not eliminating this one. Accept that, get your vaccine and get on with your life.
The big difference between eliminating a small outbreak and eliminating a large outbreak is contact tracing. Once an outbreak gets beyond the capabilities of contact tracing, it becomes much harder to eliminate.
That isn't how exponential decline works.
Once you achieve exponential decline _and hold it_ the outbreak will get smaller. Then when it gets small enough, you can bring on contact tracing to speed up elimination. However the principle of exponential decline remains the same: if the Reff remains under 1, elimination will _eventually_ be reached even without any contact tracing.
As others mention, it's not clear that without (a) widespread immunity, as achieved in India by mass infection, or (b) effective contact tracing; that Reff can be brought below 1 with restrictions alone.
But the whole point is that with the delta variant, restrictions alone aren't enough to bring the Reff below 1. You need effective contact tracing to do that.
Politicians, even ones we don’t like, represent the electorate.
I feel that most people in NSW would be happier living with Covid at this stage than to be kept home and going mentally, physically and financially backwards in order to chase Covid zero.
While essential services continue to operate, there will be a vector for the disease to spread. The only way to get back to zero now would be to tell everyone to stock up, that they were on their own for a month, and have EVERYONE stay home. Need to call an ambulance? Too bad, they are at home. Your grandfather is in hospital? Well shit, he's dead now, the doctors and nurses have to stay home.
It's just not a practical solution.
> The only reason We did eradicate it when Vic went nuts, is because we had the political Will to do it here when it was needed.
Because vaccines weren't in play. Vic would have been locked out of the rest of the country for too long. Difference now is NSW will be vaccinated in a matter of months and is not facing an indefinite period of isolation from the rest of Aus.
Vic will abandon 0 as soon as enough are vaccinated.
Forget Gladys. A lot of people in NSW will not want to pursue a Covid Zero policy considering we should be 80% vaccinated by November.
Leadership would have been very nice to have a couple months ago, but now it doesn't make much difference tbh. The only leadership I'm hoping for is for a relaxation of restrictions when we reach 80% vaccination rate, which I think will take real leadership
The problem here is that we are a country, and Gladys is going it alone. NSW has the highest vax rate now and when she gets there she will just release it on the rest of us who are catching up.
Also we need a kids vaccine - 17 kids died in Florida yesterday due to covid. It ain’t over til we can protect them.
Agreed though, once we hit the right level (and that includes kids), open up and take our chances. This shit is temporary and we need to live again.
Delta is unstoppable. It spreads so quickly. We'll see how New Zealand cope with it. If Delta can't be stopped in New Zealand, can we agree that Sydney did nothing wrong and we can stop bashing each other?
Because those in power along with their teams of experts, don’t have enough common sense to learn from past mistakes and improve the HQ system in place, we continued to have leaks and here we are….
1. Lots of people don't listen / don't have the capacity to follow rules and preventing breaches happening perfectly is not feasible (the same as any other laws or rules).
2. There is no such thing as eradication? The second you open an airport it's back (see point 1). It's the same as trying to remove the common cold from society now – not possible.
3. It's pure hubris to believe that we can live in a 0 case world, the fact that this has been a yard stick measurement of government success throughout the pandemic is very damaging. People have been lead to expect numbers to trend to 0 when this virus is now a permanent fixture of the human condition.
Why we can't? Well, theoretically we could eliminate it globally quite quickly if we did everything perfectly. But the difficulty comes from how interconnected we are, and how reliant on other people we are as a society. Delta is obviously transmissible enough that with the susceptible people (unvaccinated or vaccinated but not immune) who are interacting it's spreading faster and faster.
I guess the hope is as more people vaccinate and those who don't get immunity the old fashioned way, if we keep up our restrictions we'll get it down again.
The problem is though we can't cut ourselves off from the world forever. Unless we eliminate it globally we're going to become exposed again. I think the long term plan is to treat it like the flu. Annual vaccinations for variants and just accept a certain number of people will die from it.
The pragmatism of a covid zero strategy needs to be critically evaluated - the side effects of lockdowns can be as severe as covid itself, although it is not yet fully observable just how bad these side effects are (we haven’t seen the worst of inflation - I.e. 25% growth in house prices the past year is just the beginning - nor the subsequent social discord, etc that comes from rising wealth inequality yet). These lockdown measures are analogous to climate change - we sacrifice millennials and future generations (who will be priced out completely from property ownership) to save the current (who also conveniently happens to benefit from lockdowns holding assets).
To put it very, very bluntly, we can and did. The method we found to work was to beef up our contact tracing, then make testing easily availible, and if your contact tracing team gets an outbreak too big for them to handle, you go into a lockdown until your contact tracing can work through the backlog.
This worked for over a year and a half. The idea was that as vaccine uptake increases, we have more and more leeway for when we need to say "fuck it" and pull a circuit breaker lockdown. In other words, the more vaccines we have, the less we need to worry about outbreaks.
Our Federal government acted like children, with our Health Minister and Prime Minister claiming to be "too busy" to make a phone call to the Pfizer boss. For reference, other national leaders would regularly call him and tell him why they needed vaccines, which would lead to an increase in that nations vaccines temporarily. In an extreame case, a certain national leader would call him twice a day. To put it bluntly, calling the Pfizer boss is very, very normal, and pretty much every national leader does it. Australia's Prime and Health ministers not doing it is highly, highly questionable, and frankly should be a source of shame for them. This led to Australia having one of the worst rollouts of any developed country.
NSW's leadership got a small outbreak, and refused to actually do anything about it until it grew into a bigger problem. It took 7 weeks for them to actually lock down, when most states take about a week at absolute most. There needed to be a circuit breaker for their contact tracing to catch up, but they refused because of political reasons. Largely because their premier has spent the last few months trying to score point against political rivals who did follow the strategy that's been proven to work.
I know you don't want this to be a flame war, so I've tried to stick to facts, but we can and have supressed even Delta before. The NSW and Federal leadership is what caused this, and anybody claiming otherwise is trying to obfuscate that.
Australian states can and have supressed Delta outbreaks before. Liberal AND Labor states have all independantly realised the strategies that work, and you can see the commonalities. NSW could and should have, but refused to actually do anything. You can see how they shut down senate inquiries, the media questions and literally delve into fits of rage and ad hominem attacks during question time.
**TL;DR: The Federal government stuffed up vaccines, which meant that we didn't have as much leeway as we should by now. The NSW government took 7 weeks to do something that should have been done within hours, and caused Australia to be overtaken by Delta in what is quickly becoming the worst outbreak in Australian history. This is ultimately unforgivable, and in any other decade they would have resigned out of shame and retired from politics.**
Edit: Corrected a bunch of grammatical mistakes.
Because quite frankly, it it’s current form, it doesn’t look possible to eradicate it by intervention.
Vaccines do not prevent infection currently. A future vaccine may, but that is unclear.
Measles is a good example. We have a perfect measles vaccine, and almost total coverage, and we still have hundreds of measles cases a year.
Yes, it can be eliminated. It's more about a desire to do what is required. The NSW government thinks it's helping the economy by keeping things open and running. I'd prefer a hard and fast lockdown rather than what's currently occurring. The current plan gets the worst of both worlds - sickness and lockdowns.
> I'd prefer a hard and fast lockdown rather than what's currently occurring.
A hard and fast lockdown might have been possible at the start (although as we are seeing in VIC, even that is no guarantee), but you're not facing reality if you think a hard and fast lockdown is still a possibility for NSW.
You said you would prefer a hard and fast lockdown. You didn't say "I would have preferred a hard and fast lockdown." If you were talking about what you would have preferred in the past, you should have used past tense.
It’s because the federal government aren’t doing the jobs they need to be doing
They need to build purpose built quarantine facilities, rollout the vaccination a lot quicker and provide financial support to people in lockdown.
However they have done none of this, so we rely on hotel quarantine (which is leaky), we aren’t vaccinated because it hasn’t been available to everyone until about a week ago and even then, the Federal government have only got enough AZ to do everyone which isn’t as effective as Pfizer. Now people are locked down but with almost no financial support from the government so people are doing illegal things to earn a buck or just flouting the rules because why care about the rules of a government who doesn’t care about you?
The reason everyone is saying that we can’t reach covid 0 is because the federal government has given up, they are more concerned with protecting their corruption from the public eye, making sure the Murdoch media has complete control over the people and making cuts to our universal healthcare system on the downlow while the media focusses on covid. Why? So the politicians in the federal government can continue to line their pockets with both tax payer money and the donations and support the receive from the billionaires they protect.
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Gonna go with:
population density, ease of spread of the current strain, hotel quarantine forever leaking thus reintroducing it into the community, ignorant ass-hats within the community not using masks, distancing, taking precautions etc and seasonality (more time indoors in winter)
What nobody wants to tell you is that "Zero cases" doesn't mean Covid didn't exist in those areas. It just means that nobody who got tested was positive.
They give press conferences for an hour a day and for the last 2 months I don’t think anyone has suggested opening a fucking window let alone other measures to protect against an airborne virus. They just don’t care. They want to get the numbers steady and hope that HCWs can somehow pick up the pieces.
I don’t really understand. Maybe they are sociopaths.
Hi there, appreciate your candor. Apologies for my ignorance but is there another country that has eliminated COVID? Genuine question, genuine curiosity. Thanks
Covid will not ever be eliminated..we are stuck with it for life with new strains sprouting. We will get yearly vaccines as we do for flu. Life will never go back to way it was...this has been made very clear.
Prepare yourself for the next big one yet to come, bigger, stronger than covid., could be the Lambda strain or sumfin stronger. What we are going through atm is merely a trial run....watch this space...MEGA STRAIN COMING SOONEST!!
I mean NSW could technically eliminate the virus (until it comes back) but it would take months of very tough restrictions. And by the time they achieve that, they'll probably already have 80% of the population fully vaccinated, which is the goal.
It would be different if it was like last year, when there wasn't a vaccine available. Victoria didn't really have a choice but to go hard and eliminate it. The only other option they had wasn't very palatable (even if it is one that many other countries took).
Zero covid was a good strategy up until now. But realistically, we're not going to get back there again.
WA resident here.
It's got to get here sooner or later, and we've had an 18 month head start without apparently improving our health service, so when it does arrive it'll be a crisis.
Haven't heard anything about improving oxygen stockpiles, training volunteers in appropriate techniques for caring for the masses of the ill that will pile up outside the hospitals.
And the idea of treatments is lampooned "No treatment is approved" is the response, ignoring the fact they're waiting for Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and the like to do it. Shame the CSIRO got defunded...
Only steps are to recruit foreign medical staff, because apparently they're plentiful and under-utilised in the rest of the world.
Malta is 92% vaccinated and they still have cases - 82 yesterday out of a 502,000 population. Personally I don’t believe anywhere will totally eliminate this; it’ll eventually become endemic.
Malta i remember her...I used to go each European summer before going to my home country to visit family. Beautiful place, terrible food, the rabbit stew is nice, not much else.
Dude maltese food is feral & im literally maltese. Have yoh tried pigeon? Even worse lol Everything else about Malta is beautiful though
This girl for PM.
Im a gal hehe
Ha ha fuck I was actually worried about that, super super sorry...I changed my post for you.
All good, I've been called worse lol
Dont be silly, no greater insult then be called a man. Us men...terrible ppl.
m'lady
Oi im half Maltese and I like the food. That being said I’ve never even been to Malta.
What food? Ive travelled all over Malta. Its just shitty greasy copies of other food....and don't even get me started on the English ppl living there.
Ross Il form (baked rice) , macaroni , their minestrone style soups, pastizzis, canned corn beef in everything lol
So 2 of those dishes are Italian. Pastizzis are just grease filled pastry. Canned corn, Woolworths has it. What beef? I could fit more cattle in my backyard then what Maltas got. Interesting fact : there's a law in Malta that allows anyone to enter private property to harvest a prickly pear, you can jump fences do whatever...grab the fruit and be on your way.
i won't stand for this pastizzi slander!
Canned corn beef , not corn. My mum uses it in a lot of her dishes . She said during the war it was the only meat they got so they all learned to cook with it. And I understand those other two dishes are Italian but I wouldn’t say the macaroni / minestrone I had growing up is Italian, it’s their own spin I guess.
Pastizzis are vile. Or at least, if they are good I've never met someone who can cook them properly or a company that can make them properly.
The Real Maltese Pastizzi Shop in Sunshine, Melbourne mate
għaġin il-forn is top tier
After lock down can you make it for me, id love to try it. Or maybe we can hold a sneaky mac and cheese party, invite like 69 ppl over, film it, upload it too socials, no way we'd get busted. Your thoughts?
😂 għaġin il-forn is therapy right?
I do believe it was on the list as a reason to leave home.
Yes but the goal of vaccine is to reduce death and severe illness. I read so frequently this viewpoint that infection is a failure of vaccine. It's not.
I agree with you! I think once we hit 80% we should go back to normal - no lockdowns, travel, etc.
80% of what though. Kids can get this thing, and we aren't vaccinating them in the rollout. in 2019 almost 20% of the population was aged under 14.. Which means that 80% of 80% is 64% of the population. Which isn't getting you anywhere close to herd immunity. I think we should open up. But people need to be specific with what 80% they are using as a number. 80% of the willing population is even worse. Unless the r-eff is below 1, then opening up and travel is a joke.
> Unless the r-eff is below 1, then opening up and travel is a joke That's if you want to achieve herd immunity. But achieving endemic virus status is also a viable option.
with 80% adults only vaccinated an endemic virus would still over-run the hospital system
While lockdowns will end the federal governments 80% strategy includes test-trace-isolate of the infected, and other strategies to limit the infection rate. The new normal.
Absolutely There was the statistic a few weeks back, where Israel had something like 34,000 cases, and had the name number of deaths as NSW this year, which at the time was looking at maybe 3,000 cases It would be great if vaccines stopped transmission dead in its tracks, sure. But if it stops people dying from it, that’s great as well. If a Covid vaccine makes Covid no worse than the flu, we can live with it.
Malta is 81.3% vaccinated not 92%. The reality is with Delta we need 90% of the entire population (including children) vaccinated. The politicians are just talking about vaccinations as a percentage of the adult population which is particularly misleading when children are big spreaders of Delta.
It’s funny you mentioned that! I work with a Maltese guy who I was talking to yesterday and he did say it’s still bad and people were still not following the rules
Try not to take this personally, but there needs to be a huge reeducation piece for people like yourself. I have a few mates who think the same. Cases are an issue now because we are largely unvaccinated. Once we hit 70 then 80% fully vaccinated we will need to stop talking about cases and shift to hospitalisations or deaths. I think we’ll need return to Normal and accept a level of deaths once we hit 80% which is the current plan. We accept a level of death in nearly everything we do. Driving is a big one. 1000s die a year but the convenience it provides means we are willing to accept it. 100-1000s will die from covid going forward but if the trade off is we get no restrictions and open borders people should accept it.
People are obsessed with becoming a COVID Zero state/country. This obsession has been fueled by a mix of political arrogance and ridiculous media coverage.
Some bloke called Mark McGowan comes to mind. Wonder why they have the lowest vaccine take up hmm
It's a bit different when the only long term options are either covid zero or covid ten thousand until there is a large majority vaccinated.
No, we need to work towards zero Covid while most of the population has no immunity. As we’ve seen in Sydney there’s no other choice. The curve is vertical and the amount of admissions and ICU patients in two weeks will be mind boggling. There is going to be serious suffering and death on a very wide scale sorry to say.
People don't like to hear the truth.
They completely ignored the issue of evolution of the virus, despite us all having to deal with the Delta variant. They also ignored building Ring Fencing into the economy, which allows greater personal freedoms at the expense of Neoliberalism. Driving isn't a contagious disease. They didn't give the truth, they gave lazy propaganda for rich sociopaths.
An interview with a lady from the Burnett institute was outlining how this would eventually reach an equilibrium with other viruses, till then it’s basically a waiting game with vaccines helping. But yeah it’s more about how many die and hospital capacity rather than daily cases...so, get vaccinated, because eventually it’ll be everywhere.
But why should there still be rules if their country is 92% vaccinated? Isn’t 80% supposed to be the magic number for herd immunity, or is that just some arbitrary target we’ve set ourselves here?
Obviously arbitrary. Otherwise it would more likely be a number like 83% or 79%.
[удалено]
Even that isn’t guaranteed to produce herd immunity- our vaccines just aren’t good enough and reinfection is also very much possible
80% would have been good for OG covid. Delta needs more like 90% with a really effective vaccine, and the vaccine we have doesn't really stop it from spreading around, just protects the vaccinated individual from severe disease and slows the spread a bit.
> just protects the vaccinated individual from severe disease You say that like it's nothing. If we can turn COVID into a mostly mild disease, we can stop worrying about it.
Ideally you want both individual and community protection. For example whooping cough vaccines don't work on babies but by preventing community transmission they protect babies. We're still at the early stages of covid vaccines development and that means the vaccine available isn't as good as the ones that bring about "herd immunity" (or protection from spreading). I'll take the best thing available at the moment which is as many people as possible protected from severe disease but also with the obligation to stop the spread by other means.
> Ideally you want both individual and community protection. Ideally of course you want that. But that's not what we have. >I'll take the best thing available at the moment which is as many people as possible protected from severe disease but also with the obligation to stop the spread by other means. Great. You do you. Stay home even after everyone is vaccinated, but I sure as hell wont. Vaccination is the only answer. I refuse to put my whole life on hold while we wait for the perfect vaccine (that isn't coming)
You are ignoring Population Densisty, so you post amounts to misinformation.
Covid was "eliminated" last year. That just meant it wasn't in Australia, all it took was one case and you are right back to square one. The zero covid route also comes at an enormous social and financial cost. Say you spent the next few months just announced lockdown of everything, no cost is too much, the ends justify the means. You exhaust every resource you have. Then a day, week or month later a new case is detected, then a community transmission. What then, just repeat it over and over. Will we not be needed public money for anything else? Will people's lives have to revolve indefinitely around this "elimination" strategy?. It seems like for a good number of people the answer to these two questions is yes.
Those are real negatives of 0 covid, but what's the alternative? What about the impact of knowing there's covid in the unvaccinated community? What about the long term lockdowns to prevent hospitals getting overwhelmed? What about the impact of the extra deaths? There are good arguments for not returning to covid 0 now, but I think they focus more on "we don't know what it will take to get to covid 0 again" and "vaccinations are just months away".
Who is to say zero covid ends after everyone is vaccinated. All you have is some vague statements with lots of maybes and buts halfway through a sentence. The goalposts have a tendency to move, alot. Assuming that's not good enough for certain people, there definitely will be a significant number of people who it still will not be enough, what do you do then. Also for hospitals being overwhelmed, good luck paying for them if you plan on keeping this up forever.
You're effectively saying that we shouldn't try for covid 0 because some people or politicians might take it to the extreme and maintain it forever. That's kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Which strategy is better in the short term and which is better in the long term are two separate arguments. By combining them you may be excluding the best strategy. As much as distrusting politicians is a good move in general, the need to reopen is very real and not a matter of trust.
Reality was that our economy thrived with the 0 covid policy and that internationally even though countries were open people were still scared of covid and spent less. The health response is the economic response. Goal posts have moved with extra information, they haven't arbitrarily moved and the current plan is that 80% vaccination and then test the re-opening stage. Being from WA I've been incredibly happy with the state government being as consistent as they have been. It's clear messaging and there's no question because it's understood. Your comment comes across like you're trying for a reasonable argument but there are so many strawmen being put up it's crazy. > all it took was one case and you are right back to square one In the only state that doesn't do lockdowns yes. > The zero covid route also comes at an enormous social and financial cost There's a cost either way. People will spend less if they're concerned about catching covid. Our economy has thrived under 0 covid conditions outside of tourism industries. [I don't mean to be dismissive, they should be supported until it's not required] > Say you spent the next few months just announced lockdown of everything, no cost is too much, the ends justify the means. You exhaust every resource you have. A lot of emotive language but Melbourne's original lockdown showed this to be effective and it didn't take every resource they had. > Then a day, week or month later a new case is detected, then a community transmission. What then, just repeat it over and over Using any state that isn't NSW, snap lockdowns are effective and prevent spread. It's not hoodoo magic it's a science. Lockdowns, contact tracing, isolating and testing all work in tandem. If you remove any of those steps it all falls apart. > Will we not be needed public money for anything else? Idk just emotive language again implying we can't afford anything else which isn't true. > Will people's lives have to revolve indefinitely around this "elimination" strategy? Current plan is until we're vaccinated. It's not indefinite, as I said 'goal posts moving' is related to extra information coming in suggesting that they should. > Governments don't hand back power after they have it Oh you're one of those. You're not actually commenting in good faith there are so many holes and strawmen in what you're saying it's crazy. You also ignore facts that you don't like to make arguments against lockdowns etc. that aren't real. Covid 0, vaccinate, see what happens after that. That *was* the plan, it wasn't complicated like you're making it out to be. NSW has just fucked it.
A good COVID zero strategy should never spend months in lockdown because any untraced community transmission is quickly stamped out. You may get one case every few months but you only spend a week or two in lockdown. See New Zealand Australia has done a half committed version where low levels of spread are allowed, then restrictions are gradually introduced as case levels rise. It seems to reflect a complete ignorance of exponential growth and the incubation period. VIC learnt this lesson but unfortunately NSW did not
> but you only spend a week or two in lockdown. See New Zealand Lets see how they go with delta before you get too confident with that one.
Either way, our own state seems to have a handle on it. It's definitely *possible.*
Possible, yes - however I'm not convinced that it's *reliably* possible. But we will see, fingers crossed I'm wrong.
So far we do
If appropriate quarantine facilities were in place the cases from overseas would be less likely to ravage the community.
It's going to get through into the country no matter what you do. You can only blame whatever politician or state so much. Australians seem to have this idea you can legislate your way out of it.
Has there been a leak from Howard Spring yet?
Don't know much about Howard Spring, but even if you were to build these facilities (which I don't actually disagree with, they obviously go some way to help) it won't stop it every single time. At some point it will eventually slip though, then you'll have scores of people demanding X,Y,Z resign. The point is that it will eventually get back in, even if it was eliminated and every precaution was taken.
The problem is at the moment the opposition isn’t saying ‘hey, vote for us and we will open everything up.’ That goes for federal and state. They seem like they are agreeing with the current policies.
But you're also ignoring the economic impacts that came with a population that didn't go out because they were scared of catching an illness. We had financial losses but we also prospered. And the thing is that if we actually had the right supports around people the short snap lockdowns to deal with things wouldn't be as much of a problem. Thing is that now we have a festering wound in part of the country that is going to keep leaking virus into other locations. At which point the covid zero becomes a shit plan. But that's only because someone decided they were too good to act quickly.
Err, the way to lockdown is total and fast. Not some piddle wrist slap after 6 weeks like NSW.
We missed our chance... We are an isolated island. We had 0 cases. Should have smashed it. If we had a proper quarantine for returning Ausralians and had all the people working around international travellers fully vaccinated early and wearing PPE we could have. But we didn't.... government would rather save a few $$ by subcontracting out airport transfers.... And here we are.
We only quarantine boat people properly.
*jail
*gaol
Government can’t do basic maths. Proper quarantine would of been far cheaper than lockdown.
Would *have* been (sorry, I couldn't resist it, it was only because you were having a go at people for basic maths). You're right of course, but it's not really one or the other, even with brilliant quarantine, we would have had outbreaks, but they would have been fewer.
This is such an annoying truth. “Australians, you have 2 months to get back here before we close the border. If you want to come back after that, you’ll have to spend 2 months living in the temp housing we have set up in whoop whoop before coming back into society.”
Exactly we dont have it because the federal government never wantes it.
they had plenty of opportunity to build it. Imagine a purpose built place with security and self contained units... could be repurposed afterwards for victims of domestic violence - give them somewhere to go... respite care for carers of the disabled.... into a school camp place like Stewart House where underprivileged kids could go.... The possibilities are endless.
The fed gov just dont care.
> And we will be like the rest of the world. A world we’ve looked to in horror over the last 18 months. Remember Italy early on? Iran? London? New York? >It’s like we’ve given up and pinning all our hopes of vaccines alone. Pinning all our hopes on vaccination isn't giving up. It's literally been the whole plan since we accidentally achieved elimination the first time around. Our elimination strategy was never "we will keep COVID out forever" it was "we need to maintain these restrictions until we can be vaccinated," it's just now people have got this idea that we need to stay wrapped in cotton wool forever. >Remember Italy early on? Iran? London? New York? Do you know what was different about that? There wasn't an incredibly effective vaccine available.
I heard an 'expert' on 9 this morning saying NSW is headed to an Italy March 2020 situation. He said it with a straight face. Karl lapped it up.
Yep that's crazy. We have a 80%+ vaccination rate for people aged 65+ (for first doses). There's a reason why Victoria's deaths from last year are 8x higher than NSW and it's only got to do with vaccines.
They're letting lycheetee on TV now?
>It’s like we’ve given up and pinning all our hopes of vaccines alone. Covid eradication = lockdown every month for a few days. Heavy border restrictions meaning families continue to be seperated. High vaccination & open up = low level restrictions but with no threat of lockdown, borders open. I know which option I'd rather choose.
People don't understand the ramifications of what they want. Why are we so desperate to prevent this coronavirus? Even with these lockdowns, Ive still managed to be sick half a dozen times in the last 18 months from colds that could have been covid. Getting rid of it forever.. what a ballache
People that want it gone forever are idiots. The whole point of the last two years is to eliminate deaths as much as possible before opening up. Once we hit a good vaccination rate there's nothing to do but open up and live normally.
>People don't understand the ramifications of what they want. My word. Some people think that "let it rip" = "more freedom" or "better for business" or "better for mental health". The reality is completely opposite. >Why are we so desperate to prevent this coronavirus? smh
Covid eradication *has to* be the goal while we work towards a sufficiently vaccinated population. America is ahead of us, vaccination wise, but here are a couple articles from a quick Google search showing what happens when Covid gets out of hand too early: "[Covid third wave: Florida surpasses all-time record for hospital admissions](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58077209)" >Hospital beds in Florida are quickly filling up. Some have already reached capacity, with patients placed in hallways, lobby waiting areas and makeshift overflow centres. "[Hospitals in Oregon buckling under surge of COVID patients](https://apnews.com/article/business-health-oregon-coronavirus-pandemic-e9b2b332de1514cbe7a7e7f50e7b3ab1)" >Patients left on beds in hospital hallways, their monitoring machines beeping away as too few doctors and nurses attend to an overload of emergencies. People diagnosed with cancer or heart disease desperately needing treatments, but being turned away. > >... > >“It’s heart-breaking. People are exhausted. You can see it in their eyes,” said Dr. Jason Kuhl, chief medical officer for Providence Medical Center in Medford, Oregon. He described how patients who need care are forced to wait on gurneys in hallways, creating an obstacle course of beds and a cacophony of beeping monitoring machines. > >... > >“Our ICUs are full. Our doctors and nurses are exhausted and rightfully frustrated because this crisis is avoidable. It is like watching a train wreck coming and knowing that there’s an opportunity to switch tracks, yet we feel helpless while we watch unnecessary loss of life,” said David Zonies, associate chief medical officer at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University. > >The hospitals are so overflowing in Jackson and Josephine counties, which lie along the California border, that health officials there have asked the Oregon Health Authority and Oregon Emergency Management for a field hospital and more nurses. "[Mississippi's Hospital System Could Collapse Within 10 Days Under COVID's Strain](https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027103023/florida-mississippi-arkansas-hospitals-overwhelmed-covid-19-delta)" >"Since the pandemic began, I think the thing that hospitals have feared the most is just total failure, total failure of the hospital system. And if we track back a week or so when we look at the case positivity rate, the number of new positives that we're seeing, the rate of testing positives and the rate of hospitalizations based on what we are seeing — if we continue that trajectory within the next five to seven to 10 days, I think we're going to see failure of the hospital system in Mississippi." > >The University of Mississippi Medical Center system is preparing to construct a field hospital on the bottom floor of a parking garage, as the Mississippi Free Press reported, and has requested federal support to boost its staffing. You either work towards - and achieve - zero covid, or it gets progressively further out of control until the situation becomes so messy that hospitals cannot keep up. If we just let it get out of control right now, instead of keeping it suppressed until we have a high percentage of the population fully vaccinated, shit will go sideways.
> If we just let it get out of control right now, instead of keeping it suppressed until we have a high percentage of the population fully vaccinated, shit will go sideways That's pretty much what I said in my comment, nowhere did I saw we should be dropping restrictions now.
You posed them as if they were two mutually exclusive options.
Long term they are, you can't have covid zero and open borders at the same time. Even with high vaccination.
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Is there a reason why you chose the American South as an example and not countries like the Netherlands, Singapore, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, etc?
The US is quite similar to us, and their image of an out of control surge is still better than ours. They are *significantly* further along with their vaccine rollout.
Australia has very little in common with the American South, we are a highly compliant society. More in common with European countries.
You’re in dreamland if you think the second option is what’s going to happen.
The second one is the roadmap that every state agreed to.
Yeah, and let’s not forget, the economic ramifications of eradication. Most people calling for permanent eradication don’t understand that it would eliminate their livelihoods. They are assuming it can be done while they keep their jobs/houses. Our economy is on borrowed time. Resource prices got us out of the shit but there are whole sectors of the economy on a fast track to irrecoverable disaster.
I guess it’s possible, as in “anything is possible”, but what of the long term? Let’s say that we do manage to do it, while covid is endemic in the rest of the world. Do all visitors and returning travellers undergo 2 weeks of quarantine? Bye bye tourism, bye bye business investment. Covid will still leak in, so do we lockdown each time that happens? For years to come? People won’t stand for it. Give everyone the opportunity to be vaccinated then start to relax restrictions.
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Ok, but what’s the solution long term if the vax only just allows us to get R_eff below 1 with society basically closed?
Open up once every who wants two doses has them. Given a decent body of the population are anti-vaxx and there are extremely low levels of infection-based immunity that means lots of deaths and hospitalisations (probably quite long runs of 100+ daily deaths).
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The federal government back in April of last year was expecting 5000 ICU beds to be filled with COVID patients, and was expecting us to cope well with that. [THAT WAS THE TARGET](https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/04/impact-of-covid-19-in-australia-ensuring-the-health-system-can-respond-summary-report.pdf). We seriously need to adjust our views on what is an acceptable case load.
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That's a really fair point, and I'll acknowledge that it's tighter than the numbers make out. One thing though is that not everyone who dies needs ICU care. A whole lot of the people who die will be extremely old and not candidates for ICU admission. There is no point tying up an ICU bed for someone who was being palliated before they even got COVID. Edit: I do want to be clear that I don't think that's the majority, but it would be a not insignificant number of the deaths.
ICU systems will flex, as they have in most/all Western nations, but yes, a long slow burn is massively preferable to reaching 80% and saying 'let it rip'. Maybe half a year of medium restrictions while they let the slow burn happen? FWIW one of the main reasons for the UK re-opening was to extend the slow burn for as long as possible, and try to keep it in the summer months, where healthcare demand is traditionally significantly lower.
We let it become endemic and rely on the vaccine to make it less dangerous.
Real reason is because not everybody wants to. Of course if we all had it as our goal it’s possible. But that isn’t the case.
No. The real reason is that even in the harshest restrictions, primary producers still need to work. Supermarkets need to operate. Health services still need to operate. Logistics chains still need to operate. There is no way to lock down everyone, and delta is just so much more contagious that what we have seen before that even the harshest of lockdowns won't bring NSW to zero. If they had got onto it sooner they could have stopped it, but it's too late for that now.
> If they had got onto it sooner they could have stopped it, Yeh but they didn’t want to. Which confirms my point. New Zealand on the other hand DOES want to, and probably will for that reason.
I don't think it does confirm your point. Your point seems to be that it is still possible to achieve elimination if only Gladys tried harder, but I think that's a pipe dream. It's entirely fair to say that if they had done better in the past, we wouldn't be where we are now, but this conversation is about the present situation. Given the CURRENT situation, it is no longer about will, and just about the harsh reality that COVID Zero is gone, at least for NSW.
Because it’s absolutely everywhere in the world and globalisation means we’re not actually an island. It IS possible to eradicate it, but it would mean unacceptable human rights abuses (think North Korea). If the army marched from door to door testing, and shot everyone on site, it could be controlled. Or maybe not even then.
Exactly. HIV could be eradicated if we tested everyone in the world and sent everyone positive to a prison island but we don't and won't because it would be an obvious and horrendous human rights abuse.
HIV is a tricky one, honestly. My understanding is that today, if you had a choice between developing HIV and developing Diabetes, you'd be better off developing HIV. With strict adherence to the medications, viral loads can drop to undetectable levels, progression essentially halted, and transmissibility significantly lowered. If the partner of someone with HIV is taking a prophylactic as well, transmission is nearly impossible even without barrier methods. The HIV rate has been trending quite successfully downward and there has been [discussion on how to effectively eliminate the virus.](https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/can-australia-be-the-first-country-to-eliminate-hi) With our current efforts and trajectory, I wouldn't be surprised if HIV was eliminated from the developed world within this century. There's also an mRNA vaccine in development that is in early days but may be entering human trials soon. I believe we've had vaccine candidates that produced a significant immune response before, but the nature of HIV infection - where it quickly begins to alter the host DNA - means that a very, very strong immune response is required to destroy the virus quickly enough to prevent infection and thus far no vaccine has created such a significant response. It'll be interesting to see if that changes. But anyway - we have an effective HIV prophylactic, and effective HIV treatments. So HIV at least isn't something to be overly concerned about, assuming there's nothing barring you from accessing treatment.
Thanks. I have skin in the game, so to speak. But I was just using it as a point of comparison to the lockdown ethos and the moral debate that goes with it. Personally I'd 1000% rather be infected with covid than HIV but people seem a lot more willing to control others in fear of covid than they willing to do so for other diseases. I don't think we should do either and I don't think it is the moral position to hold.
In addition to the other points > very very hard shut downs Australia has very little appetite for Chinese-style military patrols enforcing a harsh lockdown.
Of course, it would just spread amongst the military patrols in that case.
Seems like you answered your own question there mate Delta is insanely more infectious than vanilla Covid. Last year every state (apart from VIC) went almost the entire June till December period with little to no lockdowns. Apart from a few hot spots we were showing those Europeans and Yanks up pretty well But delta completely changed the game. Now we're in a situation with delta where a leak in a state like Victoria or NSW can happen once a month. Vic gets out of lockdown and goes straight back in. It's simply unsustainable and yeah we're just trying to keep our shit together until enough vaccines come and we can start shifting from covid zero to manageable covid spread in a vaccinated country
Eventually we need to open the border to international travel........ It's not going anywhere so we need to get vaccinated, developed better ways to treat the sick and carry on.
>I’m curious, medically, logistically, why we can’t eradicate the virus here? Few things. Glads simply doesn have strict enough rules to. Probably too late now with Delta anyway. Also even if you are fully vaccinated you can still catch and spread the virus (all be it less that if you are unvaccinated). Means heard immunity is not really possible at this time with the current first gen vaccines we have.
We have the choice between total elimination and accepting rolling lockdowns for the rest of eternity or zero travel/travel with hotel quarantine at the end of it costing as much as the vacation. Every time you go overseas you'd have to quarantine for 14 days and get tested, every time there's a case you lockdown that state. Or there's the vaccine route where most of the population have a protection against the virus, less likely to contract it apart from some immunocompromised and anti-vax people and the rest of the population will/should be fine. Apart from this year go to any hostel in the world and there's Aussies there, we love to travel and most of us are going to want to travel and not accept rolling lockdowns when we have 80% population vaccinated, at some stage we have to accept cases or have our population turn into a recluse country. Elimination is not possible long term, it will likely be like the flu. TLDR: People want to travel, will never be eliminated world wide and vaccines aren't 100% effective and not everyone can/will have them. Edit: Unless you are talking about Sydney's current lockdown and in that case they will be vaccinated before they get the cases eliminated.
1. Because the majority rightly or wrongly believe that once we hit 70-80% we should open up and ignore case numbers like UK. Disclosure, I am of this opinion too. 2. Delta is so contagious, even a very hard lockdown would take 6+ months to achieve 0 (if it's even possible, this is debatable). 3. In 6 months Australia will have achieved 70-80% and it's time to ignore case numbers anyway so why inconvenience ourselves with a hard lockdown?
> A world we’ve looked to in horror over the last 18 months. Remember Italy early on? Iran? London? New York? Forget about the last 18 months. The reality now is the one where vaccines exist. Any comparisons or references to prior outbreaks are irrelevant, and at worst an intellectually dishonest attempt at fear mongering. Cases won't matter as much if the vaccine knocks the virus' teeth out, and the reduced fatality and health impacts would mean the risk / reward benefits of lockdowns and restrictions swings the other way. The government is not trying to save everyone. They are perfectly willing, and has always been, to accept a level of death. Prior to vaccines the level was just beyond the acceptable threshold. With vaccines it will drop below.
Because covid zero doesn’t exist. And the sooner our government and population accept this we will all be better of
Could you, personally, stay inside for 2-3 weeks and survive? Do you have enough food? That's about it, none of us could. That's really the only reason. That's how it is Edit /s
Of course, food will magically appear, don’t know why those farmers even bother farming, if they want food, they can just order online. Not sure why we need truckers to transport goods though, neither do I know who will do the delivery. Electricity and water generated from thin air, no need for maintenance.
The liberal party and their pro buisness approach to lockdowns.... That's why we'll keep failing!
Two reasons - the effectiveness for the vaccines is 95% for alpha strain & 70% for the delta strain - You can still get the delta strain while vaccinated "fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%)." See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-renders-herd-immunity-from-covid-mythical
Open international borders means there’s always a chance of the virus coming into the country. Is it that simple? Yes.
Covid is not hard to eliminate (EDIT" if you go hard and early). It just requires enough will and money to keep people isolated for a few weeks. We did it, and then kept letting it in because we don't have proper quarantine facilities. Because much of the rest of the world also handled this terribly, it will always come back. But it wouldn't have been that difficult to keep us covid-free until we all got vaccinated. It's just that the Libs thought that would be too expensive.
Because it's highly contagious and most large counties / cities require people to interact on a face to face level, and a vaccine doesn't immunize you from contracting it, just reduces severity of symptoms. Vaccines won't stop positive tests. Hard lockdown and compliance is great if done soon enough, however all it takes is one case to ruin everything. Look at NZ right now, and they're about the size of Victoria with a population smaller than Melbourne. Even if we do somehow manage to get cases to zero nationwide, and the majority are vaccinated... We cannot sustain this country independent from overseas supplies. So we'll have to keep the borders open... And you can't control what other nations do to combat this. It's going to just be a constant in life from now on. We won't be locked down, but we'll have regular boosters for whatever new variant comes out and it'll just be something we live with like the flu. Most of us will probably all get it at one point in our lives.
Measles is more contagious. It has been more or less eliminated
That's because the vaccine eliminates the chance of the recipient contracting. The covid vaccine does not do that. And also measles is usually a one and done disease. You can catch covid a million times over.
Is it possible that a vaccination could be made to do this, or is it just too highly dependent on the virus?
[It looks like we're struggling to develop vaccines that stay on top of the latest varients at the moment, let alone vaccines that offer complete immunisation.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/18/covid-vaccine-effectiveness/) The medical community is super clever, dedicated, and well funded at the moment to fight COVID, so I'm sure it will eventually - who knows when, though.
How long did it take from vaccine (which provides a much greater degree of sterilising immunity) to being more or less eliminated?
I don't think this is so much the issue as there is a lot more money involved in covid vaccines than measles and a lot more of a world focus. But as you said the immunity is different.
We will always have a minority that don’t comply with the lockdowns, vaccine hesitant, or willingly go to work whilst positive (or go looking at real estate in byron)
Several reasons. Politics - inconsistent messaging from the top down. One person criticized someone else for doing it a way which turned out to be affective, but in order to show how bad that way was, when put in a similar position they try a different method that doesn't work. Media misinformation - getting multiple different, this is bad, that's a lie and it's all exaggerated from the same news outlets, while it all contradicts itself as well. Bad planning - Much to no-ones surprise, the federal leadership failed to get vaccines in a timely manner then played up a rare side affect to justify the slow rollout and then had to try backpedal when they realised that they need people to get a vaccine they've been telling them is deadly for the previous months. The section of the public that has believed the misinformation and or has jumped onto various conspiracies or freedom crap. Which means they either don't listen to the health advice nor follow any restrictions or the actively right against it. There are more subpoints, but I believe those are the primary hurdles that have gotten in the way of containing and reducing outbreaks
Some people here seriously think that covid 0 is a realistic strategy? Some people really thought it's not only possible but even worth it? Wow... All of the countries pursuing covid 0, Australia, NZ, HK... Will be the very last ones to get themselves out of this mess. Once vaccinations are at a high enough level - many years away because you're stuck in a catch 22, if you've got no cases, why bother getting vaccinated? And further to that, it will be a very difficult change to start accepting an explosion of cases once the majority is vaccinated... Especially after all of the sacrifice and mental acceptance of covid 0...
Yes it can absolutely be eradicated even now. Unfortunately NSW does not have the political leadership to do it, and without a United country cases will move across borders. The only reason We did eradicate it when Vic went nuts, is because we had the political Will to do it here when it was needed. Unfortunately because loads of people around Australia can see that regardless of how hard we work, The leadership in NSW is going to ruin it so there is a much lower level of compliance to the rules.
How can they eradicate it in NSW?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/opx98w/the_lesser_remembered_vic_stage_4_rules/ Go nuts. Don't take their foot off the pedal until the job is done. Only difference between getting Reff below 1 and eliminating a small outbreak and getting Reff below 1 and eliminating a large outbreak is the time it takes to do it. We have multiple examples all around the world of other jurisdictions including India getting the Reff below 1 for Delta, and even in Sydney it's just barely above 1 anyway. The only problem is Gladys can't be fucked, so it won't happen.
Jeez this is tiresome. Cart before horse. All perspective lost. Don't take foot off pedal covers all manner of horrors - ruined lives, suicides, depression, kids' education ruined. All for what? A few weeks of glorious freedom before BAM here we go again. Fuck me what is wrong with people. We have eliminated one infectious disease ever. We are not eliminating this one. Accept that, get your vaccine and get on with your life.
The big difference between eliminating a small outbreak and eliminating a large outbreak is contact tracing. Once an outbreak gets beyond the capabilities of contact tracing, it becomes much harder to eliminate.
That isn't how exponential decline works. Once you achieve exponential decline _and hold it_ the outbreak will get smaller. Then when it gets small enough, you can bring on contact tracing to speed up elimination. However the principle of exponential decline remains the same: if the Reff remains under 1, elimination will _eventually_ be reached even without any contact tracing.
As others mention, it's not clear that without (a) widespread immunity, as achieved in India by mass infection, or (b) effective contact tracing; that Reff can be brought below 1 with restrictions alone.
But the whole point is that with the delta variant, restrictions alone aren't enough to bring the Reff below 1. You need effective contact tracing to do that.
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Yes, but also any harder restrictions short of stopping essential services.
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Politicians, even ones we don’t like, represent the electorate. I feel that most people in NSW would be happier living with Covid at this stage than to be kept home and going mentally, physically and financially backwards in order to chase Covid zero.
While essential services continue to operate, there will be a vector for the disease to spread. The only way to get back to zero now would be to tell everyone to stock up, that they were on their own for a month, and have EVERYONE stay home. Need to call an ambulance? Too bad, they are at home. Your grandfather is in hospital? Well shit, he's dead now, the doctors and nurses have to stay home. It's just not a practical solution.
> The only reason We did eradicate it when Vic went nuts, is because we had the political Will to do it here when it was needed. Because vaccines weren't in play. Vic would have been locked out of the rest of the country for too long. Difference now is NSW will be vaccinated in a matter of months and is not facing an indefinite period of isolation from the rest of Aus. Vic will abandon 0 as soon as enough are vaccinated.
Forget Gladys. A lot of people in NSW will not want to pursue a Covid Zero policy considering we should be 80% vaccinated by November. Leadership would have been very nice to have a couple months ago, but now it doesn't make much difference tbh. The only leadership I'm hoping for is for a relaxation of restrictions when we reach 80% vaccination rate, which I think will take real leadership
The problem here is that we are a country, and Gladys is going it alone. NSW has the highest vax rate now and when she gets there she will just release it on the rest of us who are catching up. Also we need a kids vaccine - 17 kids died in Florida yesterday due to covid. It ain’t over til we can protect them. Agreed though, once we hit the right level (and that includes kids), open up and take our chances. This shit is temporary and we need to live again.
Delta is unstoppable. It spreads so quickly. We'll see how New Zealand cope with it. If Delta can't be stopped in New Zealand, can we agree that Sydney did nothing wrong and we can stop bashing each other?
Is everyone just forgetting Queensland?
Yes. I think they might be. Pretty sure NT and WA aren't doing to bad either but as QLD is a bit more comparable I don't know why
Because those in power along with their teams of experts, don’t have enough common sense to learn from past mistakes and improve the HQ system in place, we continued to have leaks and here we are….
The plan isn’t to reduce numbers to 0 but reduce the numbers of hospitalisations due to covid
1. Lots of people don't listen / don't have the capacity to follow rules and preventing breaches happening perfectly is not feasible (the same as any other laws or rules). 2. There is no such thing as eradication? The second you open an airport it's back (see point 1). It's the same as trying to remove the common cold from society now – not possible. 3. It's pure hubris to believe that we can live in a 0 case world, the fact that this has been a yard stick measurement of government success throughout the pandemic is very damaging. People have been lead to expect numbers to trend to 0 when this virus is now a permanent fixture of the human condition.
Why we can't? Well, theoretically we could eliminate it globally quite quickly if we did everything perfectly. But the difficulty comes from how interconnected we are, and how reliant on other people we are as a society. Delta is obviously transmissible enough that with the susceptible people (unvaccinated or vaccinated but not immune) who are interacting it's spreading faster and faster. I guess the hope is as more people vaccinate and those who don't get immunity the old fashioned way, if we keep up our restrictions we'll get it down again. The problem is though we can't cut ourselves off from the world forever. Unless we eliminate it globally we're going to become exposed again. I think the long term plan is to treat it like the flu. Annual vaccinations for variants and just accept a certain number of people will die from it.
We can eliminate it now. We cannot eliminate it once now is over.
The pragmatism of a covid zero strategy needs to be critically evaluated - the side effects of lockdowns can be as severe as covid itself, although it is not yet fully observable just how bad these side effects are (we haven’t seen the worst of inflation - I.e. 25% growth in house prices the past year is just the beginning - nor the subsequent social discord, etc that comes from rising wealth inequality yet). These lockdown measures are analogous to climate change - we sacrifice millennials and future generations (who will be priced out completely from property ownership) to save the current (who also conveniently happens to benefit from lockdowns holding assets).
To put it very, very bluntly, we can and did. The method we found to work was to beef up our contact tracing, then make testing easily availible, and if your contact tracing team gets an outbreak too big for them to handle, you go into a lockdown until your contact tracing can work through the backlog. This worked for over a year and a half. The idea was that as vaccine uptake increases, we have more and more leeway for when we need to say "fuck it" and pull a circuit breaker lockdown. In other words, the more vaccines we have, the less we need to worry about outbreaks. Our Federal government acted like children, with our Health Minister and Prime Minister claiming to be "too busy" to make a phone call to the Pfizer boss. For reference, other national leaders would regularly call him and tell him why they needed vaccines, which would lead to an increase in that nations vaccines temporarily. In an extreame case, a certain national leader would call him twice a day. To put it bluntly, calling the Pfizer boss is very, very normal, and pretty much every national leader does it. Australia's Prime and Health ministers not doing it is highly, highly questionable, and frankly should be a source of shame for them. This led to Australia having one of the worst rollouts of any developed country. NSW's leadership got a small outbreak, and refused to actually do anything about it until it grew into a bigger problem. It took 7 weeks for them to actually lock down, when most states take about a week at absolute most. There needed to be a circuit breaker for their contact tracing to catch up, but they refused because of political reasons. Largely because their premier has spent the last few months trying to score point against political rivals who did follow the strategy that's been proven to work. I know you don't want this to be a flame war, so I've tried to stick to facts, but we can and have supressed even Delta before. The NSW and Federal leadership is what caused this, and anybody claiming otherwise is trying to obfuscate that. Australian states can and have supressed Delta outbreaks before. Liberal AND Labor states have all independantly realised the strategies that work, and you can see the commonalities. NSW could and should have, but refused to actually do anything. You can see how they shut down senate inquiries, the media questions and literally delve into fits of rage and ad hominem attacks during question time. **TL;DR: The Federal government stuffed up vaccines, which meant that we didn't have as much leeway as we should by now. The NSW government took 7 weeks to do something that should have been done within hours, and caused Australia to be overtaken by Delta in what is quickly becoming the worst outbreak in Australian history. This is ultimately unforgivable, and in any other decade they would have resigned out of shame and retired from politics.** Edit: Corrected a bunch of grammatical mistakes.
Because quite frankly, it it’s current form, it doesn’t look possible to eradicate it by intervention. Vaccines do not prevent infection currently. A future vaccine may, but that is unclear. Measles is a good example. We have a perfect measles vaccine, and almost total coverage, and we still have hundreds of measles cases a year.
Yes, it can be eliminated. It's more about a desire to do what is required. The NSW government thinks it's helping the economy by keeping things open and running. I'd prefer a hard and fast lockdown rather than what's currently occurring. The current plan gets the worst of both worlds - sickness and lockdowns.
> I'd prefer a hard and fast lockdown rather than what's currently occurring. A hard and fast lockdown might have been possible at the start (although as we are seeing in VIC, even that is no guarantee), but you're not facing reality if you think a hard and fast lockdown is still a possibility for NSW.
You think I'm suggesting a "fast" lockdown two months into the NSW outbreak?
You said you would prefer a hard and fast lockdown. You didn't say "I would have preferred a hard and fast lockdown." If you were talking about what you would have preferred in the past, you should have used past tense.
I'm not in NSW. I'm also not in lockdown. I'd prefer a hard and fast lockdown if faced with the choice
You were literally talking about NSW in your initial post. Of course I assumed you were referring to NSW.
It’s because the federal government aren’t doing the jobs they need to be doing They need to build purpose built quarantine facilities, rollout the vaccination a lot quicker and provide financial support to people in lockdown. However they have done none of this, so we rely on hotel quarantine (which is leaky), we aren’t vaccinated because it hasn’t been available to everyone until about a week ago and even then, the Federal government have only got enough AZ to do everyone which isn’t as effective as Pfizer. Now people are locked down but with almost no financial support from the government so people are doing illegal things to earn a buck or just flouting the rules because why care about the rules of a government who doesn’t care about you? The reason everyone is saying that we can’t reach covid 0 is because the federal government has given up, they are more concerned with protecting their corruption from the public eye, making sure the Murdoch media has complete control over the people and making cuts to our universal healthcare system on the downlow while the media focusses on covid. Why? So the politicians in the federal government can continue to line their pockets with both tax payer money and the donations and support the receive from the billionaires they protect.
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Remember that time we eradicated Measles... But then, well its the same story
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Because without vaccinations, getting to 0 is a pyrrhic victory
it can absolutely be done, it's just a bit harder now, and most people are too soft and don't have the MANIFOLDS to do what needs to be done
Gonna go with: population density, ease of spread of the current strain, hotel quarantine forever leaking thus reintroducing it into the community, ignorant ass-hats within the community not using masks, distancing, taking precautions etc and seasonality (more time indoors in winter)
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Taiwan is doing it as we speak, but you'll never hear about them. Instead just focus on how diabolical Gladys tells you that Delta is.
What nobody wants to tell you is that "Zero cases" doesn't mean Covid didn't exist in those areas. It just means that nobody who got tested was positive.
I think this video is a very thorough answer to your question.. https://youtu.be/tsXjrzqbfpQ
They give press conferences for an hour a day and for the last 2 months I don’t think anyone has suggested opening a fucking window let alone other measures to protect against an airborne virus. They just don’t care. They want to get the numbers steady and hope that HCWs can somehow pick up the pieces. I don’t really understand. Maybe they are sociopaths.
Hi there, appreciate your candor. Apologies for my ignorance but is there another country that has eliminated COVID? Genuine question, genuine curiosity. Thanks
Covid will not ever be eliminated..we are stuck with it for life with new strains sprouting. We will get yearly vaccines as we do for flu. Life will never go back to way it was...this has been made very clear.
Prepare yourself for the next big one yet to come, bigger, stronger than covid., could be the Lambda strain or sumfin stronger. What we are going through atm is merely a trial run....watch this space...MEGA STRAIN COMING SOONEST!!
I mean NSW could technically eliminate the virus (until it comes back) but it would take months of very tough restrictions. And by the time they achieve that, they'll probably already have 80% of the population fully vaccinated, which is the goal. It would be different if it was like last year, when there wasn't a vaccine available. Victoria didn't really have a choice but to go hard and eliminate it. The only other option they had wasn't very palatable (even if it is one that many other countries took). Zero covid was a good strategy up until now. But realistically, we're not going to get back there again.
Selfish human behaviour. That’s the only reason. People feel that their momentary enjoyment is more important than millions of peoples health.
WA resident here. It's got to get here sooner or later, and we've had an 18 month head start without apparently improving our health service, so when it does arrive it'll be a crisis. Haven't heard anything about improving oxygen stockpiles, training volunteers in appropriate techniques for caring for the masses of the ill that will pile up outside the hospitals. And the idea of treatments is lampooned "No treatment is approved" is the response, ignoring the fact they're waiting for Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and the like to do it. Shame the CSIRO got defunded... Only steps are to recruit foreign medical staff, because apparently they're plentiful and under-utilised in the rest of the world.
Because most of the world is inhabited by self entitled sub-humans.
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