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29 thoughts on “Australia is doomed”

  2. Mitch Guthman

    In every instance, it’s been our social organization that has let us down. Australia evidently became complacent and didn’t push hand enough for the vaccines and, equally important, has not limited nonessential activities to vaccinated people and has not rigorous enforced those limitations with vaccine passports.

    The way out is pushing and even mandating vaccines wherever possible and implementation of a vaccine passport.

  3. rational thought

    I am not sure the post is meant as irony. Australia is doomed might not be that much of an overstatement.

    Australia has managed to, with policies of more severe isolation ( helps to be an island), some tough restrictions when there is a small outbreak, and a good deal of luck, especially at the start, to keep covid largely at bay.

    But such a strategy was likely always doomed to failure long term without vaccination. There is no way you are going to be able to keep that up forever. Even with original covid, eventually it will break through. People are not going to keep living in a bubble for ten years. Maybe you could try to " ride it out" using these sort of extreme measures and let the rest of the world develop herd immunity wiping our cases to near zero and then you can come out of your shell. But unlikely that would happen fast enough and depend on natural immunity being so strong that the virus disappears rather than become endemic ( also not likely).

    Really an Australia strategy was a valid short term ( as in a year or maybe two) to buy time for a vaccine. Australia bet that a vaccine would be developed ( by other nations mainly like usa) and be available in time for them before their strategy broke down. They bet that trump was right last year that the vaccine would be ready quickly and also vaccine resistance in usa etc. means they could get a supply earlier.

    Australia bought a lottery ticket and it was the winning ticket . And then they forgot to cash it in by the deadline.

    The crucial second part of the australia strategy should also have been to get vaccinated as fast as possible. And they just blew that. 12.5% fully vaccinated. Pathetic. Third world countries doing better.

    Now with delta, there time has run out. In a largely virgin population with low vaccine and natural immunity, too contagious to stop with even tough restrictions once it has been established.

    Cases still low so Australia still can mitigate the damage by accelerating vaccination asap to max. But they are doomed to have a significant wave like they have not seen yet. And possibly even a wave worse than anything yet in usa short term.

    For new Zealand ' s sale, hopefully they acted quick enough to avoid getting delta established yet. And scared enough to learn the lesson in time.

  4. James B. Shearer

    They may not be doomed but they are in danger. They are in a against time, they need to get people vaccinated before delta explodes. Otherwise big trouble.

    3. Jerry O'Brien

      I got it. Unfortunately for New Zealand, they already seem to be experiencing a return of community-spread disease, so they'll need to work on their domestic controls. too.

        1. Jerry O'Brien

          I guessed, cautiously, that New Zealand's unusually large number of cases reported during the week ending on July 23rd reflected community spread, but I have now looked at their health ministry information pages. They say they have three clusters of imported cases active right now, but they seem to be among crew or passengers of sea-going vessels.

          Probably not community spread, then. Thanks for setting me straight.

    4. Mitch Guthman

      If Kevin meant to be sarcastic, I think he missed his target by a country mile. There's a universe of countries that have tried to fight the pandemic and been reasonable successful but are now threatened by lack of vaccines (Vietnam) or lack of vaccinations (Oz, Denmark, NZ). Within that universe or high performing countries, Australia is in trouble and because of the way the Delta variant spreads they might be in really big trouble indeed.

      Then there's a completely different universe of countries who either because of their lack of social cohesion/dominance by the right-wing or poor decisions by the governments (EU prioritizing austerity or avoiding catastrophe), have been doomed to taking it on the chin. Regrettably, the USA is near the bottom of this category since the Republican Party has chosen to embrace catastrophe as a path to victory in 2022 and 2024.

      We are probably beyond screwed at this point. We could be dealing with reoccurring waves of Covid-19 for the next decade or more.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/the-south-will-define-americas-covid-19-recovery/619525/

      1. rational thought

        I would think that, if you want to say that policies here in the usa screwed us, it would be more correct to say that we have already been screwed in the past vs. that we are screwed now for the future.

        Now that the large majority have some sort of immunity, vaccine or natural, and pretty clear that either makes chance of death if you still do catch it very very low, and most of the remaining unvaccinated never had covid group are lower risk young people ( and many maybe have inherent immunity if they have somehow avoided catching it so far), there is just a limited potential for covid to kill as many as it already has.

        The worst is behind us now almost surely even if everyone eventually catches covid and even if it becomes endemic.

        For Australia clearly, most of their pain is in the future.

          1. rational thought

            If you think I am wrong just say that. Why do you have to phrase it as lying? What reason would I have for lying?

            And I expect we are just talking semantics anyway? What is a " large" majority? In this context I was thinking somewhere around 70% ? And I think we are at that when you add vaccine and natural immunity. In a context like a presidential election, maybe 55% is large.

            And the point is the deaths we have already seen from the maybe 30 or maybe even 40% who got covid are going to be much larger than those from the maybe 15 to 20% of total pop who are unvaccinated and will still catch covid for the first time, because of who they are.

            Worst case future cannot be as bad as what we already went through.

  6. Austin

    I like how the country that has never really gotten below about 30 cases per million in the last 16 months is going to tsk-tsk the country that is and always has been below about 10 cases per million.

    FWIW, Australian cities and towns are very remote from each other, even more so than US or Canadian cities and towns. So regional lockdowns and mandatory 10-14 day quarantines for those allowed to travel - which the various levels of Australian government have proven willing to do even more so than US states or Canadian provinces - should be able to contain outbreaks until they can get more vaccines. (That is about the only flaw I've seen in Australia: a lack of enough money thrown at buying and administering vaccines.)

    1. rational thought

      Pointing out what Australia did wrong is really not the same as tsk tsk ing them from an unjustifiable position.

      The reason why the bad vaccination policy is so bad is it eliminates so much of what they did right and better than us in the past.

      It is more like a reverse shadenfraude ( not sure I spelled that right) where you are looking at them longingly wishes you could be there and then you see them largely throw it all away.

      Your point on the geographic advantage of Australia is interesting . Not sure it is fully valid. For the bulk of Australia in the Melbourne to Sydney corridor and maybe up to Brisbane, there is a fairly continued settlement that makes it fairly hard to isolate. Not near as much as the usa for east coast through midwest, but western usa metro areas probably more isolateable than Sydney is from Melbourne. Now with a place like Perth, very isolated and could be cut off more than anywhere in continental usa ( either if Perth has the breakout or other parts of Australia).

      The geographic isolation of australia as a whole is more important and that they were lucky enough to see what was happening before covid got established was more important and something we had no hope of duplicating . To much covid was here before we knew enough to ban travel. The China travel ban that trump did ( and democrats largely objected to) and the later Europe travel ban helped but in the end I think we would have ended up in around same place by Oct 2020. And I feel same for restrictions. To the extent they helped through Oct 2020, they mostly delayed cases from early summer to early fall. By oct 2020, original covid had hit the here immunity limit based on natural infection for warm weather most places.

      And then we saw what colder weather and the alpha type variants can do.

      I actually wonder if no travel ban and no restrictions through summer would have had a better end result.

      1. memyselfandi

        The china travel ban was an unmitigated disaster. It was the exact opposite of being helpful. It massively increased travel from china to the US. There was a total refusal to require those travelers from wearing masks on the flight or to quarantine after arrival in the US. (The CDC was still denying asymptomatic transmission at that time.) Convinced the government to let down its guard. Absolutely nothing positive came from that 'ban'. People need to stop repeating that utterly ridiculous lie.

      2. Jasper_in_Boston

        To much covid was here before we knew enough to ban travel.

        We didn't need to "ban" travel (I assume you mean arrivals from abroad). We needed to A) restrict it/reduce it B) require all persons entering the US to submit negative virus test results and C) stay two weeks in a quarantine facility.

        We didn't do "B" incredibly until Biden took office. As far as I know the US never implemented "C."

  8. rational thought

    If it is sarcasm it is implicitly making a real bad assumption which is basically the same as what spades has been incorrectly saying for a while.

    Back maybe in April, we had almost no delta here in the usa ( not sure maybe you have to go back to march but same argument). Almost all our case count that is so much higher than Australia was alpha or other pre delta strains. At some point , our delta cases were as low or lower than what Australia has now.

    And what happened. Delta has exploded with a huge R and used exponential growth to get to the majority of our cases today. While alpha shrunk to a very small amount as the alpha R stayed below 1.0

    To some extent , you can consider the different covid strains to be seperate viruses with seperate tracks

    Comparing the usa case graph for all strains to the Australia graph obscures the issue. Compare a usa graph of just delta cases to the Australia graph of just delta ( with a bigger scale) and that tiny number of Australia delta cases today might compare with the tiny number we had back in march or april. And look where we are now with delta. Australia could be there in 3 months or earlier. As Australia has less immunity, their delta R could be bigger than ours. If the actual delta R is 9 for no immunity and 80% of australia has no immunity, they are In a world of hurt. Even if it is 2.0 instead of maybe 1.5 here, it doubles every infection cycle. 10 cycles ( maybe 2 months and a bit?) and you have 1000 times the cases.

    But after 5 cycles, just 32 times which, with current number is still not horrible. Australia has a short window, maybe a month or so, to get a crash vaccination program going or they are going to face a wave as bad or worse than ours in the winter.

    This is just like spades saying no problem here in usa now as case counts still not that high.

  12. memyselfandi

    Donald Trump has single handedly caused the US to be the victim of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

  13. lawnorder

    The Aussies and New Zealanders have undoubtedly seen exponential curves, such as the ones you see in the daily "Coronavirus Growth" stories in this blog. By far the best time to squash exponential growth is while you're still low enough on the curve that the problem looks trivial, because if you don't it can become non-trivial really quickly.

  15. Martin Stett

    Next time make the print bigger and darker--sarcasm is worthless if you can't see it.
    Apparently the Murdoch media in Oz is weaker than it is in the US and UK. That or Aussies are more used to its bullshit and ignore it.

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