Are you in Australia? Have you changed your behaviour as we have so few cases?

[Ozgirl75]

I’m in Sydney and I think we had a total of 4 new cases countrywide yesterday.

We are still at home etc but I must say I’m feeling a lot more relaxed now and I’m seeing loads more people out and about. I had my hair cut yesterday and the shopping centre was fairly normal. Roads were pleasingly quiet at 5pm though - almost the best of both worlds!

I think most parents will make their own decisions.

2 weeks is a long time in this pandemic. It may be that my youngest goes back 1 day a week and my eldest doesn't for now.

Will see how it plays out. I do wonder if it would be better to start up elective surgeries etc first (and of course schools being available to parents needed for that), give it a couple of weeks and THEN do school.

Though I am worrying about all of those kids who don't have the advantages mine do and what life looks like for them right now.

It is easy for me/my family. It is not so easy for many others.

In Melbourne, working as normal but with decreased elective admissions.
DH working from home.
DD2 works at local shops so does shopping for us.
Happy to stay as we are for the time being.

We're in Brisbane. It does feel like things are changing in so much as we now know that there isn't any community transmission happening. My husband was tested this week because of a cough. The lady at the pathology clinic said she'd done hundreds and hundreds of tests and only had two positives and they were both linked to overseas travel.

You don't know what you're not testing.

If we're only testing symptomatic people, we might have an idea that community spread is low, but we don't know that for sure.

We need to be testing widely in the community - not in the 'have a sore throat' community, but in the general community.

But jane even out of the thousands of tests they are doing per day on symptomatic people, there are only 2-5 positive per state, sometimes zero. So how many tests on non symptomatic people would you realistically expect to test positive.

They have expanded testing in Vic to everyone with symptoms. If no-one with symptoms tests positive, it’s a fair bet it’s not bubbling away under the surface in a secret army of asymptomatic spreaders who are only giving it to others who will be asymptomatic! If we can keep testing like that it’s a no brainer to ease restrictions moderately in the near future.

I'm from Sydney. I'm not going to change my behaviour exactly, as everything (eg gyms, cinemas) is shut anyway there's no where to go. And I've already been going out exercising daily and supermarket shopping whenever needed, so no change there either.

But like some pps I am also no longer concerned. With under 20 new cases per day, the chance of being among them in literally 1 in a million.

I think my concern at the moment is that there are too few cases - the curve is too flat. We have no herd immunity at all and at this rate (20/day) it would take thousands of years to achieve it. Asia, Europe and North America will be back open for business and we will be - what? Hiding away down here with NZ, with closed borders indefinitely?

They can only test the people who turn up. DH is working in a small city fever clinic (low cases in the district to be fair). They are getting between 0 and 5 people to be tested every day.
My biggest concern is that people becoming over complacent could lead to us losing the excellent control we have. I’m not a Scomo fan in the least but the government here have dealt well with this situation imo.

I don’t bother thinking about herd immunity. 14% of new York and 20% of New York City have had it, and think about the nightmare they are going through just to get that far. You would need minimum 70% for herd immunity and probably more, getting to that point would be a disaster. Better to maintain strict testing and isolation protocols as we open up slowly and let the very hard working doctors and scientists establish better treatments if not a vaccine

I’ve had the same thought 1300cakes but then again nobody knows how long immunity would last. What if a population builds up sufficient immunity in the short term but it only lasts 12 months and then the whole process would start from the beginning again.

I’m definitely in favour of starting to lift restrictions though. At least in places like South Australia where current numbers are very low and there is virtually no evidence of community transmission happening. We can’t lose sight of the fact that shutting down huge parts of the economy also causes harm.

We're also in the Upper North Shore of Sydney. I know the school you are talking about who have switched to a 3 term year and I'm wondering if our school will do the same (large boys' school down the road).

@NotTheOnlyPomInTheVillage I was really hoping that school, and some of the other local ones, would follow the same path as ours. DD did too as she has friends there so would have liked holidays this year to have synced. It seems like a really sensible option, especially for kids who are not keen on online learning, and at the end of the day the physical facilities and extra curricular opportunities are what attracts a lot of people so maximising exposure to that would seem to be a good thing.

@SnowsInWater It just makes perfect sense. Particularly as the Christmas Hols are soooo long. Also online schooling is so hard for the boarders, given the different time zones.

I'm in Adelaide too. I think the kids going back to school is too soon and we are being used like an experiment. We can see what's happened in other countries when the restrictions have been lifted too early. We will just end up back in the same situation.
My kids won't be going back. One of them has a chronic health condition and their paediatrician isn't very impressed with the decision on schools.

I went to the shops last week and no one was social distancing. I had to keep dodging people coming up behind me and leaning over me.

One of them has a chronic health condition and their paediatrician isn't very impressed with the decision on schools

That's interesting.

Do you anticipate any difficulties in keeping your kids at home for the time being?

Wheatbelt here - everyone behaving themselves but in high spirits and not too much anxiety about. Still surfing (at a distance - not too hard round here!)

Social distancing has become lax where I am - happened as soon as we heard schools were reopening. I’m struggling with the expectation that DC can be together all day in a classroom but can’t socialise outside school. I feel the government has done a good job So far but I wished they would give us some schedule of the exit plan. It would give people something to work towards. The infection rate has been very low but how much lower does it need to be and for how long before we start lifting the lockdown? I think some guidance from the Government is needed right now

we are being used like an experiment

No we aren't. If anything we rewarded with returns of freedom for low rates.
It actually makes no sense to keep SA schools closed, we have such low case rates and virtually no community transmission. We never got to levels other states did, which is why we are still allowed groups of 10 and always have been. With such low rates, I'm not prepared for dd to miss months on end of school
Like it or not, one state will have to go first in the big reopen. It makes sense SA is top of that list, we already had the most lax restrictions to lift
This experiment line may hold weight if we were in say NSW where rates and transmission were much larger.

I had to keep dodging people coming up behind me and leaning over me.
I do have to ask, what do you expect people in the shops to do? be buggered if I'm waiting for someone to read every detail of their label or compare prices across 3 brands, grab what you want, move and no one has to lean over. I'm not a slow shopper and not about to be held up by those who are.

I'm an ex-pat Spaniard living in Sydney Blue Mountains, my contract will expire in a couple of years when I go home to Madrid.

Social distancing is a bit more laxed but still safe. It's normal that with the low community transmission numbers people are feeling a bit more relaxed. I think the government and states got it right - acted early and hopefully will all get out "safely" early

@squeekums I'm not 'reading every label'. I'm walking down an aisle, trying to pick something up and expecting people to keep to the 1.5 metre rule. And giving others the same courtesy.

SA Health put out a post today asking people to stay home and not to leave unless it's essential. They can't have it both ways. We will be back here with another wave of it soon. Other states are staggering their school returns.

@janeskettle no we will be ok for the time being keeping them home, frustrating as it is. My dh may have to keep wfh even when others return simply to shield him.

@thelocalwoolieshasnotp Ok first up, great UN, i didnt notice it before
I didnt mean you literally, sorry it did sound like that rereading my comment.
Your comment just reminded me of being in aldi the other day, there was a guy taking ages to choose i block of bloody cheese, i leant over him to get what i needed, i wasnt going to hang around waiting. Im not hanging back and having my shop take longer, therefore being out longer for this stupid 1.5 thing WHEN we allowed in groups of 10 and schools open.

School is essential, shops essential.
I doubt there be a 2nd wave here, our community transmission is almost zero i believe, no new cases, over 90% recovered, only 1 or 2 in ICU and about 5 who recovering/stable and what cases we did have came from people who had been out of state.
Even the AFL is considering SA as a hub for teams to restart the season cos we doing so well.

We cant just stay like this till when a vaccine is found, what if it never is? We have to emerge at some point

From melb. Seems people are more relaxed. Where I live nearly everyone was wearing face masks and gloves, now not so much and more shops are opened.

I do wish we were heading into summer rather than winter. Fingers crossed for a warm wet spring and a hot wet summer.

That would cover bushfires and corona. TBH. At this point I am starting to worry more about the summer fire season than I am about corona.

We need the exhange of people and equipment with California and that probably isn't going to happen this year.

Thinking about supermarkets - given that most people have been continuing the visit supermarkets (and it’s not like there’s a huge variety to choose from), if the risk of transmission was coming from there, presumably we would have seen a bigger spike in cases from people catching it via their shopping trips.
As we haven’t, we can probably conclude the shopping trips are low risk.
Same with hairdressers - if they’ve been open throughout, with increased hygiene but no social distancing, but there hasn’t been an increase of cases linked to hairdressers, again, we can deduce that this is a low risk activity.
And if this is low risk, then surely sitting in a park or on the beach is even lower risk.
I’m hoping that while we’ve had this two month period of fairly slow progression of cases that at some point there will be info published on HOW the cases we have had were spread. Like, we know that the majority were linked to overseas travel and care homes but I’m guessing we have had some community transmission, and if so, where have people caught the cases; from family? from shops? gyms? restaurants? Etc etc

I think the difference here compared to Europe, UK and US is that most of our cases have been from overseas and cruise ships. Now we have cut off that source of infection I think the chance of a second wave is much smaller, especially for the states with smaller numbers of cases.