Why are we not following Australia?

[yawnsvillex]

I'm sorry if this has been done to death.

But having just been on a call with my Aussie cousins I am SO jealous.

Masks have gone, no social distancing AND NO VACCINE! So how the fuck have they done it?!

I'm depressed at the thought of a lockdown in January / February. Furlough has been extended until the end of April so basically we are fucked. With no promises of even April?!

I really don't care anymore.

Look at other areas of Australia, they're going back into lockdown.

I'm fed up of it too. Until the vaccine has been given to enough ppl we are stuck.

This says that 1.5 m distancing still recommended in NSW.

Don't hug, don't touch, do sanitise, masks not required but strongly recommended.

Maybe people in NSW are envious of people in the Northern Territories.

On the flip side, I think Australia will be fucked economically as tourism accounts for a lot of the economy relatively speaking. Similarly with NZ - even if they keep Covid at bay, operating as a self contained island with basically no international visitors is surely going to be catastrophic if it goes on for long.

Every time someone asks this question, it’s invariably because the country in question had a much harder and stricter lockdown in the first place than the UK has ever had and would ever accept. EG no foreign travelers in or out at all as in New Zealand. No going outside (even for exercise or dog walking) as was the case recently in South Australia. Or having a monitor on your front door, so that if you even so much as open it, local authority enforcers turn to ask what the fuck you’re doing - as in Wuhan for example. Or, when even one positive case is detected a whole town of 10,000 people is strictly, and that does mean strictly, quarantined for weeks, like in Vietnam. In the UK people are protesting about wearing face masks and not being allowed to go to the pub. That’s why.

My relatives in Victoria had a far longer and stricter lockdown than we had here on the basis of very few cases.

What's Australia's way out? They have mostly bought the AZ vaccine. To achieve herd immunity with no kids being vaccinated and no existing immunity is going to be challenging. They may have to mandate the vaccine to ever allow travelling again.

They not only closed their borders to the rest of the world (and continue to do so although there was talk of an air bridge with New Zealand) but they also closed the borders between states so no travelling to NSW from the Northern Territory for example (and this is set to continue being the case for some time). Are we prepared to do the same thing here - close the border between Scotland, England and Wales?

Australia also have the advantage of people only travelling there for the specific purpose of going to Oz (their tourism industry has suffered far more than our own) whereas we are an international hub for people flying to elsewhere so aren't able to close the border.

All in all, we are very different geographically which impacts on the decisions our governments have made and so can't really be compared like for like.

We can't do the same as Australia because Australia currently has 8-10 new cases per day. We have tens of thousands of cases per day.

Herd immunity can only be achieved through vaccination, so both the UK and Australia will be relying on mass vaccination.

Australia’s seasons are opposite to ours. They had large swathes in lockdown and not allowed to cross borders etc. when we were in our summer and enjoying a relative reprieve. They’ve also got much more space to work with...

They’ve also got excellent border control and will be benefitting from New Zealand’s measures. We still allow international travel with our closest neighbours.

They also have a completely different climate and much less dense population.

I don't understand why people are STILL making posts like this. Could they not consult one of the million or so threads on the topic written over the past 9 months?

Also, the situation in Melbourne I think it was with the people effectively being held prisoner in their tower blocks for weeks on end as part of lockdown has since been deemed unlawful - that's the measures the country resorted to... Is that really what you want to see happening here?

@IcedPurple

I don't understand why people are STILL making posts like this. Could they not consult one of the million or so threads on the topic written over the past 9 months?

Calm down. I said I was sorry if it had been done to death.

Stick the knife in why don't you, when I can't even see the point of my life right now

@pennylane83

Also, the situation in Melbourne I think it was with the people effectively being held prisoner in their tower blocks for weeks on end as part of lockdown has since been deemed unlawful - that's the measures the country resorted to... Is that really what you want to see happening here?

Yes if it gets us to where they are now.

I can see this situation in the U.K. going on for YEARS!

Everyone seems ok with it going on like this

Stick the knife in why don't you, when I can't even see the point of my life right now

I'm sorry for that - I feel much the same way - but how is making yet another thread on something which cannot be changed going to help your mental state?

I don't know @IcedPurple I just don't know how much more I can take.

I'm sat in my PJ's ... should be working but can't face it. I don't know how to pull myself out of this.

Thank you for the apology.

Yawnsville.
This winter is shit. Today is particularly shit. (It’s blowing a gale and pouring too where I am.)
We will get through it.

I can see this situation in the U.K. going on for YEARS!

Even without a vaccine pandemics generally don’t last more than 2 years or so. Take the 1918 influenza pandemic - that strain of disease became the main seasonal influenza until around 1958, even after the pandemic petered out.

Already experts are estimating around 10% of the UK have had the virus. We do have a vaccine, and we should have more coming along.

As for Australia they had initial advantages - they didn’t have the levels of February pre-seeding that we had before disease monitoring for travellers not from China was happening, they’re not a major transport hub.

And they were less complacent, despite having fewer cases. They shut down mass gatherings before their case numbers were high and started their more stringent measures around the same time we did - but much earlier in their case load. Shutting the borders early and having mandatory hotel quarantine feels like a huge factor.

They weren’t without fuckups - Ruby Princess and Melbourne hotel quarantine are the two most obvious. But talking to Melbourne friends they’re glad they had the draconian lockdown to eradicate rather than suppress.

Ultimately, they had a strategy and have stuck to it.

I’m desperately hoping they licence a vaccine and get enough of the population vaccinated to allow travel, because I do miss my family and this has been the absolute hardest year to be an immigrant away from my country and my family. But I can’t blame their government for taking the cautious path.

Most of Australia's imports come in in containers. Some by air freight. Already they are concerned that the cluster in Sydney came via air crew.

In the UK, just one port, Dover, has 9000 lorries per day bringing in goods, including food that we rely on. Each lorry has at least one driver. We have other shipping ports. We also have container freight and air freight, but it would take years to transfer all our land freight to containers and air, if it were possible at all, and the cost would be prohibitive.

Thanks, partly, but not entirely, to freedom of movement, we have huge numbers of people who need to transfer between the UK and continental Europe on a regular basis for family and/or work reasons.

I don't think the majority of people in the UK would tolerate losing a huge chunk of our imports, nor banning people whose lives are set up to move between here and the Continent from doing so.

yawnsvillex We're coming out of it now so hang in there. It may take ages to vaccinate everyone, but once quite a few are done it makes it hard for the virus to spread and it will become rarer to see a case. We don't have to remove every last trace of the virus before things improve. Just make it manageable.

It was probably true that we could have had a stricter lockdown at first and controlled it better, but even now we have regular threads with people saying that it's not fair and against their human rights to tell them what to do. Those people are too stupid/contrary to obey even the simplest rules and short of a shoot-to-kill policy for rule-breakers (I'd have voted for it) there wasn't much we could do.

You want it to be over, but there are protestors getting together in crowds in without masks to spread it faster.

But we WILL get there and it won't be years.

Yes the trade and imports/exports logistics is a HUGE factor.

They’re back to normal in China too.

What about this OP is it that makes your life feel so bad?

I ask because it sounds like you still have a job? You can meet friends for walks. Buy most things from supermarkets or online. What actually is so bad that it’s making you wonder if there is a point to life?

Early action taken. It’s summer there, so the virus is on the back foot. Stricter lockdowns. They also don’t yet have any of this new variant that’s causing our absolutely mental numbers in parts of the UK.

They also don’t yet have any of this new variant that’s causing our absolutely mental numbers in parts of the UK.

We don’t know that yet. The spike could just as easily be behaviour-driven.

Lockdowning the virus to elimination in the UK is futile. We'd lost before we even knew Covid 19 was in the country. Samples have shown that people have died from the virus having caught it in the community before we'd heard about what was happening in Wuhan. We haven't got a clue about how widespread it was in Dec, Jan and early Feb. It was already here before anyone would have had reason to query shutting down the borders.

A week or two in March makes no difference at this point.

As crap as it it, I'd rather be in Melbourne Derbyshire than Melbourne Victoria.

We might be an island, but we are highly connected to the rest of Europe and the world.