Who thinks Australia and NZ have got it right ?

[marilenagrace]

What do you think ? Do you think that keeping everyone out of the country is the right approach long term to deal with covid ? Do you wish we did that here in the UK ?

They need to hurry up their vaccination programme as their tourism industry will suffer a lack of international visitors. They’re a bit stuck at the moment. My very close family are frustrated that they can’t see me or my elderly mother.

There are huge parts of the world that adopted a more rigorous approach than Europe and the US and it appears to have paid off. East Asia and the gulf states are all doing well. I guess Australia and NZ will be able to work out arrangements with them. So yeah it will probably shape out okay for them.

People from Europe who have emigrated to New Zealand or Australia made the decision long ago that they would potentially not see overseas family for years. They actively chose to live in countries geographically isolated from all continents with massive human populations, and as distant from Europe as is possible. An annual overseas holiday from Australia is pointless if seeking warmth, sun, sea and sand, as you can get that in your own country; and very expensive if interested in travelling for different cultural experiences. The UK, on the other hand, has large populations of immigrants very used to being able to travel regularly to visit family and to go on holiday to warmer countries, or to travel cheaply on short, cheap flights to other countries which offer different cultural and other experiences.

All countries are not the same, and to expect the same reactions from countries with very different populations in very different situations is just silly, imvho. The UK could certainly have responded more effectively to the coronavirus threat, but New Zealand or Australia it was never going to be.

So, yes, Australia and New Zealand got it right for them - they are not a good example of what the entire of the rest of the world, or Europe in particular, was ever going to be capable of.

I agree shame about the vaccination balls up but at least they won't have deaths due to it.

SelkieQualia - I couldn't agree more. Australia is a phenomenally multicultural society and it's one of the many aspects of life here that I'm so incredibly thankful for.

In terms of our response to Covid, I think we could have been a bit faster off the mark like NZ. Since we came out of lockdown though, life has been pretty much back to normal - we're all just addicted to using hand sanitizer everywhere we go. A lot of my friends and family are hanging out to return to Europe for holidays, but I think it's good for the poor planet to have a break from all those carbon miles.

@oneglassandpuzzled

They need to hurry up their vaccination programme as their tourism industry will suffer a lack of international visitors. They’re a bit stuck at the moment. My very close family are frustrated that they can’t see me or my elderly mother.

Actually, the tourism industry in Australia is booming. Australians often travel to Indonesia or Thailand for holidays, and now can't. That money is now being spent locally.

Yes, I absolutely believe that NZ and Australia have handled Covid really well. There will be thousands of people in Australia and New Zealand spending time with loved ones now who would have died of Covid had a more lax policy be adopted. There will also be thousands of people in Australia and New Zealand enjoying fit and healthy lives who would now be suffering from crippling long Covid if a more lax policy had been adopted.

Given the UK'S different circumstances, in particular reliance on goods coming in via lorries from continental Europe, the UK could not have done exactly what NZ or Australia did, but our own government has consistently been pathetically slow in stopping Covid (and more recently different mutations of Covid) being imported in. In early 2020 it didn't even advise against holidays in Northern Italy at a point when it had become apparent that Covid was circulating widely there. Now it is failing to add India to the red list despite knowing that there is a potentially dangerous mutation of the virus circulating there.

But over time, a false sense of security took hold and the population became ever more lax with masks and social distancing.

This is an easy explanation but I am afraid people (especially journalists and some scientists) tend to overestimate the effect of NPI and underestimate other factors (e.g. seasonality, spread of new variants).

Uruguay is now in the beginning of Autumn. As we saw from our own experience, social distancing measures that seemed to keep Covid under control throughout July and August stopped working in early September.

In the short term it definitely worked.
But keeping the borders indefinitely closed is going to be extremely difficult.
I have British friends in Australia with elderly parents in the uk who don’t know if they’ll ever seen each other again.

I think it’s quite clear that the UK should have taken a very tough approach to arrivals in February last year once it was clear what was coming but keeping our borders closed akin to Australia and New Zealand just not doable for the UK due to so many (tens of thousands every day) trucks coming in and out.
Australia and New Zealand only have planes and boats coming in so infinitely more manageable.

I noticed from a link someone posted on another thread that the CDC in the US did not appear to have India on its red list, either.

I live in OZ and don't know of anyone who is angry about that. A few people with relatives overseas might be frustrated, but most people seem to be pretty happy with closed borders.

Fair enough. Assuming no reopening ever, how do young people feel about the prospect of never travelling the world? Never working abroad and coming back for Christmas? No OE at all? How do the many people with Aussie family living abroad, and the many immigrants to Aussie with all family aborad, feel about never seeing those people again?

That's what no reopening means.

They’ve done a fabulous job. Our relatives in Australia and NZ are living pretty much entirely normal lives. I think about them a lot as I’m dropping my kids off, masked and socially distanced seemingly indefinitely.

Their government has already scrapped the target to vaccinate by the end of the year, so there will be large percentages unprotected.

Yep, and our Govnt has come out yesterday or today saying given this they are not going to rush or really contemplate opening the borders as originally planned (end of year). I’m guessing we are not looking at that being until everyone is vaccinated and given the current debacle - Govnt made deal with AZ to vaccinate majority of population and deal with Pfizer to only do initial frontline group while waiting for bulk of AZ to come in. Now they have gone begging to Pfizer as we can’t vaccinate under 50’s with AZ and (rightly) given we don’t actually have a problem here most people over 50 don’t feel great about taking the risk. Essentially they are not taking the risk as the personal benefit to them will be greater, as is the case in places like the UK, but instead they are being asked to cop the risk to allow us to open up faster. Most of them are not buying it and want to wait for Pfizer, and I don’t blame them as it’s a hard pill to swallow when we are essentially living life as normal just without the international travel.

I can’t see us opening up until end of next year, who knows I may be wrong. It’s weird as people have become accustomed to jetting about. When I was young and worked overseas (did the UK for a decade as first stint there), you went with the mentality you couldn’t just jet back and no one could jet over to you and it was pretty much a given you wouldn’t see people for years. No Internet like these days, no Facebook, heck no email even. We communicated with family and friends by letter and postcards and they took several weeks to arrive. International phone calls were prohibitive and used sparingly for a few minutes max cramming everyone possible round the phone. I remember a colleague over there, also Australian, who had a parent die suddenly. It wasn’t a case of being able to hop on a plane and get home for the funeral, it just didn’t work like that. When you lived internationally you were taking the risk you would miss births, deaths, marriages and not see people for the duration basically. We survived and I’m sure people will again if they need to until we open up, whenever they may be....

Domestically we need to travel to take up the slack due to lack of international tourists but it’s not a hard task at present given we have no other option.

Well the USA has fucked up even worse than the UK has every step of the way so far so no surprises there.

Australia is unlikely to become the new Uruguay. Uruguay was always in a precarious position due to its neighbours, Brazil in particular.

It looks like Australia on the other hand will be able to open up to tourism from countries that already make up the bulk of its tourist visitors and crucially who are the high spending tourists - places like China, Singapore, Japan etc - without too much covid risk. These are also countries whose economies have been running as normal for a fair while now so there's a lot of discretionary cash waiting to be spent. They probably won't miss a few hundred thousand British backpackers trying to eke out their redundancy pay in cheap hostels.

From what I can tell we’re basically vaccinating ourselves into a similar position. The focus on variants in the press at the moment is largely because it threatens the efficacy of vaccines and therefore the UK’s position is only as strong as the global situation and that’s still raging. Australia and NZ have done well to avoid the high death toll but that comes with its own set of problems.

Unfortunately this is a situation that will continue to change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst, but I’m reasonably optimistic that things will continue getting better rather than slipping backwards again. It’s just important to remember that we can’t call the shots on which direction the virus will move.

They got it right for them it would seem. It’s naive in the extreme to think it would work for us.
I just wonder if long term their strategies might not turn out to be quite so wise.

@IcedPurple

NZ and Australia did what is right for them. However, their situation is unique and doesn't apply in the rest of the world.

This!

Yes, I wish we had done the same. No abroad holidays in return for pretty much everyday normal life sounds great. Cam travel again when safe to do so.

It looks great and they’ve certainly had an easier year than us. I’d have concerns for them in the long term though. Even when everyone is vaccinated, the virus will mutate, evade vaccines and people will still become ill. Do they stay ‘closed’ forever? Imagine the fear they will feel when (if) they are allowed to travel again or if (when) cases appear in Australia and NZ. I’m envious of the low death rate and how their way of life is relatively normal at the moment but don’t envy them the watching, waiting and inevitable panic when Covid takes hold or the alternative of never opening their borders.

It's feasible for Aus and NZ to do that, because of theirlocation and distance from other countries. Close the ports and airports and they can control who comes in. Their combined populations are less than half the population of UK (and far more spread out). So they have inbuilt advantages for migration isolation.

Uk is a dinghy /light plane/helicopter ride from France and N Ireland , absolutely impossible to police an entire coastline. It's also one of the worlds major air transit hubs.

@PicsInRed

I live in OZ and don't know of anyone who is angry about that. A few people with relatives overseas might be frustrated, but most people seem to be pretty happy with closed borders.

Fair enough. Assuming no reopening ever, how do young people feel about the prospect of never travelling the world? Never working abroad and coming back for Christmas? No OE at all? How do the many people with Aussie family living abroad, and the many immigrants to Aussie with all family aborad, feel about never seeing those people again?

That's what no reopening means.

Come on. Currently the borders between Australian States are mostly open. The border with NZ is opening, and the influx of people on planes entering Aus internationally via planes (then hotel quarantine) is growing from a trickle to a stream. That’s today. Forecast from our Govt is increasingly more (there’s currently some) outgoing travel for citizens from 2022-2023 in a careful managed way.

A bit different from the dramatic ‘never ever seeing anyone from another country ever again’. Hysteria won’t help anyone.

@IceCreamAndCandyfloss

Yes, I wish we had done the same. No abroad holidays in return for pretty much everyday normal life sounds great. Cam travel again when safe to do so.

But what NZ and Oz have done is a lot more than 'no abroad holidays'. They've pretty much shut themselves off from the world, with a small number of exceptions. Might be a good idea for them, but I'm baffled as to how, after a year, people don't understand that this would be neither possible nor desirable in a country with an open border with another country and completely dependent on freight brought in from abroad.

I think it's willful obtuseness at this stage.

What I think is that Aus & NZ had opportunities that weren't available to many countries and not the country where I live (Britain). NZ/Aus don't share land borders with any other country. They don't have a Northern Ireland type area with political violence threatening to blow up over possible closed borders. They aren't used as an important landbridge for another country. They are mostly or all food self-sufficient. They are weakly connected to rest of world in trade. Their airports have small roles as international hubs for travel. Services are not major parts of their economies; their populations are small and low density compared to Britain.

NZ locked down at a point (in their epidemic) that was like UK epidemic was on about 1 February. I recall MN voices demanding lockdown in UK before that, but those voices weren't taken seriously. Because (see whole preceding paragraph).

I don't live in Aus or NZ, or know anyone there. I don't feel like I need to have opinions about their choices, except to say I don't find them comparable to choices UK had.

a country with an open border with another country

An extremely politically contentious border at that, in a region that's already seen violence in the last weeks due in part to the potential for disruption due to Brexit. If we closed our borders completely it would only work if we did it in coordination with Ireland and kept travel open between the two countries.

If it were feasible, obviously the best approach anywhere would be a combination of Australian style border restrictions and minimal internal lockdown with UK style vaccine rollout, followed by re-opening the borders once everyone's vaccinated. If you can only pick one, the one that seems best is going to depend heavily on personal circumstances.

Australia made some good choices but also had some good luck - not getting the February 2020 import of cases that we unknowingly got, which contributed to our rocketing cases in March, a trade system that means imports and exports are easily segregated without humans mixing in large numbers (exclusively ships and planes rather than heavily reliant on RORO lorries that go to warehouses all over the country, rather than left at the docks or airport).

However I know my own family in Australia are getting worried about how on Earth the government is going to extricate the country from the prison it has built itself - in a country that is very used to zero Covid (and enjoying the benefits), how do you get support for an ongoing level of a Covid, including deaths, which even a fully vaccinated society will get if it’s connected to the rest of the word.

The trouble with a short to medium term zero Covid strategy comes when the exit strategy and long term goal isn’t clearly articulated from the outset.