Austalian state likely can't contain Delta, will let it rip

[starfro]

www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-07/nsw-delta-variant-may-never-be-controlled/100273956

Be thankful that here most vulnerable people are double jabbed, whereas over there it's far, far fewer.

Delta cannot be contained, it's too transmissible.

@callinda

I don't think anyone ever thought that we could avoid every single COVID death. We've had 7 deaths in QLD already. The aim was always to reduce the number of deaths as much as possible.

The benefit we had in Australia was that we were behind at the start in terms of infection rates. It could easily have been the other way round. We have lots of travel with Asia. It could have been the UK looking at Aus and working out what not to do. It was just luck. And the problem is that for lockdown to work you have to go hard and fast BEFORE it looks like it's necessary. In Aus we were able to get the public and political will to do that because there were bloody terrifying newsreels of people collapsing on the street in China and Italian hospitals overrun. Also certain practical advantages in terms of geography.

But In the UK the lockdown was too little too late. On the other side, people have been very motivated to get cmvaccinated quickly there and there has been a great publicity campaign.

Not so here. People have been slow and complacent about vaccination. and government as well. We need a big campaign, celebs getting the jag, mobile units etc.

When the dust settles I hope all countries will be able to learn from one another without bitterness and recriminations, so that the world as a whole can be better prepared for NEXT time. Which there will be, sooner or later.

We did lockdown too late but a major issue for the U.K. is that our supply chain relies on thousands of lorries (and their drivers) entering the U.K. everyday. We also have a land border with Europe which presents additional difficulties.

I honestly think that even if we had acted earlier with lockdown, an elimination strategy would have been futile in the U.K. we'd have been in near constant harsh lockdown trying to stifle small outbreaks brought in from Europe. It just wasn't sustainable from a logistics perspective.

I'm not suggesting that everyone thinks all deaths are avoidable, but I think some people do feel that way. Some deaths in the U.K. could almost certainly have been avoided but by no means all of them.

Where each country actually ends up won't be seen for several years and due to individual challenges comparisons will be difficult. I'd agree though that ultimately it is in everyone's interest to focus on what we can learn from this experience overall with a view to improving on any future response.

People have been slow and complacent about vaccination. and government as well. We need a big campaign, celebs getting the jag, mobile units etc

Absolutely, it’s staggering how glacial the pace has been to date.

The government didn’t push vaccination in the past 6 months because they only had AZ. Any vaccination campaign would have politically backfired on them when doctors started telling the lines of people that they only had AZ, but that the current advice was not to use it for a large part of the population. So they kept quiet, hoping that all would be well until more Pfizer arrived at the end of the year, and that no-one would notice that they had severely screwed up their ordering.

People have been slow, but through no fault of their own, though I’m sure the government would like to blame it’s own citizens, so that they can remain untarnished and in power.

But the thing is the UK ended up having really long lockdowns anyway, and all the thousands of deaths. I don't know about total elimination but certainly pausing flights from Wuhan right at the start and banning non essential travel as it spread would have helped. Experience from here suggests that the earlier and the more strict the lockdown, the shorter the lockdown will have to be. I'd prefer short strictrolling lockdowns of a few days each rather than months and months of semi lockdown.

But so much was unknown at the start. I will always challenge those who say "lockdown doesn't work" though, as I think that is a dangerous and mistaken conclusion to draw at the present time on current evidence.

@callinda

But the thing is the UK ended up having really long lockdowns anyway, and all the thousands of deaths. I don't know about total elimination but certainly pausing flights from Wuhan right at the start and banning non essential travel as it spread would have helped. Experience from here suggests that the earlier and the more strict the lockdown, the shorter the lockdown will have to be. I'd prefer short strictrolling lockdowns of a few days each rather than months and months of semi lockdown.

But so much was unknown at the start. I will always challenge those who say "lockdown doesn't work" though, as I think that is a dangerous and mistaken conclusion to draw at the present time on current evidence.

Lockdown does work and we should have locked down earlier than we did (that would have reduced the length of the first lockdown very significantly). I am not anti lockdown at all.

We did have quite considerable periods (7 or 8 months last year) where restrictions were fairly limited and schools, shops, pubs etc were open.

I just don't believe that zero covid/elimination was feasible in the U.K. If we accept it wasn't possible then cases, hospitalisations, deaths etc were inevitable. Again I am not saying that there weren't mistakes made in the U.K. or that a zero covid strategy was "wrong". It was just not possible in the U.K.

6 cases soon become 200 a day of your not on the ball or when you belong to the NSW liberal Govt and don’t “do” lockdown until you do, complete with military insuring compliance of the health orders.

6 is easier to deal with and snuff out rather than leaving it till your totally out of control.

@Mypathtriedtokillme

6 cases soon become 200 a day of your not on the ball or when you belong to the NSW liberal Govt and don’t “do” lockdown until you do, complete with military insuring compliance of the health orders.

6 is easier to deal with and snuff out rather than leaving it till your totally out of control.

Except with Delta this is going to become a very frequent experience. Can people really live with that sort of unpredictability? Going in and out of lockdown every few weeks?

Can people really live with that sort of unpredictability? Going in and out of lockdown every few weeks?

They are going to have to. What’s the alternative?

Until there is the supply to actually vaccine the population, what can you do?
Let people get sick and possibly die because your not willing to be inconvenienced?

I thought there was supply of AZ vaccine?

And how many people have taken it up, given the Atagi advice?

AZ jabs are spaced out by 3 months... even IF everyone went and got themselves jabbed tomorrow, it would still require lockdowns to continue for at least another 3 months... and unfortunately they are NOT all going to go and get jabbed tomorrow, not in states that are currently successfully containing the flare-ups...

There apparently is but a lot of GPs and chemists haven’t got any or any Pfizer and won’t have any till mid August.
Pfizer had been taken from the rural areas to be given to year 12 school students do they can return to in person lessons.

They had scaled down production from June as they weren’t getting used and they planned to remove it from manufacture.
260,000 doses produced in a week in mid July.
They are now ramping it back up.

Politicians in all parties have been using lockdowns and border closures OVER a push to get vaccinated as it has a very immediate and strong affect on how voters feel about the politician who has invoked it. It’s a high-stakes political game. Not one politician has come forward in the past 6 months to say we’re doing this all wrong, we need to get behind AZ because we can’t keep persuading you citizens think we are all-powerful in the face of COVID, this isn’t sustainable, we will lose this game of roulette.

There is so rarely ever any simple honesty in politics... it’s so depressing that so many politicians (around the world) have used the pandemic to leverage political capital, at the expense of the people who they promised to support. Power hungry....

@Blackbird2020

Can people really live with that sort of unpredictability? Going in and out of lockdown every few weeks?

They are going to have to. What’s the alternative?

I think they’ll end up essentially closing down hotel quarantine. Just use specialised sites like Howard Springs that allow for proper air gapping.

The U.K. switched to an 8 week gap for both Pfizer and AZ.

The U.K. switched to an 8 week gap for both Pfizer and AZ

That’s good if AUS can do the same, but it is going to take more than 8 weeks to get to 70% or 80%... Finally there is an uptick in vaccination rates because of Sydney, but there is no logical reason it’s taken this long, other than the government didn’t spread their bets when making purchasing decisions, and then consequently didn’t go in hard with the only vaccine they had available.

Now, they are pushing AZ, but not because the risk of death from Delta is significantly higher in the young (but they’d like you to think that), but because they are facing the possible collapse of the healthcare system in Sydney as Delta is so transmissible, so many people are getting sick and requiring some level of medical care ALL AT THE SAME TIME. The risks of dying from Delta vs the risks of taking AZ for the young have never changed. The line that so many politicians took (we don’t want any of our younger population dying unnecessarily from AZ) was sooo irresponsible. It projected a powerful image for these politicians (I got your back, mate) but has lead to a possible catastrophe for Australia.

It really is interesting to see how Australia will emerge from this. They can't sustain zero covid long term and the vacination rates need to be increased. As above hopefully vaccination rates will improve (while lockdowns may keep happening) and healthcare can be prepared for the exit wave that will happen. It could well work as long as they are prepared for the high numbers with covid once they open up. The advantage is of course being prepared/having foresight and hopefully the protective factor of vaccination and a year or sos better knowledge wrt treating covid.

They have changed the vaccine gaps, Pfizer is now 6 weeks apart instead of 3. AZ is now 8 weeks apart instead of 12.

The thing that’s been missing from Australia all along is a coherent plan. Due to our lockdowns we have had a long period of pretty much normality. I do not understand why, in that time, we didn’t do things like significantly increase hospital capacity. The government failed to prepare the population for the reality that there will be cases at some point - I have no idea why this was, whether they truly thought they could avoid it, or whether it was more of a political decision to not scare people.
But what this has done is made some people (quite a lot!) so frightened of the virus that they are willing to accept long lockdowns, even though for the vast majority of them, the virus will be quite mild.
They should have prepared more while we had the time, whist accepting that cases would happen.
Back in January when vaccines were available and they were saying “it’s not a race”, I said on a large Facebook group that I’m part of that this was a ridiculous strategy and I was verbally pummelled, with people saying how we had “beaten” the virus and that it would be over soon. We were complacent.
Equally, I think the border closures were good, and effective. We’ve avoided huge deaths while vaccines have been developed and better treatments worked out. But we should have used our advantage better to get the population vaccinated and hospitals better prepared. We’ve had 18 months! We could have built numerous Covid specific hospitals by now.

I expect based on the roadmap that some restrictions will remain when we reach vaccination targets, and they will allow spread of Covid to happen slowly with targeted lockdowns if it's going to fast for the healthcare to keep up.

@Ozgirl75

The thing that’s been missing from Australia all along is a coherent plan. Due to our lockdowns we have had a long period of pretty much normality. I do not understand why, in that time, we didn’t do things like significantly increase hospital capacity. The government failed to prepare the population for the reality that there will be cases at some point - I have no idea why this was, whether they truly thought they could avoid it, or whether it was more of a political decision to not scare people. But what this has done is made some people (quite a lot!) so frightened of the virus that they are willing to accept long lockdowns, even though for the vast majority of them, the virus will be quite mild. They should have prepared more while we had the time, whist accepting that cases would happen. Back in January when vaccines were available and they were saying “it’s not a race”, I said on a large Facebook group that I’m part of that this was a ridiculous strategy and I was verbally pummelled, with people saying how we had “beaten” the virus and that it would be over soon. We were complacent. Equally, I think the border closures were good, and effective. We’ve avoided huge deaths while vaccines have been developed and better treatments worked out. But we should have used our advantage better to get the population vaccinated and hospitals better prepared. We’ve had 18 months! We could have built numerous Covid specific hospitals by now.

Well said. Lockdowns and border closures only buy time. It’s so frustrating to see that time squandered in Australia when it could’ve been used to put better quarantine facilities and hospital infrastructure in place. And it fed the complacency in vaccine take up.

It’s interesting, because it almost felt like the leaders thought “well if we just close everything it’ll probably go away and then we’ll go back to normal”.
I don’t disagree with the border closures, I don’t even disagree with the lockdowns (although I believe the rules should be proportionate and rigorously medically attributed (no, there is no reason to wear a mask when you’re alone in a car)) but we should have vaccinated early and widely, and at the same time, prepared our hospitals. We had the luxury of so much time and it feels like we just squandered it.
If we’d done that we could have been so much better when cases did come - lock down vulnerable sites like aged care, keep schools going with rapid flow tests, allow vaccinated people greater freedoms to encourage vaccination (eg, have them not need to follow the 10k rule, allow them to meet outside with other vaccinated people; low risk high reward ideas).
If we’d done these things i think we could have emerged with a few hundred/low thousand deaths, a strong economy not subject to extended lockdowns and a relatively well prepared country, medically.

I think the inevitable exit wave will be relatively non-lethal, in part because the Ozzies etc. basically bought time for the medical sector to work out how to treat COVID. We now know a lot more about how to treat patients and we have some very good drugs coming up. And at least hospital staff in Oz and NZ etc. are likely to be almost entirely vaccinated by the point COVID is actually allowed to spread, so no danger of hospital systems being overwhelmed. There is absolutely zero doubt that the Zero Covid approach will, by the time this is all over, have saved loads of lives.

I think the biggest potential concern about the Zero Covid countries is not medical but psychological. Millions of people have now been "trained" to be really really terrified of COVID (because that is the only way to get a population to keep complying with LDs for a handful of cases)---it's not clear how governments are going to get people to live with the virus in the future. As the virus spreads, this will make a lot of people in these countries very reluctant to eat in restaurants, travel domestically, take part in leisure activities or keep their kids in school/nursery, which is likely to have on ongoing effect on a lot of things.

@Ozgirl75

The thing that’s been missing from Australia all along is a coherent plan. Due to our lockdowns we have had a long period of pretty much normality. I do not understand why, in that time, we didn’t do things like significantly increase hospital capacity. The government failed to prepare the population for the reality that there will be cases at some point - I have no idea why this was, whether they truly thought they could avoid it, or whether it was more of a political decision to not scare people. But what this has done is made some people (quite a lot!) so frightened of the virus that they are willing to accept long lockdowns, even though for the vast majority of them, the virus will be quite mild. They should have prepared more while we had the time, whist accepting that cases would happen. Back in January when vaccines were available and they were saying “it’s not a race”, I said on a large Facebook group that I’m part of that this was a ridiculous strategy and I was verbally pummelled, with people saying how we had “beaten” the virus and that it would be over soon. We were complacent. Equally, I think the border closures were good, and effective. We’ve avoided huge deaths while vaccines have been developed and better treatments worked out. But we should have used our advantage better to get the population vaccinated and hospitals better prepared. We’ve had 18 months! We could have built numerous Covid specific hospitals by now.

I agree to a point. Things have changed very fast, so long term policies have been difficult. Remember, it was only a bit over 12 months ago that people were still saying " there will never be a vaccine against covid". There were some very good reasons for Australia to back astrazeneca to start with. We had to change tack after more information came to light. There were also good reasons for our vaccine roll out to be slow. We just didn't have the same urgency they the UK did.