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.

@LovelaceBiggWither

No, if we keep our state borders closed, it won't necessarily spread to all states. The state closures are tightly monitored.

Gladys is not the only sane leader, she's the leader who had the chance to stop delta and chose for ideological reasons not to do so until her hand was forced.

NZ is still pursuing elimination but Australia is not. Once our vaccination rates are high enough we'll re-open the border.

At some point the borders will be opened. And then if it's not the Delta variant, it will be one of the many other variants that are around that will spread in NSW. It's just a matter of time, sunshine. Welcome to reality.

I think this is the issue with a zero Covid strategy. If the rest of the world is not doing a zero Covid strategy then you can’t pursue it long term?

@Delatron

Not everyone will be able to be vaccinated, children for example. Plus people that don’t want to be. You won’t hit the required %. I think it’s been great for you all but unfortunately there will be tough times ahead now. And tough decisions for the government.

But that applies everywhere (the point about needing a certain % of the population immunised). The point is well made - at some point AUS and NZ will have to open up and some of their citizens will catch whatever variant is "letting rip" (being transmitted) at the time. Hopefully after another year it will just be a bad cold.

I am not too keen on opening up fully in less than two weeks' time and I definitely think we could have kept masks in crowded indoor spaces. But we can't keep moving the goalposts - originally we were going to open up after vulnerable people were vaccinated, then over 50s, and now it's more or less after all adults have received at least one dose. I am not sure moving the goalposts again is really feasible.

Not in the UK, but happy at the moment to be in a country where even my 18-year old is vaccinated and we all have vaccine passports and can travel in Europe if we want to. Most of the people I know have already had covid, no matter how careful we’ve been - not everyone can work from home. Watching Australia with interest, and hope to be able to visit family soon. It’s a huge problem that so many there are against vaccine, especially with the much more contagious Delta. Then again, Astra vaccine is not allowed here and I think more people would have declined the vaccine if we only had Astra to choose from like in Australia.

@igelkott2021 my point is, when you have a large proportion of the population who have had the illness and therefore some immunity your percentage needed to vaccinate to get to herd immunity is lower.

A population with zero immunity for a novel virus needs to hit about 97% vaccinated which isn’t going to happen.

I’m not sure what recent stats are on the % of people in the U.K. that have had Covid? I remember ages ago reading a 20% figure for London. So it is a different situation.

@LovelaceBiggWither

Gladys is a cowbag who didn't shut down in time on principle. She's bleated on that NSW will never go into lockdown on her watch. She was forced to order NSW into lockdown when the numbers got too high even for her. Lockdown and circuit breakers have worked in other states because our premiers call for them very early on. We had a 3 day lockdown last week here in Q with an extension of a couple days for the city of Brisbane. It worked, the delta variant has not taken hold here as yet.

Unfortunately the vaccination debacle is not a state issue, it's a federal issue and Scummo has fucked that duck well and truly. I'm just hoping that the grassroots fury at this mess sees him dumped at the next election.

Brilliant summary of the situation here in Australia.

Gladys should have locked down NSW way sooner than she did. Now they've had to lock down for an extra week instead of just two weeks. Here in Queensland we had a three day lockdown that was extended to four days, and that was enough to track, trace and keep the outbreaks in Queensland under control. We have to wear masks when out for two weeks. That's annoying but sensible.

Our premier Annastacia doesn't mince her words when addressing the public about lockdowns and restrictions. Tells us to stay home unless we have one of the four allowed reasons to leave home (to buy food/medicine; work/study; receive medical treatment or provide care; and exercise). Gladys however asks and says please and doesn't act like a leader. She doesn't even make non-essential shops shut during a lockdown. Here pretty much any shop that wasn't a supermarket or pharmacy was shut down. No hairdressers, clothes shops, gift shops etc were open. They're all open in NSW. Gladys' excuse is that no one has defined what counts as an essential and non-essential business. Holy shit. She's the state leader. Define it. She has the power to do that but hasn't done it.

It's awesome to be able to live a mostly normal life with very little risk of contracting Covid after watching the shitshow the USA went through until Biden took over the presidency. Watching what has happened in the UK has also been scary. Listening to Boris' announcement the other day was chilling. For someone who nearly died from Covid I would have thought he'd be more cautious about it. Clearly not. Perhaps he's forgotten about how ill he was.

As for vaccination in Australia, there simply isn't the supply of vaccine available for it. Plenty of Astra Zeneca but it's not recommended for people under 60. My DH and I were lucky enough to get fully vaccinated with Pfizer while there was a supply. We're two of the less than 10% of the country who are fully vaccinated. Now people can't even get an appointment for it until September or October.

I hope people remember how much the Liberals and Scomo have fucked things up wrt vaccinations when it's time for the federal election and vote the bastards out.

Or they could get to 97% by a mixture of vaccination and infection, eventually. Nothing in their strategy so far prevents that. However by starting the 'infection' part well after the 'vaccination' part (and after treatments have also improved), they'll have had many fewer deaths and much less disruption along the way.

@Mrbob

Tbh (speaking from Australia) we just need to get our vaccination rates up massively and our quarantine system to a point where people could come and go more freely (while still quarantining for 10-14 days) if vaccinated. At the moment I think there is enough chance that variants will soon escape vaccinations that I would put up with quarantine being a permanent thing providing it didn't cost much (maybe home detention anklets or something) and the capacity was huge. It is really awful that there are still people who can't get home

We live fairly normal lives mainly free of fear. It is hard to put a price on that. I am in no rush to start bombing off around the world again- I would just like the opportunity to see my family in the UK every so often. Otherwise we can be fairly self sufficient. We can have everything from ski holidays to tropical beach holidays without leaving Australia. Its not ideal but its not exactly a hardship. Our economy is doing beautifully and life is easy.

NSW is not "letting it rip" It is trying to get down to zero again because none of the other states will open up until they do. We have a hugely vulnerable population in the Northern Territory particularly that NO one will risk.

I think it is probably hard from the UK to understand how strictly we control it here (which in return means most of the time we can have very relaxed restrictions) They literally put a town into lockdown for 2 days because someone who was in the airport there for a few hours developed covid a few days later. No messing around.

I honestly think you’re living in a bubble if you think Australia’s economy can chug along forever with closed borders and quarantine. Sure for now we can holiday at home (if state border aren’t closed) and sell houses to each other but eventually we need to rejoin the rest of the world.

The plan released last week has borders reopening so Covid is coming. All the people who refuse to be vaccinated because they think Covid won’t reach them will be in for a shock. As Dan Andrews said, once everyone has had a chance to be vaccinated we won’t be locking down cities and closing borders to protect them. We must get back to normal.

Well really you could argue that Gladys is doing exactly the right thing - allowing Covid to slowly spread through the state. It’s so funny reading these messages because it seems like half the people want to stay locked down forever and half just want Australians to suffer and die as some kind of penance for, I don’t know, managing to outwit the virus the first time round? It’s such a weird way of looking at it - like “you deserve this, ha ha, stuck on your perfect fucking island while we’ve all had to suffer, now it’s your turn”.

@FeralWoman I think a lot of people in NSW feel very differently. We don’t want to be ordered about by our elected politicians, we expect a dialogue and Gladys has done a good job at balancing the needs of business and people to go about their lives. Lots of people in NSW feel that her hair trigger on lockdown is a massive over reaction and we don’t want to be told to do daft things like wearing a mask on our own in a car.
But you guys voted for her so I guess you like the paternalistic style of leadership.

@tiltedtomatoes spot on - the chances of dying of Covid even without vaccination are reduced by having a year to learn about it, best treatments etc. Plus we now have vaccination (over 30% have received one dose) and so even when the time comes that Covid does start to spread through, we should be in a better position than if we had just allowed it in last January.

It’s the same arguments everytime Australia and NZ are brought up, some posters are just waiting for it to go tits up so they can say I told you so.

I wonder why, it’s such an unpleasant way of looking at things.

I don’t think it will go tits up

I think the warning to Sydney residents will work and by next week things will be containable. Hope so anyway

I know it’s been better, my family is in Covid free state it’s been totally different to here. Could t have been more different.

But at some point we’ll all be post vaccination stage and it’ll feel pretty similar, albeit without the horrendous time

And I’m unconvinced we could have done the same, so it’s always pointless talking about that particular failing imo

Couldn’t

Unfortunately for the countries who acted to protect their citizens, they will still struggle because other countries, such as the UK, acted too late with too little at every juncture. Global pandemics need a global response.

@wafflyversatile

Unfortunately for the countries who acted to protect their citizens, they will still struggle because other countries, such as the UK, acted too late with too little at every juncture. Global pandemics need a global response.

The timing on the curve is a huge difference though

U.K. and NZ locked down pretty much same time

A bit like bring much closer to a tsunami one country has much more time to act

Each country did what it thought was the best thing to do, with the information they had at the time. I think, in Australia, being in Asia (basically) we have feared and planned for this for a long time. Certainly businesses and schools leapt into action in January 2020, suggesting a plan was being put into place. Eg, people from China were quarantined from January, businesses advised/banned people from overseas travel fromFebruary. We have a huge amount of travel to and from China and the risk of a new disease (like SARS) coming from China was always a danger that was planned for.
In the U.K., I don’t know, but I think the plans were more around Flu, because those are the dangerous viruses that have affected people before. So their plans were different.
But to be fair, everyone was acting in the dark, Aus was lucky in its geography and low population but we really are all in this together. So many of us here have families in Europe - we aren’t all sitting here like “I’m all right mate”, because we worry about our family members getting sick and us not being able to see them.

@wafflyversatile I 100% agree with this - global cohesion would have been a good thing, but I don’t know how realistic that would ever have been. We don’t even have a cohesive plan between our states!

All of Europe and US got hit hard

It was here very early. Aus do sound as if they did more early on but by the time NZ did lockdown there were around 140 cases in total in late March

Really so much easier to say look at the carnage we can avoid that and contact trace all of them. And it was still tough.

Plus early on the WHO were not advocating border closure

The SAGE minutes from Feb are quite interesting too, advice was quite different to what we hear now

There are a lot of opinions on this thread which are obviously not based on actual facts.

www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-case-numbers-and-statistics

485 active cases in the WHOLE country
28 cases in the past 24 hours
Less than 32000 cases in TOTAL since the beginning of the pandemic.

It feels like people are wishing the worst.

Question from a Brit who has looked on enviously at the way our mates down under have managed Covid : Why haven’t the Aussie & NZ governments taken the opportunity created by closing their borders to vaccinate their populations while they weren’t having to fight a pandemic at the same time?

IIRC NZ at least said that as there is only so much vaccine availability other countries needed them more.

I live in NSW, am ECV and am due my first vaccination in about two weeks. I woke up this morning feeling absolutely terrible. It's either the flu or - not. I haven't had any respiratory illnesses for about 18 months. I can't imagine where I picked it up as I've hardly been anywhere, and when I have gone out, I've been masked.

I'm sitting on the couch here and can hardly move really