The UK may have got it right

[VioletRiemelt]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-57911032

Australians back in lockdown, while our restrictions are gone. Our exit wave could be over by September.

We have an outbreak of pedantry and there's no vaccine for that! Apostrophes at dawn...

Oh FUCKIT! Pedants' Corner!

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow

I haven’t received any of the above. So don’t have it to give back.

They locked down too late too many times. How can they have done much right with the death rate we have? That’s the measure l use.

Well thats fabulous that you haven't needed any help from the government.

Sadly many have relied upon much needed help, help to keep a roof over their heads, help to feed and clothe their children, help employers keep people in jobs.

Without this help, there would be a lot of people facing homelessness.

They've not done everything perfectly, but they've certainly not done anything.

Sorry you are cross about it but it’s unnecessary to keep typing global. Just saving you precious time in the future for more ranting and raving on MN.

Aus and NZ closed their borders ruthlessly to stop the viruses getting in. This worked in the most part but Australians weren't allowed back into their own country. Now they have started to let small amounts back and delta has got in. I'm guessing they are going to close their borders again.

UK did a shit job of keeping covid out. Closing the borders didn't happen in time or at all. Trusting people to self isolate etc... No covid tests on entry to country etc. This should have been set up in airport way before it did. They set up the test sites and vaccine centres and they are quite efficient now. Was a poor decision not to sort out testing at borders to stop covid getting in.

Australia is in a difficult situation now. They are starting to lose control of delta and are going into another lockdown. They don't know how long their lockdowns are going on for. Their vaccine rate is low so they have a long while to go before they can start to relax the lockdowns fully.

UK on the other hand are doing well with the vaccines. Yes delta is spreading rapidly, but we aren't fearing it like the previous variants because more of us are vaccinated. As only 50% are currently vaccinated I'm hoping that things get even better once 80/90% of adults and possibly children over 12 are vaccinated.

It is a global pandemic. It's not some silly competition with the UK in on corner, doing remarkably well, and Australia, in the other, failing miserably... at what, having a minute fraction of the UK's death toll??

@Mrstreehouse

Sorry you are cross about it but it’s unnecessary to keep typing global. Just saving you precious time in the future for more ranting and raving on MN.

Pandemic doesn’t mean global, rather an epidemic on more than one continents. Not necessarily global. Hence the need for the prefix ‘global’.

Australians weren't allowed back into their own country. Now they have started to let small amounts back and delta has got in. I'm guessing they are going to close their borders again.

Several thousand per week have arrived all through the pandemic. The borders have remained closed throughout the pandemic. It is flight numbers that are capped, and places in hotel and other quarantine. More people want to return than can fit into the caps.

I don't know where to start to unpick the misguided thinking in the OP. It's too hot.

No OP, it's not like that at all.

@IndigoC

It’s not a competition. No country has dealt with Covid perfectly. It’s a matter of what’s been sacrificed. Lives, jobs, mental health, freedom to travel and be with loved ones.

Just as well really or we'd be trailing around the course as everyone else was packing up their kit and going home.

Actually some have done pretty well.

Mauritius, Iceland, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, Tanzania to start with.

Several thousand per week have arrived all through the pandemic. The borders have remained closed throughout the pandemic. It is flight numbers that are capped, and places in hotel and other quarantine. More people want to return than can fit into the caps.

And it's super super important that Hollywood stars and sports players get priority over, you know, citizens. And we definitely want to make sure rich people can bump those without very stretchable financial resources.

The border has essentially been closed to the majority of Australian citizens abroad, speaking as one of them.

"Mauritius, Iceland, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, Tanzania to start with."

I live in Japan, and we've had a lowish death rate for reasons that aren't entirely clear, but the pandemic has been pretty poorly handled here.

Tanzania appears to be avoiding releasing data on COVID.
www.bbc.com/news/56242358

I'm happy for Iceland, Mauritius, Singapore and the like, but very small countries with no land borders almost certainly have pretty massive advantages over everywhere else.

twitter.com/davidriddel/status/1417803633823944706

I think Australians are going to HAVE to dump zero COVID at some point if they ever want to open their borders.

It does appear that Delta requires insanely high levels of population immunity in order to stop circulating. Very vaxed countries like Israel have largely seen off death and hospitalization pressures, but there are cases even there. LIkewise the UK, where over 90% of the population now has antibodies due to a mixture of high vaccination rates and a lot of previous infections, yet we're still seeing plenty of ol' cases (though few deaths). And Australia is about a million light years away from this kind of level! There is little natural immunity in the population and an awful lot of people are saying they don't want the vaccine either.

So if they want to open their borders in a normal friction-free-travel kind of way, Ozzies will have to accept that the virus is going to swirl around the country and that people might get sick from it.

If they can get REALLY high vax levels, they could manage "There will be positive tests, a few people will get noticeably sick and a very small number of deaths might occur." Now, I can happily live with that future, but if the whole population has been trained to see even a single case as a national disaster, it may be hard to get everyone to change their mindset just like that. Public fear isn't something that governments can just conveniently switch on and off like a tap.

And if they can''t get more than, say, 60% of their population vaxxed, even that is going to be a pipe dream.

I think Australians are going to HAVE to dump zero COVID at some point if they ever want to open their borders.

Electorally impossible until after next May at the earliest though....

Plenty of big countries with land borders have done better than here though, considering there are 200+ countries and we are in the top 20 for highest number deaths of per capita.

How come we have done so much worse than Bangladesh for instance, or Austria, or Turkey, or Egypt or Serbia or Vietnam or Botswana or Malaysia?

And if they can''t get more than, say, 60% of their population vaxxed, even that is going to be a pipe dream.

Look over there!

The topic of this thread is producing some really odd diversionary tactics. Australia will start to receive the bulk of its Pfizer and Moderna supplies in a couple of months, and that will be a gamechanger; new vaccine hubs are opening; pharmacies are being enlisted to boost availability.

Australia has not, at any point during the pandemic, been in the desperate position of the UK - so supplies were slow to arrive, initially, being diverted to places of greater need; and then the problems with the AZ vaccine were offputting to the older cohort in a country not dealing with community infections, at that stage.

The UK, meanwhile, has offered itself up as a test pilot: what happens when you let a highly transmissible variant run riot in a partially vaccinated population.

We are about 20 at the moment but our direction of travel is downwards. Many other countries are on the up so we’ll drop a few more places over the next few months. Our deaths per million has been fairly static recently.
Plus their are countries like Russia and India that should be much higher up this gloomy table than they are.
We’ll have to wait for excess deaths to see the true position, just as Valance said back in April 2020.

We will be a very useful metric for other countries like OZ to see at what level of immunity they might be able to open up at. It’ll be a bit more than us as we have some natural immunity but it will still be a useful guide.

Nobody, and I repeat, nobody, is using the UK as a great guidance tool for what to do in a pandemic. It's more a primer in what-not-to-do.

Meanwhile, Singapore has reintroduced restrictions just four days after relaxing them.

Really? Not the impression I get reading some of the international news. They are looking at our roll out and seeing what happens now. They’d be crazy not to follow it. It could be v useful for them.
If there was a country in our position doing what we are doing, we’d be watching them closely I am sure.

@unwuthering Singapore’s approach is exactly the same as the U.K. Live with Covid. Issue is they opened up before their vaccination rate was high enough. So they are delaying it exactly like U.K. did on 21 June. Ditto Netherlands.

Yeah, they are looking at the rolling out of the red carpet for a really nasty new variant.

So actually some other countries are getting it wrong and opening up too early and then having to reimpose restrictions. The U.K. decided against opening up on 21 June for this exact reason. Why is it people don’t dig deeper before stating what other counties are doing.

@unwuthering nobody is wishing for a nasty new variant. But we do have to put Covid into balance now vs everything else in life.