Regarding Australia, yes, they discuss that specifically in the article I linked. That particular intervention is a lot easier to enforce when you don’t have a

Regarding Australia, yes, they discuss that specifically in the article I linked. That particular intervention is a lot easier to enforce when you don’t have a long land border with a country going through an outbreak, and a very large number of citizens presently in the neighboring country. Australia’s borders are closed, and they never really had a lot of community spread. Canada had significant community spread, and earlier, and a larger population returning from hotspot areas. The point is a careful and thoughtful examination shows that a country’s geographic, social, and economic “natural affordances” are largely responsible for the differing COVID case loads, much less than the effective dollar amount “spent” on interventions. Spending on an intervention includes the economic hit as well as the direct cost. E.g. Australia was able to get a lot more bang for their buck because they’re an island and didn’t have a large segment of their population traveling in hotspots. I think we agree on the vaccines. The point isn’t there’s something specific about coronavirus. It’s not a “meme” that we don’t have a coronavirus vaccine. We actually don’t have one. That just means we might not have as much experience ramping up a new one as we do, for example, with influenza, and there may be things we need to learn along the way. A working vaccine or treatment in 12-18 months is a long way off. If we are anywhere near 5% prevalence that means we are a lot closer to 65% (when herd immunity starts being noticing beneficial) than you might think, since it is non-linear. Regarding ventilators, even in the general (non-COVID) case if you find yourself on one you’re about 50/50 not going to walk away from it. But with COVID it appears ventilators exacerbate the swelling in the lungs and in NY 80%+ of ventilated patients have died. [1]. That’s what I mean by “proven to be basically lethal”. We know the vast majority of COVID patients on ventilators die, far more than just the average ventilator death rate for pneumonia, using the same O2 saturation markers. So doctors are moving away from ventilators and no longer using the typical O2 saturation cutoffs for ventilating because interestingly patients with lower O2 levels are not in the typical level of distress. It seems the CO2 is still getting out even though the oxygen is not getting in... more like hypoxia. > It's true that in some cases oxygen is sufficient for some people. We can agree on more than that. Luckily the fact is that oxygen therapy is sufficient for the vast majority of cases. Just do the math on hospitalizations and deaths in NY with the known variable that 80% that were ventilated died. QED the vast majority were not ventilated. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/08/health/ap-us-med-virus-outbreak-ventilator-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/08/health/ap-us-med...