4 ms·
As long as you can keep your borders effectively shut for the next year or so I think you’ll be in great shape. That ship has sailed in the case of the US. As
by zaroth 7y ago
As long as you can keep your borders effectively shut for the next year or so I think you’ll be in great shape. That ship has sailed in the case of the US.
As I understand it, there is a bimodal approach to managing an epidemic. You’re on a totally different pathway of successful suppression, where you’ve never actually seen exponential community spread. Your endpoint is not herd immunity.
The US probably was seeing uncontrolled exponential community spread in ~January. There are major metro areas which have 20%+ prevalence. The only endpoint left for the US is herd immunity.
So you would not expect the same measures to be taken, as long as AU is striving to maintain suppression I think that means your local measures will have to remain quite a bit stricter than a country trying to obtain herd immunity as quickly as possible.
EDIT: (Since HN won’t let me reply) You’ve had a total of 6,700 detected cases and 63% of those were imported.
Your total community spread over this entire time was what we see in two days in Massachusetts.
You’ve done 500k tests total, the US is presently running 160k tests a day. Harvard just came out with a study saying they thought we would need to get to 5 million tests a day. This is what I mean by bimodal.
- genidoi 7y agoWe had an R0 greater than 1 for a long enough period that if the response wasn't on point, we'd be in a similar position to the US. One aspect that's missed is our testing rate - 500,000+ tests performed so far with a 1.2% positive rate. That's half of South Korea's. None of this is to blow my Aussie horn. Whilst I'm proud to live in a country that handled this crisis well, I can't help but feel frustration at many of the remarks that Trump has said, particulary comments such as "can you really believe the numbers coming out of these countries?" it's just baffling considering that the AU-US alliance is unshakeable and there is no reason to mistrust our figures. All stats sourced here: https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir...
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoIt's difficult for us to believe any country's officially reported test numbers because ours (and most European ones) are known to be at least order of magnitude below the actual number of infections.
- cycomanic 7y agoShow me evidence that there is 20% prevalence please. What I have seen so far has been very limited study with very shaky evidence (the RKI in Germany back pedalled pretty quickly on the results of the antibody test for example)
- zaroth 7y agoNYC's initial antibody study tested 3,000 people and came back with 21.2% positive. NYC expanded their antibody testing to 7,500 people last week and as of Monday it had come back with a 24.7% positive rate. > Building on an initial testing run of 3,000, another 4,500 random New Yorkers have been screened since last week for antibodies, which would indicate that their immune system battled the bug, the governor said in his daily Albany press briefing.... Some 24.7-percent of those tested in the city were found to have antibodies, up from 21.2-percent in the first round. https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/cuomo-says-nearly-25-of-nyc-residents-may-have-had-coronavirus/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/cuomo-says-nearly-25-of-nyc-re...