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Not sure if these doctors have followed what has been happening in Melbourne, Australia. We have been in lockdown since early June and went from 700 cases per

Not sure if these doctors have followed what has been happening in Melbourne, Australia. We have been in lockdown since early June and went from 700 cases per day to 15 per day so it has technically worked. However, it has completely destroyed businesses and affected a lot of smaller retailers. Our premier has been called "Dictator Dan" by most of murdock media including WAPO but the support among public has stayed strong. Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine.

Johanx64 6y ago
If the virus hasn't been stopped completely all you are doing are dragging feet indefinitely (with all the catastrophical damage that comes along with it). It hasn't worked - literally nothing had qualitatively changed since day 1 when I said that exactly this would happen. All we have is better testing methods and a ravaged economy, yet fundamentaly we are at square zero.
- ISL 6y ago
  There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path. The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.
  - Johanx64 6y ago
    A lot of people that shouldn't and wouldn't have died are dead. Even more are unemployed, starving, homeless and in severe distress as a direct consequence. I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
    - wolco2 6y ago
      Those are the effects of moving society online. New winners and losers will emerge. A strong social safety net is helpful transitioning the losers back to productive winners. This was going to happen over a longer period of time anyhow.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Those aren't either/or decisions. Appropriate responses and better safety nets could have minimized both issues.
  - DarthGhandi 6y ago
    What numerical value would you place on saving 100 lives? Virtually all of them over 80. $500m? $1b? $100b? Just for comparison about 80 young Australians died from suicide this week alone.
    - ry454 6y ago
      About zero, really. Unless some of those 80+ year olds are prominent scientists, etc. The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life. A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
    - zacharycohn 6y ago
      Economists value a human life at $10,000,000 USD (there's a great Planet Money podcast about this). Therefore, 100 lives would be worth about a billion dollars.
      - logicchains 6y ago
        That's the value of an average life. Health economists at e.g. the NHS actually use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year, to account for the fact that e.g. an 80 year old has fewer years of life left than a 10 year old.
      - amscanne 6y ago
        Medical decisions in the USA suggest that the statistical value of a “quality-adjusted life year” is ~$128,000 on average. Obviously the question of “life years” is critical in this context. Everyone would be in favor of sacrificing more to save healthy children than people who are 80+. (No one wants to see anyone die needlessly, but the children can live happy lives for another half-century.)
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    >There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. If they had instead dropped a nuclear bomb on Melbourne, 0 people would have died from Covid19.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    True. I don’t think experts honestly thinks you can hammer the virus to zero though based on our knowledge of human behavior. Case in point, HIV has killed around 50 million over the past few decades, and we know exactly how it spreads, and it is quite easy to stop. If we can’t stop HIV, without a vaccine there is no way we can stop something airborne (which we now know SARS-CoV2 is).
- Paradigma11 6y ago
  We also have far better treatment methods and many ppl who get sick now would have died earlier.
xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
It's worth pointing out that this would be a second lockdown, as Ontario has already started to loosen restrictions after the initial lockdown (where cases also dropped to <100 during the summer).
- darcys22 6y ago
  Thats pretty much what happened in Melbourne. We started relaxing the restrictions and the second wave started. We followed with very strong lockdowns that brought us down from the ~700 new daily cases to the current ~15 new daily cases.
war1025 6y ago
> Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine Part of this is just fear talking though. My family was very concerned about the virus for the first couple months. Then people we knew in our age demographic (20s-30s) started catching it. Invariably it's been a day or two of fever and a week or so of cold symptoms. Absolutely people who are at elevated risk because of age or pre-existing conditions should lock down to whatever extent they feel is necessary. But the general feeling here (central Iowa) seems to be more and more that the lockdown is far worse than the virus. Because of that, we get raked over the coals pretty well daily by everyone in the media. But our schools are open, our universities are open, and people are more or less back to normal life. Cases are stable. Deaths are low and mostly restricted to the very old. We seem to have settled on an acceptable (to us) middle ground. I'm sure businesses are still hurting, but very few have shut their doors permanently. I get the feeling that's a very different picture than many places.
- zacharycohn 6y ago
  I'd encourage you to read through this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j2pb9a/serious_people_from_reddit_who_survived_corona/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j2pb9a/serious_p...
ketamine__ 6y ago
> We have been in lockdown since early June and went from 700 cases per day to 15 per day so it has technically worked. Victoria hasn't exited lockdown. How can you say it worked? > Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine. I have heard the argument that suppression is a good strategy because a vaccine is soon to be approved. If we can't develop a vaccine I would hope suppression wouldn't be the strategy.
- p1necone 6y ago
  It worked because less people died. Some people (myself included) are more concerned with human lives than opening businesses faster.
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    Are your people (and yourself) more concerned with human lives than children getting an education and not falling behind? If so, how long should children suffer? As long as it takes?
    - II2II 6y ago
      Take a look at the provincial breakdown. The Atlantic provinces are in a position where kids are going to school, restrictions are being lifted, and the number of cases are in the single digits per week. For the most part, there is not spread within these provinces so efforts can focus upon verifying that people coming into the province aren't infected and ensuring the population complies with far less extreme measures so that the virus does not gain a foothold in the region yet again. Even parts of the country with a far greater number of infections than the Atlantic provinces are seeing numbers stabilize (e.g. Alberta) or decline (e.g. British Columbia). This is not the case in Ontario, where the spread is essentially uncontrolled. Measures need to be put into place because the living will continue to suffer as long as that spread is uncontrolled, and yes the loss of life matters as well. A few weeks to stabilize the situation will ensure that lives are not lost needlessly.
    - wolco2 6y ago
semerda 6y ago
I have been following this mess. I’m an Aussie in CA. Even when a vaccine is available it’s not going to be 100% effective. Contrast it to another RNA based virus (but faster mutating) like influenza. The annual shot effectiveness fluctuates based on what is the dominant strain socially circulating. Therefore, the science Dan is subscribed to means Vic will be locked down indefinitely. Sure ppl love the lockdowns but the reality will hit hard when they realize there is no such thing as “pause” in the economy. It’s a hard stop followed by CPR. What ever happened to real science; you know, the one where we learn and adapt as new information is made available. I’m pretty sure we now know a lot more about this virus, demographics most at risk, it’s disease management etc... As Frank Herbert says; Fear is the mind killer.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Comparing a not yet existant vaccine to a vaccine for a virus that's totally different is silly. Especially comparing it to the flu, as that's a virus that mutates much more often than most viri. In any case no vaccine is 100% effective. The goal is typically to be effective enough that the virus dies out faster than it spreads. Which solves the problem. There are a lot of covid vaccine trials going on. The different candidates have different properties. It has yet to be seen which candidates are succesful.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    While you're correct to point that out, I'm not aware of any health experts who expect that the current crop of vaccine candidates are sufficient to stop the disease from spreading. The hope is that it will spread slower and/or be less severe.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      I'm definitely no expert on this, but it seems a little early to say. There's 321 candidates in development (albeit some very early stage) and none have fully passed trials yet. I think the effiacy of various candidates isn't clear yet (i may be totally wrong)
  - 6y ago
koyote 6y ago
I feel like everyone is talking about Melbourne's lockdown as if it was their first lockdown. This is their second lockdown. They virtually eliminated it during the first lockdown and brought the virus back in via hotel quarantine leaks (as proven by genomic testing). There is nothing indicating that the same thing won't happen again. NSW's contact tracing team has been excellent but I have not heard anyone detail how Victoria's team is up to scratch now (a part from throwing some money at Salesforce). There is no long-term strategy in this whatsoever, the hope is that the vaccine is available and effective before the inevitable 3rd wave hits a still highly susceptible population.
- gregoryl 6y ago
  VIC contact tracing has now adopted the same process as NSW
  - koyote 6y ago
    Do you have a source on that? I know that they sent some people up to see what NSW was doing but haven't actually heard them say what, if anything, they were going to adopt. There is this 'funny' article from a couple of days ago though; seems like a lot of lies and smoke: https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/nsw-denies-it-is-copying-victoria-s-contact-tracing-system-20200928-p56022 https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/nsw-denies-i... Gladys also indicated that a large part of NSW's tracing success was the tight integration and information sharing between government agencies. Something that, if you read between the lines, is apparently not the case in Victoria.
- spfzero 6y ago
  I wonder about this hope for a vaccine, and if it is a reasonable thing to base policy on. There is still no vaccine for HIV, after several decades of trying and many billions spent. None for SARS1, Mers, the commom cold. There are influenza vaccines, but still no effective ones in terms of preventing a significant number of deaths every year.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago

Johanx64 6y ago

If the virus hasn't been stopped completely all you are doing are dragging feet indefinitely (with all the catastrophical damage that comes along with it). It hasn't worked - literally nothing had qualitatively changed since day 1 when I said that exactly this would happen. All we have is better testing methods and a ravaged economy, yet fundamentaly we are at square zero.

ISL 6y ago
There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path. The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.
- Johanx64 6y ago
  A lot of people that shouldn't and wouldn't have died are dead. Even more are unemployed, starving, homeless and in severe distress as a direct consequence. I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
  - wolco2 6y ago
    Those are the effects of moving society online. New winners and losers will emerge. A strong social safety net is helpful transitioning the losers back to productive winners. This was going to happen over a longer period of time anyhow.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Those aren't either/or decisions. Appropriate responses and better safety nets could have minimized both issues.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  What numerical value would you place on saving 100 lives? Virtually all of them over 80. $500m? $1b? $100b? Just for comparison about 80 young Australians died from suicide this week alone.
  - ry454 6y ago
    About zero, really. Unless some of those 80+ year olds are prominent scientists, etc. The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life. A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
  - zacharycohn 6y ago
    Economists value a human life at $10,000,000 USD (there's a great Planet Money podcast about this). Therefore, 100 lives would be worth about a billion dollars.
    - logicchains 6y ago
      That's the value of an average life. Health economists at e.g. the NHS actually use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year, to account for the fact that e.g. an 80 year old has fewer years of life left than a 10 year old.
    - amscanne 6y ago
      Medical decisions in the USA suggest that the statistical value of a “quality-adjusted life year” is ~$128,000 on average. Obviously the question of “life years” is critical in this context. Everyone would be in favor of sacrificing more to save healthy children than people who are 80+. (No one wants to see anyone die needlessly, but the children can live happy lives for another half-century.)
- deathgrips 6y ago
  >There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. If they had instead dropped a nuclear bomb on Melbourne, 0 people would have died from Covid19.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  True. I don’t think experts honestly thinks you can hammer the virus to zero though based on our knowledge of human behavior. Case in point, HIV has killed around 50 million over the past few decades, and we know exactly how it spreads, and it is quite easy to stop. If we can’t stop HIV, without a vaccine there is no way we can stop something airborne (which we now know SARS-CoV2 is).
Paradigma11 6y ago
We also have far better treatment methods and many ppl who get sick now would have died earlier.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago

It's worth pointing out that this would be a second lockdown, as Ontario has already started to loosen restrictions after the initial lockdown (where cases also dropped to <100 during the summer).

darcys22 6y ago
Thats pretty much what happened in Melbourne. We started relaxing the restrictions and the second wave started. We followed with very strong lockdowns that brought us down from the ~700 new daily cases to the current ~15 new daily cases.

war1025 6y ago

> Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine Part of this is just fear talking though. My family was very concerned about the virus for the first couple months. Then people we knew in our age demographic (20s-30s) started catching it. Invariably it's been a day or two of fever and a week or so of cold symptoms. Absolutely people who are at elevated risk because of age or pre-existing conditions should lock down to whatever extent they feel is necessary. But the general feeling here (central Iowa) seems to be more and more that the lockdown is far worse than the virus. Because of that, we get raked over the coals pretty well daily by everyone in the media. But our schools are open, our universities are open, and people are more or less back to normal life. Cases are stable. Deaths are low and mostly restricted to the very old. We seem to have settled on an acceptable (to us) middle ground. I'm sure businesses are still hurting, but very few have shut their doors permanently. I get the feeling that's a very different picture than many places.

zacharycohn 6y ago
I'd encourage you to read through this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j2pb9a/serious_people_from_reddit_who_survived_corona/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j2pb9a/serious_p...

ketamine__ 6y ago

> We have been in lockdown since early June and went from 700 cases per day to 15 per day so it has technically worked. Victoria hasn't exited lockdown. How can you say it worked? > Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine. I have heard the argument that suppression is a good strategy because a vaccine is soon to be approved. If we can't develop a vaccine I would hope suppression wouldn't be the strategy.

p1necone 6y ago
It worked because less people died. Some people (myself included) are more concerned with human lives than opening businesses faster.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Are your people (and yourself) more concerned with human lives than children getting an education and not falling behind? If so, how long should children suffer? As long as it takes?
  - II2II 6y ago
    Take a look at the provincial breakdown. The Atlantic provinces are in a position where kids are going to school, restrictions are being lifted, and the number of cases are in the single digits per week. For the most part, there is not spread within these provinces so efforts can focus upon verifying that people coming into the province aren't infected and ensuring the population complies with far less extreme measures so that the virus does not gain a foothold in the region yet again. Even parts of the country with a far greater number of infections than the Atlantic provinces are seeing numbers stabilize (e.g. Alberta) or decline (e.g. British Columbia). This is not the case in Ontario, where the spread is essentially uncontrolled. Measures need to be put into place because the living will continue to suffer as long as that spread is uncontrolled, and yes the loss of life matters as well. A few weeks to stabilize the situation will ensure that lives are not lost needlessly.
  - wolco2 6y ago

semerda 6y ago

I have been following this mess. I’m an Aussie in CA. Even when a vaccine is available it’s not going to be 100% effective. Contrast it to another RNA based virus (but faster mutating) like influenza. The annual shot effectiveness fluctuates based on what is the dominant strain socially circulating. Therefore, the science Dan is subscribed to means Vic will be locked down indefinitely. Sure ppl love the lockdowns but the reality will hit hard when they realize there is no such thing as “pause” in the economy. It’s a hard stop followed by CPR. What ever happened to real science; you know, the one where we learn and adapt as new information is made available. I’m pretty sure we now know a lot more about this virus, demographics most at risk, it’s disease management etc... As Frank Herbert says; Fear is the mind killer.

bawolff 6y ago
Comparing a not yet existant vaccine to a vaccine for a virus that's totally different is silly. Especially comparing it to the flu, as that's a virus that mutates much more often than most viri. In any case no vaccine is 100% effective. The goal is typically to be effective enough that the virus dies out faster than it spreads. Which solves the problem. There are a lot of covid vaccine trials going on. The different candidates have different properties. It has yet to be seen which candidates are succesful.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  While you're correct to point that out, I'm not aware of any health experts who expect that the current crop of vaccine candidates are sufficient to stop the disease from spreading. The hope is that it will spread slower and/or be less severe.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I'm definitely no expert on this, but it seems a little early to say. There's 321 candidates in development (albeit some very early stage) and none have fully passed trials yet. I think the effiacy of various candidates isn't clear yet (i may be totally wrong)
- 6y ago

koyote 6y ago

I feel like everyone is talking about Melbourne's lockdown as if it was their first lockdown. This is their second lockdown. They virtually eliminated it during the first lockdown and brought the virus back in via hotel quarantine leaks (as proven by genomic testing). There is nothing indicating that the same thing won't happen again. NSW's contact tracing team has been excellent but I have not heard anyone detail how Victoria's team is up to scratch now (a part from throwing some money at Salesforce). There is no long-term strategy in this whatsoever, the hope is that the vaccine is available and effective before the inevitable 3rd wave hits a still highly susceptible population.

gregoryl 6y ago
VIC contact tracing has now adopted the same process as NSW
- koyote 6y ago
  Do you have a source on that? I know that they sent some people up to see what NSW was doing but haven't actually heard them say what, if anything, they were going to adopt. There is this 'funny' article from a couple of days ago though; seems like a lot of lies and smoke: https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/nsw-denies-it-is-copying-victoria-s-contact-tracing-system-20200928-p56022 https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/nsw-denies-i... Gladys also indicated that a large part of NSW's tracing success was the tight integration and information sharing between government agencies. Something that, if you read between the lines, is apparently not the case in Victoria.
spfzero 6y ago
I wonder about this hope for a vaccine, and if it is a reasonable thing to base policy on. There is still no vaccine for HIV, after several decades of trying and many billions spent. None for SARS1, Mers, the commom cold. There are influenza vaccines, but still no effective ones in terms of preventing a significant number of deaths every year.
- lbeltrame 6y ago