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I've said it many times, Australia and New Zealand are both islands, this makes restricting ingress far easier than land borders controlled by many different au

I've said it many times, Australia and New Zealand are both islands, this makes restricting ingress far easier than land borders controlled by many different authorities. Furthermore, many countries have laws that prohibit house arrest, which is essentially what you are suggesting here. Finally, unless the entire world did the same, we would not be "covid-free". As soon as one person with covid entered the country post-lockdown, cases would grow. If Australia had actually beaten covid, then they could welcome people back. But they didn't beat it! That isolated themselves from the world and continue to do so. That isn't beating it at all. You may be right that almost everything is open again, but there are also leaving thousands of their citizens stranded abroad. This is an absurd payoff for a virus that, at worst, kills .5% of people who contract it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australia-coronavirus-stranded-quarantine-travel/2020/12/10/6d990c60-2e0d-11eb-9dd6-2d0179981719_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australia-...

LatteLazy 6y ago
Sorry, I should have clarified: I'm a limey brit so closing our (my) border is almost as easy as it is for the aussies. Similarly, we have no constitution or bill of rights, so a house arrest law is easy and quick to pass. The issue with the .5% figure is that 5% of covid patients would die if they didn't receive care. So the death rate is only 0.5% until your last hospital bed / ventilators / nurse is busy. Then it's 5%. We've fucked about letting more and more people get it. Which is fine because 0.5% and because we're following the "herd immunity" strategy. Unlike Aus that went for eradication. But now, so many people are sick the hospitals are full. London expects to run out of beds within 2 weeks. Rest of the UK in 3 weeks. Given the 5-6 day incubation period, that means we need to reduce the R number below 1 by Monday in London (where people are densely packed and rely on public transport). You have 7 more days for the rest of the place. Or we accept the 5% marginal death rate. 5% is pretty fucking high. Look around your office, your sports team, your family and fields. Pick 1 in 20 to die. And that's 5% across the board. It's higher for your grandparents, your sick cousin etc. Plus you have people permanently disabled and "Long Covid" to factor in. So having encouraged people to go out, having let people test the rules and find them unenforced, and having done all the easy cheap shit (office worked wfh), the government finds it has to get very strict, convince people it means it this time, and get them to stay home, all in the next few days. Oh, and the current government was elected by the people most likely to die of this. And the current leader is dumb and lazy. And he's spent the last year promising his party no more lockdowns...
- salmon30salmon 6y ago
  I will need proof that 5% of people would die if they didn't receive care. The hospitalization rate is not at 5% in my state, so on the face of it that number is bunk. And I doubt anyone would seriously contend that every hospitalization would be death but for hospitalization. But lets take your numbers as they are. It wouldn't be 5% of all infections, or 5% of all severe infections. It would be 5% of all infections _above hospital capacity_. Health systems wouldn't disappear, they would just not take in more folks, or triage more aggressively. I know you address this in your comment, but it is important to note. Because it greatly changes the emotional appeal for your emotional argument to spell it out. Don't bring long-covid in to this discussion, there is no real hard evidence that it even exists AND is an artifact of covid.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    That's a very fair question, I won't pretend my numbers are precise or even accurate because (amazingly to me) we've done a terrible job of estimating/measuring and communicating these basic numbers /rant. I'm going off: Positive tests in the UK yesterday: 52,618 https://covidgraph.com/ https://covidgraph.com/ Patients admitted yesterday: 3867 https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare That's 7.3%. It's gone up since I last looked, about 1month ago. But I wouldn't call it a true rate as there are plenty of people not getting tested. If half the people are asymptomatic or don't get tested for whatever reason, that gets you 3.6%. There aren't many beds left so I don't think they're admitting many people who don't need it. I'd be happier discussing a range of anything from 2 to 10% because who the fuck knows. Fair? To address the marginal vs absolute point, again you are quite right. I'd actually go a bit further: good triaging would be a bit brutal but it would also mean the majority of deaths were old or otherwise ill. There is a concept in UK medicine called quality adjusted life years (QALY). This tries to mathematically account for "obviously you save a young healthy person with kids over an old, otherwise ill person". Death rates don't incorporate that at all. I'd like to see what the QALY figures are like for covid. I don't think they're public though. A 1.2 R number (the figure being used for London, again a wild estimate...) gives you a 3% daily growth rate. That means number of infected doubles every 23 days. So assuming we stick with just current measures (reopen schools), your death rate will tend to the hospitalisation rate on a 23 day half-life. Assuming 5% hospitalisation rate (again, try it with your own numbers, I'm not wedded to 5%), the death rate will be 2.75% around Feb 7th. Then 3.5% around March 3rd. Then 3.88% around March 26th etc. I don't know what will actually happen. And I'd add that trying to extrapolate anything exponential is a fools game. So who knows? I'm merely pointing out there are very possible, very severe outcomes.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Sorry, I should have clarified: I'm a limey brit so closing our (my) border is almost as easy as it is for the aussies. Similarly, we have no constitution or bill of rights, so a house arrest law is easy and quick to pass. The issue with the .5% figure is that 5% of covid patients would die if they didn't receive care. So the death rate is only 0.5% until your last hospital bed / ventilators / nurse is busy. Then it's 5%. We've fucked about letting more and more people get it. Which is fine because 0.5% and because we're following the "herd immunity" strategy. Unlike Aus that went for eradication. But now, so many people are sick the hospitals are full. London expects to run out of beds within 2 weeks. Rest of the UK in 3 weeks. Given the 5-6 day incubation period, that means we need to reduce the R number below 1 by Monday in London (where people are densely packed and rely on public transport). You have 7 more days for the rest of the place. Or we accept the 5% marginal death rate. 5% is pretty fucking high. Look around your office, your sports team, your family and fields. Pick 1 in 20 to die. And that's 5% across the board. It's higher for your grandparents, your sick cousin etc. Plus you have people permanently disabled and "Long Covid" to factor in. So having encouraged people to go out, having let people test the rules and find them unenforced, and having done all the easy cheap shit (office worked wfh), the government finds it has to get very strict, convince people it means it this time, and get them to stay home, all in the next few days. Oh, and the current government was elected by the people most likely to die of this. And the current leader is dumb and lazy. And he's spent the last year promising his party no more lockdowns...

salmon30salmon 6y ago
I will need proof that 5% of people would die if they didn't receive care. The hospitalization rate is not at 5% in my state, so on the face of it that number is bunk. And I doubt anyone would seriously contend that every hospitalization would be death but for hospitalization. But lets take your numbers as they are. It wouldn't be 5% of all infections, or 5% of all severe infections. It would be 5% of all infections _above hospital capacity_. Health systems wouldn't disappear, they would just not take in more folks, or triage more aggressively. I know you address this in your comment, but it is important to note. Because it greatly changes the emotional appeal for your emotional argument to spell it out. Don't bring long-covid in to this discussion, there is no real hard evidence that it even exists AND is an artifact of covid.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  That's a very fair question, I won't pretend my numbers are precise or even accurate because (amazingly to me) we've done a terrible job of estimating/measuring and communicating these basic numbers /rant. I'm going off: Positive tests in the UK yesterday: 52,618 https://covidgraph.com/ https://covidgraph.com/ Patients admitted yesterday: 3867 https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare That's 7.3%. It's gone up since I last looked, about 1month ago. But I wouldn't call it a true rate as there are plenty of people not getting tested. If half the people are asymptomatic or don't get tested for whatever reason, that gets you 3.6%. There aren't many beds left so I don't think they're admitting many people who don't need it. I'd be happier discussing a range of anything from 2 to 10% because who the fuck knows. Fair? To address the marginal vs absolute point, again you are quite right. I'd actually go a bit further: good triaging would be a bit brutal but it would also mean the majority of deaths were old or otherwise ill. There is a concept in UK medicine called quality adjusted life years (QALY). This tries to mathematically account for "obviously you save a young healthy person with kids over an old, otherwise ill person". Death rates don't incorporate that at all. I'd like to see what the QALY figures are like for covid. I don't think they're public though. A 1.2 R number (the figure being used for London, again a wild estimate...) gives you a 3% daily growth rate. That means number of infected doubles every 23 days. So assuming we stick with just current measures (reopen schools), your death rate will tend to the hospitalisation rate on a 23 day half-life. Assuming 5% hospitalisation rate (again, try it with your own numbers, I'm not wedded to 5%), the death rate will be 2.75% around Feb 7th. Then 3.5% around March 3rd. Then 3.88% around March 26th etc. I don't know what will actually happen. And I'd add that trying to extrapolate anything exponential is a fools game. So who knows? I'm merely pointing out there are very possible, very severe outcomes.