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Well Australia is open and has been for a while. As far as I know there were no novel variants that were found first here because the lockdowns suppressed case

Well Australia is open and has been for a while. As far as I know there were no novel variants that were found first here because the lockdowns suppressed case numbers and besides, there is only 25 million Australians. We have the same variants as the rest of the world, except most Australians don't know anyone who has died from COVID.

Jedd 5y ago
Can confirm, up to a point, though I'm an edge case in AU -- in part because everyone I know has been careful, sane, and kept up with vaccinations. The count of people I know who've had COVID is now up to 16, and they've all been fine, of course. Naturally, no one I know has been hospitalised, let alone died.
jefftk 5y ago
Australia: 6.6k deaths, 25M population, 0.03% dead US: 1M deaths, 300M people, 0.3% dead. On the other hand, Australia's had most of their deaths recently and is still going, while the US deaths were mostly earlier. So the gap will likely narrow over time.
- threatripper 5y ago
  > So the gap will likely narrow over time. No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    I expect the gap to continue to narrow because it has been narrowing: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~AUS https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      If you start from the premise that a much larger portion of the vulnerable in the US have already been infected, the expectation would be that the gap will only ever narrow, so the direction isn't really an indictment of the policy in Australia, you have to look at where things end up.
      - jefftk 5y ago
        I didn't say it was an indictment of Australian policy, and don't think that. But my parent was saying that the gap was unlikely to narrow, which is just wrong.
    - threatripper 5y ago
      Besides the statistical anomaly at the end (probably a one time correction for some past cases) the US death rate has always been higher. So the gap has been widening until now. Look at cumulative cases. Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.
      - jefftk 5y ago
        Good point! In cumulative deaths per million: US AUS delta 2022-01-01 2477 87 2360 2022-02-01 2673 141 2532 2022-03-01 2852 204 2648 2022-04-01 2948 247 2701 I didn't look closely at the graph and I misread the recent apparent spike, which I agree with you is likely some kind of correction. I'm sorry I can't go back and edit my comment!
- aperson_hello 5y ago
  And by excess death numbers, the US probably already had that many deaths before the time Australia locked down. The world acted too late to not let the cat out of the bag. Australia definitely avoided a lot of impact by locking down and starting locked down, but it was happenstance and geography that allowed it to do so semi-effectively
  - urthor 5y ago
    I believe most of the deaths in the US were not actually early. They were in that May-October range were there was just... yeah. Edit: data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... My old area under the curve skills require a bit more than a mark 1 eyeball. But most of it seems to be later, but there was an April spike.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      They have a cumulative deaths option on their Covid data (the link is scaled to population, there's a toggle for that on the graph header). https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=population&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~HKG~KOR~AUS~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... The low China numbers prior to Omicron certainly seem to be a result of successful containment, I guess we will find out more over the next months about how Omicron goes (and whether they report it accurately).
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  I think living in the relative freedom of the US rather than Australia for the last two years has been worth way more than an 0.27% chance of dying.
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    We spent most of 2020 and half of 2021 living with no fear of the virus because it wasn't here. No one I know has even been hospitalised by COVID. It is hilarious to me (and most Australians I know) that Americans think we had a hard time or our strategy didn't work. It did. We came as close as possible to "winning" the pandemic. Now if you lived in Melbourne life kinda sucked. But everywhere else was fine. Perth and Adelaide had about ~2 weeks of lockdowns between them after May 2020. Also a 2 in 1000 risk of death is frankly awful. I wouldn't take those odds.
0xy 5y ago
All you had to do to 'achieve' this was sacrifice the education of the young, decimate small business, prevent citizens from leaving the country (you know, against the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which Australia signed and violated) and unleash police on the citizenry for peacefully protesting. Australian police fired rubber bullets at peaceful assemblers [1], violently threw a compliant man to the ground causing brain damage [2], pepper spraying old women [3] and arresting people for the crime of... suggesting a protest [4] After all this, massive damage was done to mental health to the point 1 in 10 residents in the lockdown capital Victoria seriously considered suicide. [5] With all this damage and the decimation of civil liberties, it's hard to justify the measures. Especially not when you set fire to UN human rights standards to do so. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victoria-covid-update-rubber-bullets-fired-on-second-day-of-construction-protests-which-block-freeway https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-officer-suspended-over-flinders-st-arrest/100500840 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-offi... [3] https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-victoria-police-push-woman-to-ground-and-pepper-spray-her-during-violent-lockdown-protests/news-story/5a4e29ee5eb10b5b0e25708a512ac730 https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-... [4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arrest-fourth-person-for-supporting-protests/12630904 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arres... [5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-considered-suicide-in-2020-research-finds/100242310 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-...
- ImaCake 5y ago
  Oh yeah Melbourne screwed up badly. But the rest of the country didn't. Don't conflate Melbourne's bad contact tracing and subsequent lockdowns with the quality of life elsewhere in Australia. We spent most of the last two years COVID free and without lockdowns. Even Sydney contact-traced their way out of multiple outbreaks before July 2021 without lockdowns. It is genuinely pretty funny seeing Americans think they know more about what happened in Australia than the people who lived here. We still live up to our "The Lucky Country" moniker.

Jedd 5y ago

Can confirm, up to a point, though I'm an edge case in AU -- in part because everyone I know has been careful, sane, and kept up with vaccinations. The count of people I know who've had COVID is now up to 16, and they've all been fine, of course. Naturally, no one I know has been hospitalised, let alone died.

jefftk 5y ago

Australia: 6.6k deaths, 25M population, 0.03% dead US: 1M deaths, 300M people, 0.3% dead. On the other hand, Australia's had most of their deaths recently and is still going, while the US deaths were mostly earlier. So the gap will likely narrow over time.

threatripper 5y ago
> So the gap will likely narrow over time. No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.
- jefftk 5y ago
  I expect the gap to continue to narrow because it has been narrowing: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~AUS https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    If you start from the premise that a much larger portion of the vulnerable in the US have already been infected, the expectation would be that the gap will only ever narrow, so the direction isn't really an indictment of the policy in Australia, you have to look at where things end up.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      I didn't say it was an indictment of Australian policy, and don't think that. But my parent was saying that the gap was unlikely to narrow, which is just wrong.
  - threatripper 5y ago
    Besides the statistical anomaly at the end (probably a one time correction for some past cases) the US death rate has always been higher. So the gap has been widening until now. Look at cumulative cases. Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      Good point! In cumulative deaths per million: US AUS delta 2022-01-01 2477 87 2360 2022-02-01 2673 141 2532 2022-03-01 2852 204 2648 2022-04-01 2948 247 2701 I didn't look closely at the graph and I misread the recent apparent spike, which I agree with you is likely some kind of correction. I'm sorry I can't go back and edit my comment!
aperson_hello 5y ago
And by excess death numbers, the US probably already had that many deaths before the time Australia locked down. The world acted too late to not let the cat out of the bag. Australia definitely avoided a lot of impact by locking down and starting locked down, but it was happenstance and geography that allowed it to do so semi-effectively
- urthor 5y ago
  I believe most of the deaths in the US were not actually early. They were in that May-October range were there was just... yeah. Edit: data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... My old area under the curve skills require a bit more than a mark 1 eyeball. But most of it seems to be later, but there was an April spike.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    They have a cumulative deaths option on their Covid data (the link is scaled to population, there's a toggle for that on the graph header). https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=population&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA~HKG~KOR~AUS~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... The low China numbers prior to Omicron certainly seem to be a result of successful containment, I guess we will find out more over the next months about how Omicron goes (and whether they report it accurately).
School-Cotton 5y ago
I think living in the relative freedom of the US rather than Australia for the last two years has been worth way more than an 0.27% chance of dying.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  We spent most of 2020 and half of 2021 living with no fear of the virus because it wasn't here. No one I know has even been hospitalised by COVID. It is hilarious to me (and most Australians I know) that Americans think we had a hard time or our strategy didn't work. It did. We came as close as possible to "winning" the pandemic. Now if you lived in Melbourne life kinda sucked. But everywhere else was fine. Perth and Adelaide had about ~2 weeks of lockdowns between them after May 2020. Also a 2 in 1000 risk of death is frankly awful. I wouldn't take those odds.

0xy 5y ago

All you had to do to 'achieve' this was sacrifice the education of the young, decimate small business, prevent citizens from leaving the country (you know, against the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which Australia signed and violated) and unleash police on the citizenry for peacefully protesting. Australian police fired rubber bullets at peaceful assemblers [1], violently threw a compliant man to the ground causing brain damage [2], pepper spraying old women [3] and arresting people for the crime of... suggesting a protest [4] After all this, massive damage was done to mental health to the point 1 in 10 residents in the lockdown capital Victoria seriously considered suicide. [5] With all this damage and the decimation of civil liberties, it's hard to justify the measures. Especially not when you set fire to UN human rights standards to do so. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victoria-covid-update-rubber-bullets-fired-on-second-day-of-construction-protests-which-block-freeway https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-officer-suspended-over-flinders-st-arrest/100500840 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-offi... [3] https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-victoria-police-push-woman-to-ground-and-pepper-spray-her-during-violent-lockdown-protests/news-story/5a4e29ee5eb10b5b0e25708a512ac730 https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-... [4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arrest-fourth-person-for-supporting-protests/12630904 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arres... [5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-considered-suicide-in-2020-research-finds/100242310 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-...

ImaCake 5y ago
Oh yeah Melbourne screwed up badly. But the rest of the country didn't. Don't conflate Melbourne's bad contact tracing and subsequent lockdowns with the quality of life elsewhere in Australia. We spent most of the last two years COVID free and without lockdowns. Even Sydney contact-traced their way out of multiple outbreaks before July 2021 without lockdowns. It is genuinely pretty funny seeing Americans think they know more about what happened in Australia than the people who lived here. We still live up to our "The Lucky Country" moniker.