Shifter, please tell us more about Australia's pandemic response. I don't think you've mentioned it before.
Victoria to almost get to the point of eliminating the virus mandated the wearing of masks, did a hard lock down, people had to work from home if that was possible, only go out for essential things, limited the amount of people at gatherings (like weddings) or how many people you could invite to your home, could not enter/lave the state barring a few circumstances and instigated night time curfews. It sure crippled the viruses r0 value. I think some of the things was a tad too hard from an economic perspective but the results speak for themselves
South Australia is cracking down on a new cluster doing a 6 day hard lock down the moment it eventuated. Hopefully going in early will prevent the need for a longer term lock down
We also have contact tracing. Currently businesses in almost every state must have a sign in register or the QRcode.
Most states at the moment have great contact tracing abilities and can get on top of any new case and isolate those affected as they come so apart from social distancing for most people, all the shops are still open, restaurants open and business pretty much is going on as usual.
International flights need a pretty compelling reason to leave here and we are limiting the amount of people that can come back at any one time. Everyone that does come back has to be put in mandatory 2 week 'hotel quarantine'
It's really not rocket science. You get the r0 value down to less than 1 and you will beat this thing eventually. Having everyone, healthy and sick wear a mask, coupled with social distancing is one way to do it. And most businesses can still pretty much go on as normal at the same time. People just need to get over the vanity of wearing a mask. What Victoria did was to essentially speed up how long it would take to get to a stage you could say you almost eliminated it
In almost every instance where this has had community transmission, you could have essentially prevented it if everyone was wearing a mask. Masks are cheap. The cost to the economy and to peoples lives when this spreads unchecked is disastrous. Wearing a mask makes sense.
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