Australian Response

shesty

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117645552#Comment_117645552

That's a problem now everywhere. RSV rates are rocketing in the US and the UK are having similar problems. I expect it to be an issue here too, especially come winter. Had to bring my own 3 year old to Temple St a couple of weeks ago, struggling to breathe with croup, as a dose went round the house from my older 2, but he caught it worse. He's not in a creche and has had mainly outdoor exposure to other kids since March 2020., so he hasn't had the number of doses my older 2 had by that age.

I've seen Bronchiolitis in a 3 week old and a 6 week old who needed oxygen, and it isn't good. 7-10 days for it to run its course, and the 6 week old needed oxygen for most of those 10 days.

It's going to be a very long winter. Again. We might have "solved" one issue, but we have created a huge amount of other problems in doing so.I'm sure somebody thought of that though....

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117647363#Comment_117647363

Kids have needed to go to a&e with respiratory infections long before Covid and will continue to do so long after Covid.

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117649158#Comment_117649158

And your point is? You obviously do not have an idea how immune system works.

gral6

So, what the update about brilliant Australian approach? Is Sydney in the lockdown till at least October now?

PhilipsR

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117658284#Comment_117658284

I'm really curious as to what Australia has done to you during your life. Why have you so much angst towards it?

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117658284#Comment_117658284

The brilliant Australian approach is still working quite well. Death rate remains less than 3% of the Irish death rate.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661382#Comment_117661382

And life has been almost completely normal there since March of last year. It's strange to read the criticism of the Australian approach considering that a vaccine passport and a form of ID is required in Ireland to have a cup of tea indoors.

Slideways

As i said previously, any australian i have seen post here is quite happy with the status quo, few from NSW would be sooking hard but taking the last 18 months as a whole, we have had it pretty good here

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661585#Comment_117661585

And I imagine that a lot, if not most, Irish people would give their right arm to be in Australia instead of Ireland.

gral6

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661592#Comment_117661592

You are wrong

Noo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661717#Comment_117661717

Some roo steak with that chip?

Hector Savage

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117647363#Comment_117647363

But those illnesses are OK as they aren't covid !!!

Hector Savage

Im sure the australians that aren't allowed leave their homes even for work aren't happy with this, it's grand if you do your surveys amoung IT lads that can work from home.

Slideways

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661717#Comment_117661717

I wager I'm not but if the delusion keeps you happy cobb you fire right ahead

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661814#Comment_117661814

Yes, there is people who are doing it tough in NSW and VIC for sure. The vast majority of them though are aware of how different life would be if Aus had not taken the approach they did.

The only part of the approach here is that the useless turd Scott Morrison has been useless throughout and if it wasnt for the states premiers carrying the load we would have been fcuked

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117661804#Comment_117661804

The suggestion is that the measures we have adopted against the spread of Covid have also been effective, as a by-product, against the spread of other respiratory diseases. Which is a good thing, you might think. And, in most ways, it is.

But in one way it isn't. Newborns have maternal immunities which last for six to twelve months. During this period, they encounter common infectious diseases and are relatively unharmed by them, because they are protected by maternal immunities. The encounter serves to trigger and build up their own immune responses, which provides a more lasting degree of protection for when they encounter the same infections again.

If they don't encounter common infections during this period but rather later then, when they do encounter them, they are no longer protected by maternal immunities, but they have yet to develop any immune response of their own, so they can get very sick indeed. And that's what's happening with non-Covid respiratory diseases.

There's not a great deal you can do about this. You could weaken or abandon your covid protection measures, which might on balance be good for infants - they don't get very sick from Covid, and the benefit of building up immunity to other diseases would outweigh the risk from Covid - but would be bad for everyone else and very bad indeed for vulnerable groups, including the elderly, the immunocompromised and those with already impaired respiratory systems.

political analyst

There was an outcry when, for a short period earlier this year, Australian citizens of Indian extraction who were in India for family reasons (e.g. funerals) couldn't come home because of the ban on citizens abroad coming home. Given that many people throughout the world living far from home couldn't attend the funerals of close relatives, why didn't the Indian-Australians just forgo attendance of funerals in India and wait for the end of the pandemic to have commemorations in India at a later date?

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117663750#Comment_117663750

Well, many did.

But, just to set things straight, the cases I am aware of weren't people who had gone for funerals; they were people who had gone to care for/spend time with dying family members, and then stayed for the funerals. And in each case they had sought and obtained permission to go, and obtained re-entry permission, before leaving Australia; the re-entry permission was withdrawn while they were outside the country. So you can see why there might be a degree of upset about that.

josip

Why have Melbourne and Adelaide been able to lockdown out of Delta and Sydney have not?

Did they react faster and harder than Sydney or were the Western suburbs always going to be impossible to control sufficiently for Delta?

Whatever the reason, Sydney looks on course for a similar length of lockdown to Melbourne's last year. Is the lockdown as restrictive as then or is it a soft lockdown?

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117666621#Comment_117666621

Melbourne and Adelaide reacted much faster when the Delta variant reached them. mainly because they don't have the libertarian ideological leanings of the NSW administration that hampered the initial NSW response and led to its too-little-too-late reaction.

The "Bondi Cluster" was first identified on 18 June, when it included 4 cases. The NSW response was to make masks compulsory on public transport in Sydney.

By 22 June the cluster was 22 cases; it was 31 cases on 23 June; 36 cases on 24 June; 65 cases on 25 June.

On 24 June the NSW government applied travel restrictions to six suburbs, but the restrictions allowed people from those suburbs to travel freely throughout greater Sydney; they just couldn't leave Sydney.

Unsurprisingly, this did nothing to stem the growth of the cluster. Social distancing rules that applied in the rest of Sydney didn't help much either. The cluster was 65 cases on 25 June, 124 on 28 June, 160 on 30 June, 175 on 1 July, 188 on 2 July, 207 on 3 July. NSW didn't introduce Sydney-wide stay-at-home rules until 26 June, several days after other states closed their borders with NSW (which most states did on either 23 or 24 June).

wassie

Sydney and Melbourne are also very big cities of over 5 million people. Adelaide is 1.3m, which would be much more manageable in terms of lockdown and contract tracing of community transmission.

derfderf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117658284#Comment_117658284

Can you please explain the better approach the country you're in took that puts Australia to shame? And how that has made the last 16 months so much better for you than us?

ceadaoin.

And so the isolation of Australia continues. Even superstar athletes are going to stop going to there for events if they have to go through all the quarantine nonsense and be separated from their families. In turn they will lose the events and the world will continue to move on without them

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/57976072

Peregrinus

You should consider the possibility that Australia will continue to move on without the events. Among all the many consequences of the pandemic, whether in Australia or internationally, the disruption to the touring plans of sports superstars strikes me as about the most trivial. And the notion that Australia should risk UK-level death rates so that overpaid English cricketers can bring their children to Perth is, if not actually obscene, certainly absurd.

There are powerful points that could be made against the travel restrictions but, seriously, this is not one of them.

ceadaoin.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117676547#Comment_117676547

I mean, its just a part of the bigger picture of the future of Australia. I figured that would be the reaction though. Who needs international sporting events, and the millions of dollars generated/international students/tourists/immigrants/ foreign workers/refugees anyway.

That's how you become a closed off country, separated from the rest of the world, but ok. All the racist xenophobes who (in my experience) make up a not trivial portion of the Australian population will be delighted.

Peregrinus

Like I say, I think you've chosen the wrong place to pitch your camp. Objecting to travel restrictions because they inconvenience wealthy sportsmen is a bit like objecting to masks because they make it hard for you to show off you new colour of lipstick. It suggests a seriously skewed set of priorities.

And suggesting that relaxing restrictions to accommodate international sportsmen will somehow alleviate the situation of a spectrum of people stretching all the way to refugees is not helping you to correct the impression you are giving. Seriously, stop digging.

gral6

Australia is fecked, closed off, isolated country.

Despite an extended lockdown of Sydney, the state capital, New South Wales said it has recorded 239 locally acquired cases in the past 24 hours, the biggest daily rise since the pandemic begun.

This is O Covid strategy, instead of vaccinating their citizens, they are locking up their citizens.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117676927#Comment_117676927

Ireland, with about half the population of New South Wales, had 1,301 new cases and 9 deaths (versus 2 for NSW) on 28 July.

So, whatever the deficiencies of NSW's Covid measures, they seem to be dramatically more effective than Ireland's. Not that I want to single out Ireland in particular, but it's a comparator with which boardies will be familiar.

Critics of the Australian policies in this forum seem to want to evaluate those policies against criteria which do not include how well they work. Does it not occur to them how stupid that looks?

gral6

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117677042#Comment_117677042

That's endemic. As soon as Australia gets it as better for it. 0 Covid does not work.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117677249#Comment_117677249

If you can offer a policy which works better, I'm sure Australia will embrace it. But a policy which produces longer lockdowns, greater costs and a death rate 30 times higher is not that policy.

muddypuppy

Hopefully for the people in Sydney I'm wrong, but right now I feel that unfortunately they're stuck in the same limbo we got stuck for several months here in Ireland - lockdowns but not harsh enough to reduce the numbers of cases in a significant matter fast, just decrease the spread.

Unfortunately I don't think this will get them to zero cases or so any time soon. And the more the government waits, the more getting to 0 becomes impossible. I fear that they're in for either a long lockdown like this one until the vaccines ramp up, or for a less long (but still not just a couple of weeks) very harsh lockdown.

Plus of course there is lockdown fatigue - the more you stay closed the more people will start to relax and work around/break the rules.

Talking to a friend over there, he's describing the current lockdown as "quite lax" as well - but he is comparing it to March 2020 in Italy, where people would leave their house maybe once a week, only one, go shopping and then go back inside and that's it. it does seem pretty close to what we had as "Level 5", which worked to decrease the number of cases but could never have arrived to 0.