Australian Response

I suppose if you don't live in Ireland and have little idea of the Covid response there and what it was like to live through the last 20 months, you might have such a weird brain fart.

I think that in some small way that penny is slowly dropping.

Perhaps,given their isolation from other "modern" societies,the Antipodes are the last to realize that ?

It was still quite surprising to hear NZ's media favourite,PM Jacinta Ardern come out with the following....

914 cases in Australia today.

The Australian and NSW Government responses simply illustrate what is evident around the world - conservative governments are a health hazard.

The Australian government was too restricted in vaccine purchasing and terrible at the vaccine roll-out. The 2020 deaths were largely in federally regulated nursing homes, where the state-run homes nearby had almost no deaths. They failed to design meaningful mass media educative campaigns to address vaccine hesitancy.

The NSW Government was reluctant to shut down when Delta started its run and has re-opened construction when it should be going much harder. Restrictions are now differential, hitting the poor and multicultural suburbs much harder than rich whites.

I hate the Tories, wherever they are.

Abusers seize opportunities whenever they can. Imagine how traumatising the shootings were for the volunteers who were arranging to pick up the dogs or who were caring for the dogs.

The regulator will do nothing.

The LNP (conservative) controlled press will stifle and refuse to print community reaction.

it is police-state behaviour.

It was cr*p in Melbourne last year, and it's cr*p in Melbourne again this year. What will change next year if they don't abandon zero covid policy? As we've seen here with a high vaccine uptake, there are still cases. What approach is better? Ireland or Australia? Answer imo is neither. Look at some countries in mainland Europe where they are living with covid. Better than both Ireland and Australia. At least at the moment, I can leave here. I gather it's very difficult to leave your home in some states, never mind the country in Australia

Ah jesus that's **** horrible. I know we had drama about people searching for a lost dog on a mountain and they got fined etc... but come on.

Christ I hope they don't know animals can carry Covid, be like the army vs cows in the UK's Foot and Mouth war!

It might very well be the case that zero delta community transmission is not feasible, but zero community transmission with previous variants and covid classic worked brilliantly for both countries.

It's not looking good for Australia now. I think they'll have to change tactic. They've too many idiots who never bought into the policy, and they're making it all but impossible.

I wouldn't put it passed NZ to make it work though, so your celebrations of their failure might be a little premature.

Even if they have to change tactic to one of mitigation, they'll be going into their first significant wave with many of their most vulnerable vaccinated. It could have been significantly better on this front, but nonetheless they should still be spared the very worst of covid. Unlike just about every other western country.

To suggest they got it wrong with zero covid ignores the fact that they both enjoyed relative normalcy for the last 18 months. They've done significantly better than almost every other western nation in every conceivable way - deaths, hospitalisations, the economy and general quality of life.

Their failure, if we can call it that, was in not getting their supplies of vaccines in as quickly as most of their other counterparts. It is not a failure of zero covid in any way at all.

Any schadenfreude is entirely misplaced, petty and frankly stupid.

I wouldn’t necessarily say they failed. It’s a spectrum some countries do well others not so well but I’m not sure where you could draw the line for failure. If preventing deaths is the aim then they’ve done well. If there was any failure it was that they didn’t change tack when it became obvious that the delta variant had changed the rules of the game.

They've prevented huge numbers of deaths, kept their hospitals running as normal, kept their economy ticking over and had a much higher quality of life for the most part since the pandemic began.

It looks as though they'll suffer a very difficult few months, but due to their limited but targeted vaccine rollout it shouldn't be as bad for them now.

Few if any western countries have done better.

Well Australia's economy has entered recession twice and is set to go into recession again thanks to this latest lockdown but my understanding of their economy is limited. Their lockdowns do seem to be a lot more stringent than ours in terms of people moving around and what's open/closed. That's a good point about their health service though, having to dedicate our entire HS to covid was massively damaging and the consequences will ripple for a few years. I don't think Aus or NZ will end up in that position. When covid has become endemic and this is "over" I think their stats will look pretty good compared to ours.