Australian Response

What the story with NZ? Still pushing for Zero Covid utopia? Australia looks to be have given up

You cant look at Australia as a whole, internal border restrictions have been a hugely successful. Like individual countries. There's plenty of boardsies on here not located in sydney or melbourne whose lives have been and still are comparatively unaffected by covid. There are some states where covid has been pretty much non-existant the entire time.

Anyone living here can clearly see that that the current lockdowns are for containment and control while they go full out on the vaccinations.

Yes they are. It was always made clear that the Pfizer supply wouldn't increase until august/september. It has taken off massively since. They are currently on target for 70% vaccination by end of the year, with a population 5 times that of ireland. Within the space of the past few weeks its has gone from me knowing hardly anyone vaccinated (just a few nurse and doc friends), to everyone in my social/work/hobby circles either having one or both shots, or being offered a booking for one.

So yes, the rollout has improved significantly. They might be 34/38 now but as stated above, the ramp up was only ever possible from August.

The population size is irrelevant, it's how the programme is managed. The US too took off at a very impressive rate yet now finds itself with many states at barely 50%. 50% is easy, it's that last 10-15% that is the real challenge. We haven't run into that problem at all but quite a few countries have.

New South Wales has 32.2% of its 16+ population fully vaccinated which is nowhere near the highest vaccination rates in the world. They will obviously be vaccinating faster than other developed countries who already have a large percentage of their population vaccinated

Thats basically WA and QLD and they can f**k right off if they want to keep their borders closed. The tourism operators in those states will be on their knees when the federal money stops, its like a microcosm of the Australian response with the world, at some stage you have to have a plan to open up using vaccinations as a defense, otherwise you are just kicking the can down the road. I saw the WA premier saying he wanted zero covid even after vaccines are rolled out, good luck to people there, if you dont have your family within the state you're not getting out for a long time, you get to go for coffee and a bite to eat though!

I'm in WA and have fully supported Mark McGowan's performance for the past 18 months. The latest State election was a landslide and his approval rating is sky high because of the quality of life we've maintained through the pandemic.

However, there needs to be an end game and there's only so many long weekends you can have in Margaret River. WA is full of ex-pats with family in other parts of the world so if the rest of the country starts to open up then McGowan will be under serious pressure to follow suit and I think he will have no choice but to cave eventually.

The issue in WA at the moment is vaccine hesitancy. As mentioned already, there is a mentality that if we don't have COVID then we don't need a vaccine. We had a scare last month with a returned traveller which tbh was a great thing as it woke up a few people to the fact that we aren't invincible and they need to get vaccinated. It may take another one or two similar situations (or a lockdown) to get to the 70/80% mark.

Poor choice of words by me. I meant the number of people getting vaccinated daily per 100 people. Not people who are fully vaccinated.

Sco Mo often gets blamed for the poor vaccination rates in Australia, but can he also be held responsible for the poor vaccination uptake across the Tasman?

Is it simply a co-incidence that Australia and NZ have successfully implemented Zero Covid strategies over the past year AND have low vaccine uptakes?

They're ahead of a number of EU countries already, and have a better trajectory than most.

This should be used as an example in college about how cherry picked data in a nice graph can be used to present a distorted view of reality.

Is that where Australia sees itself in the world, comparing itself with Romania and Bulgaria?

Australia is not in the top 40 of countries with the highest vaccination rates, it has less than half the vaccination rate of the EU. 25% of the total population of the world has been vaccinated, Australia is barely above this average. I am not saying that Australia has done a bad job in relation to Covid-19 but to claim that it has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world is incorrect

The Guardian has a decent vaccine tracker for Australia. They're doing fine, belatedly. Coverage should be ok in a couple of months.

Compared to we were at the start of this year, with schools closed and over six months to go, they're in a much better position.