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Comment by rrrhys | Hacker News Reader

In the least inflammatory tone possible, what do you think they should be doing instead?

There's a lot of pile-on about how they've done everything wrong without a lot of suggestion about what they should've done instead / should currently be doing instead.

For example, if Andrews and co cave to the federal and local pressure and re-open the state today, and everything explodes in two weeks, who takes the blame then? Still Andrews and co.

While it's been a huge outbreak by Australian expectations, it's still tiny when compared to the rest of the world.

If we had the 10, 15,000 cases per million that are more commonplace around the world, there'd still be a stuffed economy, lower employment, increased mental health issues, right? We'd just have another layer of mess with hospital overload and death that we don't have in a large amount at the moment.

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A part from the general mismanagement (quarantine, contact tracing, aged care) there has been a complete lack of consistent strategy. You can't just change the strategy every 6 weeks.

NZ went for elimination from the outset so when the virus came back in Auckland several weeks ago it was a no-brainer to immediately lock down again (although now they seem to have shifted to a suppression strategy, let's see how that goes for them...).

Sweden went for a flatten the curve(ish) strategy which meant that they did not automatically enact a lockdown when things started heating up in terms of case numbers/deaths because they were confident enough at the time that their health care system would cope.

Those are two very different strategies with different outcomes but they were consistent and thereby achieved their respective goals.

Victoria (and Australia as a whole) has gone from flatten the curve to suppression and now to elimination. If Victoria had chosen elimination after the first flare up back at the end of May, then that would have most probably been achieved by now.

> what do you think they should be doing instead?

Probably not much. But that's because you used the word "doing". If you had asked "what should Victoria have done instead?", then there is a long list.

To pick on one thing, I was amazed press were showing people in the locked down towers apparently depending on charities for essential supplies. To this day don't know if it was a beat up or real, but if real it boggles the mind. It implies the lock down was little more than a thought bubble with almost no effort put into planning.

Obviously, they did eventually react to the collapse of contract tracing, the explosion of cases, the outbreak in nursing homes and so on, and as a consequence everything seems to be as under control as it can be now. But it does seem to all be reactive, not proactive.

I do wonder how the situation arose. At one level it's obviously a reflection of competence of the bureaucracy, as this is where the pollies (who usually have very little expertise in their portfolio) get their advice. But those same pollies have been there for 10 years and so they should by now have made their stamp on the culture of the bureaucracy. Frankly when you compare it's performance with bureaucracies in all other states, it was very poor. For me (a Queenslander) the outstanding state was NSW the Ruby Princess cluster fuck notwithstanding.

The government mandated curfews, for instance, do not seem to have been a recommendation from the health authorities (in fact, no other country has them).

It really does not make much sense to unnecessarily restrict the times when people can, e.g., go out and buy groceries. The wider the allowed hours, the less density of people there will be in those indoor places, which will help decrease the spreading of the virus.

Name one country that has had hospital overload. Any country. This was an expectation that was reasonable in February, and become a talking point for people who want lockdowns for ideological reasons and aren't willing to look at new evidence. [0]

In short: open everything and let the devil take the hindmost. The alternative is a yo-yo lock down until Bangladesh manages to deploy a vaccine to everyone infected before the virus mutates, something that will happen in 202-never.

[0] Even the horror stories from New York were because they didn't have the capacity to bury people fast enough, not that they ran out of hospital beds.

Spain

New York. Italy.

1 google search for "overwhelmed hospital" turned up this article from 2017/2018 - https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

New Jersey - At capacity, Elective surgeries cancelled

Alabama - Elective Surgeries Cancelled, state of emergency declared

California - set up tents outside, patients in hallways

Pennsylvania - Surge tents

Not really. Hospital overload here is defined as people being unable to get healthcare because no hospital can take them. This news story covered Spanish hospital 'overload' at the time, which basically meant they converted some beds to ICU/COVID beds.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-07/spains-intensi...

It discusses one of the hardest hit hospitals. However the absolute numbers were small and they never turned people away.

This sort of bed conversion is known to happen even in normal years, so it doesn't mean much by itself. Dramatic language can be misleading. Unfortunately it is standard for health officials to describe hospitals as "overloaded" or "at breaking point" simply due to seasonal flu outbreaks, as in these articles from 2017:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20170111/french-hospitals-stretched-...

https://www.euronews.com/2017/01/12/struggling-to-care-hospi...

In Madrid many people were turned away from hospitals. I know personally people that could not get into the hospital with a double pneumonia and were told to call an ambulance if their oxygen levels dropped. Ambulances took 4-6 hours to respond, instead of minutes. In regular times a double pneumonia 100% lands you at the hospital.

Not a direct acquaintance, but a friend of my sister was two days siting in the hall of the Gregorio Marañon until they could transfer him to IFEMA. Almost no supply of food during these two days, and he was lucky to have a seat, many people lying on the floor.

They found many bodies of people dead by COVID-19 at home. They found some bodies on the streets.

I don't get how can you pretend that many hospitals / regions were "overload".

Spain had similar problems to Italy early on in the outbreak where they shut down large chunks of hospital capacity by insisting doctors and nurses self-isolated, although it's now known that this was actively harmful: the virus is virulent and would have infected them sooner or later anyway, and the ones who weren't already elderly or sick wouldn't have been badly affected.

It's a debatable question whether this shutdown of hospitals was due to the virus, or due to the over-reaction to it. Other places where the virus started later didn't do this to the same extent (although the UK did and is still doing so!), and they saw less serious problems.

As for "many bodies of people dead at home/on the streets", can you show me reports of people dropping dead of COVID on the streets? I never heard that, it seems it hasn't happened elsewhere and sounds suspect.

Remember that basically all reports about people dying "of" COVID are garbage. The average age of death when testing positive is over the average life expectancy in most places (maybe all, I haven't checked). Almost all such reports are of deaths that were naturally happening anyway due to age or other serious health conditions, and COVID was just co-present at time of death - maybe it pushed them over by a little bit, but probably only by months. Correlation/causation mixups are a huge problem with COVID datasets.

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