We have been in lockdown since early June and went from 700 cases per day to 15 per day so it has technically worked. However, it has completely destroyed businesses and affected a lot of smaller retailers. Our premier has been called "Dictator Dan" by most of murdock media including WAPO but the support among public has stayed strong. Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine.
It hasn't worked - literally nothing had qualitatively changed since day 1 when I said that exactly this would happen. All we have is better testing methods and a ravaged economy, yet fundamentaly we are at square zero.
That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path.
The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.
I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
$500m? $1b? $100b?
Just for comparison about 80 young Australians died from suicide this week alone.
Therefore, 100 lives would be worth about a billion dollars.
The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life.
A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
I don’t think experts honestly thinks you can hammer the virus to zero though based on our knowledge of human behavior.
Case in point, HIV has killed around 50 million over the past few decades, and we know exactly how it spreads, and it is quite easy to stop. If we can’t stop HIV, without a vaccine there is no way we can stop something airborne (which we now know SARS-CoV2 is).
Victoria hasn't exited lockdown. How can you say it worked?
> Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine.
I have heard the argument that suppression is a good strategy because a vaccine is soon to be approved.
If we can't develop a vaccine I would hope suppression wouldn't be the strategy.
Do you actually have any info on those topics? If not how can you claim that it worked. Maybe it had just delayed inevitable but at higher overall cost.
I live in Toronto, Ontario.
Even parts of the country with a far greater number of infections than the Atlantic provinces are seeing numbers stabilize (e.g. Alberta) or decline (e.g. British Columbia). This is not the case in Ontario, where the spread is essentially uncontrolled. Measures need to be put into place because the living will continue to suffer as long as that spread is uncontrolled, and yes the loss of life matters as well. A few weeks to stabilize the situation will ensure that lives are not lost needlessly.
I live in a diverse area with lots of working-class people: It's not uncommon for kids in my school district to be using their parent's old phone as their online portal for distance learning. It's also not uncommon for parents who must work & can't afford child care to have an elderly relative watch their kids. Relatives that aren't always fluent English speakers, and often aren't equipped to help a kid navigate a curriculum spread across 5 or 6 different electronic systems.
Cardiovascular disease kills 655,000 Americans each year compared to Covid's 200,000.
Homeless people have been placed into accommodation (and is apparently proving to be cheaper than the previous services provided).
Medical care is fully available?
Malnutrition??
(Note that this isn't a hypothetical - we have real world examples - see New York a few months ago, or Spain.)
So if you assume that Victoria can contact trace almost as well as NSW, I think its fair to say it's worked because they've got to a number where contact tracing is effective.
We followed with very strong lockdowns that brought us down from the ~700 new daily cases to the current ~15 new daily cases.
This is their second lockdown. They virtually eliminated it during the first lockdown and brought the virus back in via hotel quarantine leaks (as proven by genomic testing).
There is nothing indicating that the same thing won't happen again. NSW's contact tracing team has been excellent but I have not heard anyone detail how Victoria's team is up to scratch now (a part from throwing some money at Salesforce).
There is no long-term strategy in this whatsoever, the hope is that the vaccine is available and effective before the inevitable 3rd wave hits a still highly susceptible population.
https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/nsw-denies-i...
Gladys also indicated that a large part of NSW's tracing success was the tight integration and information sharing between government agencies. Something that, if you read between the lines, is apparently not the case in Victoria.
SARS1: the virus was eradicated before trials could complete.
MERS: There are several vaccines in testing, however MERS comes and goes randomly, so it takes a lot of time to gather events.
HIV: Apparently there's a trial in Uganda going on since quite a while, which looks better than the past ones (which were failures), but with HIV, it takes years to see if it works or not
That said, betting all your options on a vaccine is not what I'd call sound policy. In fact, there are several drugs in the pipeline, but few if any report that.
Part of this is just fear talking though.
My family was very concerned about the virus for the first couple months. Then people we knew in our age demographic (20s-30s) started catching it. Invariably it's been a day or two of fever and a week or so of cold symptoms.
Absolutely people who are at elevated risk because of age or pre-existing conditions should lock down to whatever extent they feel is necessary.
But the general feeling here (central Iowa) seems to be more and more that the lockdown is far worse than the virus.
Because of that, we get raked over the coals pretty well daily by everyone in the media.
But our schools are open, our universities are open, and people are more or less back to normal life. Cases are stable. Deaths are low and mostly restricted to the very old. We seem to have settled on an acceptable (to us) middle ground. I'm sure businesses are still hurting, but very few have shut their doors permanently. I get the feeling that's a very different picture than many places.
Even when a vaccine is available it’s not going to be 100% effective. Contrast it to another RNA based virus (but faster mutating) like influenza. The annual shot effectiveness fluctuates based on what is the dominant strain socially circulating.
Therefore, the science Dan is subscribed to means Vic will be locked down indefinitely. Sure ppl love the lockdowns but the reality will hit hard when they realize there is no such thing as “pause” in the economy. It’s a hard stop followed by CPR.
What ever happened to real science; you know, the one where we learn and adapt as new information is made available. I’m pretty sure we now know a lot more about this virus, demographics most at risk, it’s disease management etc...
As Frank Herbert says; Fear is the mind killer.
Especially comparing it to the flu, as that's a virus that mutates much more often than most viri.
In any case no vaccine is 100% effective. The goal is typically to be effective enough that the virus dies out faster than it spreads. Which solves the problem.
There are a lot of covid vaccine trials going on. The different candidates have different properties. It has yet to be seen which candidates are succesful.
I’m comparing RNA based viruses not diseases. If the keyword “flu” offends you because you think I’m comparing it to the flu then replace it with any RNA based virus and it’s mutation rate. You’ll realize fast that the thing called cure is only 100% effective when the mutation rates are close to 0.
Why do you think that the flu being an RNA virus is the reason that you need a new vaccine every year? I'm pretty sure that is not the reason.