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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.

You mentioned Asia. I saw this headline today:

"South Korea's Health Minister Describes Seoul As A 'COVID-19 War Zone'"

By US standards, their case count is still incredibly low. The point is they haven't actually been able to contain it, either; they're just acting sooner and more aggressively for the second wave. Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days.

If "half-assed 'wear a mask and social distance if you want'" kept the r0 below 1, lockdown or not, new cases would drop.

What's scarier is that the Bay Area, with ubiquitous masks, good-ish weather, partial closures, and lower population wasn't even able to keep new cases down.

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> Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days.

NZ hasn't had any new cases in the general population for quite some time. The cases that NZ has been reporting are all recent arrivals undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine in an isolation facility.

Both Australia and New Zealand have shown (multiple times) that it is entirely possible to completely eradicate this virus using nothing more sophisticated than masks, social distancing, testing, and (targeted) strict lockdowns.

Australia and New Zealand are islands where the borders can be closed much more tightly than elsewhere and imported goods arrive mainly through container shipping. In the EU, the need to ensure regular freight truck traffic and move hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from east to west means that a comparable lockdown could not have been achieved.

> Australia and New Zealand are islands where the borders can be closed much more tightly than elsewhere and imported goods arrive mainly through container shipping. In the EU, the need to ensure regular freight truck traffic and move hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from east to west means that a comparable lockdown could not have been achieved.

I wonder about this. I'd expect freight truck traffic in China to play at least as big of a role in distribution there that it does in Europe. China is a giant connected piece of land, and if their numbers are to be believed even in the slightest, it's clear China was able to keep Covid under control to a much greater extent than the western world.

Australia never fully halted interstate freight truck traffic, as it was deemed essential. I've heard Covid tests were given to truckies at state borders, but that seems possible for US states or European countries to do, even with limited resources. Is freight truck traffic really to blame for Covid spread, then?

And although Australia largely shut itself off from foreign crop labor, and is struggling to harvest crops given this, there's not all that much appreciable damage that I can see. Perhaps this was really a good season to err on the side of going short handed. Prices will go up, but the juice is worth the squeeze, it seems.

Also, Hawaii is an island, as is the UK. Alaska would seem to have similar advantages to an island state. Yet these islands are doing very much more poorly compared to Australia and New Zealand.

> It's clear China was able to keep Covid under control

China's lockdown involved e.g. welding the doors of apartment blocks shut and forcing the populace to install a spyware app on their phones. Claiming that a Western country "could have just done like China" is basically saying that that Western country could have just junked all its civil liberties.

> And although Australia largely shut itself off from foreign crop labor, and is struggling to harvest crops given this, there's not all that much appreciable damage that I can see.

Things are different in the EU. After decades of the single market, keeping people fed absolutely relies on getting those harvests done with imported labour.

> I've heard Covid tests were given to truckies at state borders, but that seems possible for US states or European countries to do, even with limited resources.

Tests were in short supply for a long time. By the time they were available, it was too late to lock down as effectively as Oz or NZ. Again, you underestimate just how special those two countries are among Western nations.

Freight truck traffic definitely did play a role in spreading Covid within China - it's how they ended up with an outbreak in Beijing, the city they'd most aggressively protected against the spread of the disease. That outbreak in turn appears to have been seeded by another outbreak that went entirely undetected until it spread to Beijing. China's apparent success in keeping Covid under control is one of the biggest mysteries of the entire pandemic; their methods don't seem like they should work, and every so often there's a little sign that something isn't right like that undetected outbreak.

> Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.

In Australia, hard lockdown looks like the following:

1. International borders closed to all non-citizens, permanent residents or essential travelers

2. State borders closed per 1

3. City "borders" closed per 1 — happened in Melbourne

4. You can't leave your home for any reason not deemed essential

5. If you do leave your home for an essential reason, you must stay within 5km of your home, or have a job/emergency/essential imperative to travel further away

All of the above is enforced by police officers.

In Melbourne, they even closed off a high-risk, high density building for a while, just because the health authorities deemed it a risk.

Could you expand more on what these European "hard lockdowns" mean? Because at no point during this pandemic has any of the above happened in any American state or city, at least not to my knowledge.

The Australian federal government also enacted Job Keeper to suspend work hours yet keep working people employed, and took additional steps to ensure as many people as possible could remain on lockdown without a source of income. This was as important as — if not more important than — the hard lockdown enforcement measures themselves.

Melbourne in Australia was seeing 600-700 new cases per day in late July/early August.

They went into EXTREMELY hard lockdown for 6-8 weeks, and now they haven't had a single case in four weeks.

https://www.vox.com/2020/12/4/22151242/melbourne-victoria-au...

The article says there was no secret sauce, which isn't quite right. Some factors that played a role:

- Australia had had an unusually bad fire season and an associated scandal about the government response: our PM was on holiday in Hawaii while an unprecedented area of land was burning. The framework for state/federal cooperation on disaster management was being revised right as 2020 started, and there was political will for strong measures, such as ignoring WHO recommendations to let international borders stay open.

- Victoria had strong state of emergency/disaster powers, including the right to impose movement restrictions, and clear conditions and precedent for imposing them.

- The states had the power to close their borders, and did so, isolating the second wave to one state. Victoria was the odd one out - the other states set the bar at near-total suppression.

- The lockdown really, really sucked. The Victorian state government relied heavily on the support of the federal government, support from the general populace, and federal spending on income supplements. They still came under enormous pressure to end the lockdown early, even with more federal and individual support than states in the US would have gotten.

>> Europe had hard lockdowns. Not China-hard, but pretty hard. Cases surged again.

Well yeah, after the first wave people threw all caution to the wind and decided to go back to their old habits. So of course cases are surging again.

This isn’t rocket science. Not sure why everyone is pretending there’s some sort of huge mystery. We know how the virus spreads.

summer travel to countries like Croatia helped spread the disease among travelers who brought it back to their home countries, as well.

This virus has put on bare display just how selfish, unintelligent, and tribalistic we are as a species. Like you say, there is no mystery at this point. We have to face the cold, depressing truth about who we are.

> What's scarier is that the Bay Area, with ubiquitous masks, good-ish weather, partial closures, and lower population wasn't even able to keep new cases down.

I’d contest that characterization of the Bay Area - even in Santa Clara County where I live, I’ve not seen ubiquitous mask wearing.

I live in the bay area and it is 100% of every single person I've seen outside. I still haven't spotted anyone without a mask besides a runner or someone on a bicycle.

Bay Area has some busy shipping ports and a lot of commerce flowing throw it.

It’s not within the regions power to shut down the state and interstate highways.

Spread was going to come from the rest of the country no matter what they did.

Also, by current US and European standards South Korea is carrying out very few Covid-19 tests, which makes it hard to make a meaningful comparison of case numbers. Well over an order of magnitude less in per-capita terms. I believe they're still not routinely offering testing to people with mild potential symptoms unless they've had recent contact with a known case, and there's evidence that it's in increasingly widespread circulation outside of the network of cases known to contact tracing.

Plus, you've got to remember that disease outbreaks grows exponentially, and exponential growth always has low numbers at the start until it doesn't.

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