Hacker News Reader

Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, Melbourne is A-Okay. They'd have been that way much earlier if it wasn't for one major super spreader event.

View on HN

It's nearly summer there. Respiratory viruses are far more common in winter. I feel this fact is conspicuously absent from talk of Australia.

Your timing is out.

Melbourne started their lockdown in winter. Everyone obeyed it. It was strongly enforced [1, 2]. They beat coronavirus. And now they can enjoy their summer.

I live in London. At one point in the summer, our covid rates were lower than Melbourne's. But the UK's messaging was confused and contradictory ("eat out to help out", test and trace was shambolic, rules were not enforced). So no one is the least surprised that it has got out of control again so quickly.

[1] My parents live half an hour's drive from Melbourne. Police stopped every car on the highways to enforce no travel, fined the drivers and made them turn back home.

[2] One party of 26 people got busted ordering KFC to the same address and fined $26,000.

But numbers seem to be up again, this article is speaking of another lockdown: https://t.co/2S9b4HfUhg

from that link:

>The Avalon cluster has grown to 38, with 21 out of yesterday's 23 cases linked to it and another two still under investigation.

It isn't fair and might not even be entirely honest to describe this to a (mostly US) audience with a phrase like "numbers seem to be up again".

The trigger for Australia to go back into lockdown would be considered a giant fat ignorable nothingburger in almost every part of the US.

For context, that's in another state and the number has rose from 0 > 35 so its still manageable. You can't even remotely compare that to UK.

I don't think I was, but every journey starts with the first step ;-). I think the Australian confidence of 'having eradicated covid' is misplaced. You can only eradicate a virus if you do that worldwide, and given viruses' capability of mutating, I think that's an unattainable goal.

That's in Sydney, which is over 700km away. It is also nothing like the scale that the UK is dealing with and will hopefully be dealt with by a short lockdown - possibly not even of the entire city of the politicians pull their finger out quickly enough.

Yeah, raarts is trying to burn us by taking this sudden reappareance of a whole 30 cases in NSW seriously. Because here in Australia we take it that seriously.

Short lockdown maybe, back to normal soon, not too many other places will be able to brag about that.

We will be able to save all the lives prior to vaccination that nations with less willpower seem willing to spend.

That’s a very weak argument. The “numbers went up” from single digits to 34, from a single outbreak that is actively being traced.

Aggressive contact tracing works when the disease is at low levels.

If only the UK had the same level of government as Melbourne and Singapore and Japan and South Korea and New Zealand and all the other places that did that...

I'm not sure that's completely fair. Countries vary so much that putting it down to "the government" ignores all the other factors. You're examples are all on the southern hemisphere, with mostly nice weather where people spend more time outside. General population health also has a massive effect. Here in the UK we are a nation of overweight old people, but fat-shaming is a thing so that's only going to get worse.

But those antipodean countries are all coming out of their winter. So they got through the worst of it during the coldest part of the year, with more people indoors, and only now are getting into summer.

I'm not sure about those other countries, but an Australian "winter" is very different from a British winter.

As I said - there are other factors here (many more than I mentioned) - that you can't compare countries so easily.

Agree with you in principle, except that Japan and Korea are at temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

Not sure why you are all focusing on my example with the weather. Like I said there are many factors involved here, with the weather being one of them.

I completely agree with your overall point, that there are too many confounding factors to reliably attribute anything to government actions. I guess I just couldn't resist the urge to nit.

So Australia (Melbourne at the time) and the UK had basically the same case reports per day in July. One place crushed it, the other didn’t.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/drericlevi/status/132282229786701...

[1] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...

Firstly, the UK response has been terrible, Australia far better.

However there are several contributing factors and it certainly doesn’t come down to mask use as the primary one as mask discipline in the UK hasn’t been bad in my experience.

This is a seasonal disease (the main reason for the UK summer reprieve), and it’s now summer in Australia, and they have also been far better at quarantines and contact tracing and have used this period wisely to get the disease under control. All these factors matter in a response, and the UK has suffered from panic management and a lack of difficult measures at the right time and is now entering the peak season for this sort of virus so things will get worse for a month or two at least, even with a new lockdown.

Contract tracing wasn't very effective. What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city...

I'm all for managing the virus spread but if the policies are a piece of meat, in the UK the policies are uncooked in Melbourne they were burnt.

> What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city...

The .au epidemiologists I've heard on NPR have made it clear that what worked in Melbourne was everything they did, including a lockdown and including contact tracing.

Exactly, there is no one magic bullet. The changing seasons probably helped too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com