Comment by phs318u | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phs318u | Hacker News Reader

"Data from surface survival studies indicate that a 99% reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within 3 days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass."

These are typical surfaces found on public transport, shopping malls, food courts. Three days allows for a lot of traffic to pass through and potentially come into contact with the infected surface. Of course, if the infection is coming from someone who is at that location on a daily basis (works there, takes the same bus/train each day) then the 3 days stretches out because surfaces are getting re-infected while the person is infected. Given that in densely populated areas such locations can get hundreds to thousands of people passing through each day, 1 in 10K may still translate to 1 infection every few days for a given "location". Each of those people would likely infect whoever they cohabitate with. So, while surface transmission is very low, it's not nothing, and can translate to real numbers in short order.

You may read the above and say "so what?". I should point out that I'm based in Australia, and the way we've handled the COVID situation and the numbers we've had and are having, means we are generally pretty highly sensitised to avoiding the kind of shitshow happening in most of the rest of the world. The numbers you are seeing in your countries are horrific to most of us.

You had me nodding along until last paragraph, where I can’t help but ask you to remind me what the population of AUS is, and the population density. Aren’t you also on an island with relatively harsh immigration policies?

Obsessively cleaning bags from the grocery store and cereal boxes may not be the explanation for why your COVID experience seems saintly compared to contiguous regions with 10x the population and 40-50x the population density.

Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS.

> Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS.

All of this. So many people are holding up AUS and NZ as the way the rest of the world should have handled it. But as you correctly say, they're two isolated countries on the bottom of the planet, no land borders, no ferry traffic from neighbouring countries, low population density, and also largely self sufficient.

Stopping people entering and leaving AUS/NZ is trivial versus Europe or the USA. Shut down your borders for months and you've solved the problem. Do that in the USA or Europe, and you'll have empty shelves and chaos.

Firstly, population density of the whole country is irrelevant. Population density of urban centres (e.g. Sydney + Melb > 10M pop.), is comparable if not greater than many cities in the US. We are largely self-sufficient for most food stuffs. I assume most of the US is too (I doubt that closing your borders would lead to empty food shelves). But we are entirely not self-sufficient for just about anything that's manufactured (the bulk of which comes from Asia, mainly China). We shut our borders to people (mostly) not goods. We also had governments that were willing to make politically very unpopular decisions based on the advice they were getting at the time. And the more the outcomes diverged between what we were seeing and what the rest of the world was experiencing, it became less politically damaging to make those kinds of calls (even more so because there was largely bipartisan agreement on the macro decisions even if details varied across states).

I live in Melbourne and went through 2 multi-month lockdowns. The first was 3 months, the second was 5 months. It may be comforting to think that it was "trivial" for us to control the spread of COVID, but I assure you it didn't fucking feel trivial 5 months into the 2nd lockdown.

> but I assure you it didn't fucking feel trivial 5 months into the 2nd lockdown.

I wrote that it is trivial to prevent people entering and leaving AUS/NZ, as you also stated in your comment "We shut our borders to people (mostly) not goods."

I did NOT write it was trivial "locking down" cities. Europe is under going similar lockdowns, so Australia is far from alone. According to the press, there are 30-40,000 of your fellow citizens that still have not been able to return home 12 months after all this started, precisely for the reasons above.

> population density of the whole country is irrelevant.

It's completely relevant. Even more so that if you live in Perth, you don't just jump in a car and drive to, say, Sydney, whereas in Europe you can drive from London to Birmingham in a couple of hours, or Paris to Brussels, and so on. Australian towns and cities are very widely spread compared to Europe and the USA. Which is reflected in the speed of transmission (and lack of) across the country.

You underestimate the amount of interstate traffic here, especially on the east coast. The real reason we squelched transmission was the highly unpopular but rigorously enforced state border closures. That is a political and economic choice not a reflection of geography. And it was done so, by state governments of both political persuasions, despite the barrage of constant criticism from the Murdoch press.

It has nothing to do with population density. Other continents have fared much better than Europe, North America, and South America [1]. Many of the world's densest cities are on these continents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:COVID-19_Outbreak_World_M...

Population density absolutely matters for airborne infectious disease spread.

The point being made is that it’s local density that matters not overall density.

Overall is relevant when representing the performance of a continent.

I think the point of this is to focus on countermeasures that work, because if you divide your attention wrong, you can start approaching something like a sanitization-theatre, that looks like you are doing impactful things but in reality it is mostly for show.

I remember Zeynep Tufekci ranting about a school where they had strict procedure for doing a weekly deep cleaning, but no guidelines on ventilation.

I'm in the US and the death toll is horrific for me to think about.

Nobody is perfect but certainly our previous leadership did a great job of proving just how critical it is that world leaders understand or at least believe in science and facts.

I've seen some Australian news outlet coverage via YouTube and can draw some pretty close parallels to a well known news outlet ironically named after a clever animal in the US. In my mind, this means the seeds of misinformation and a rise in the same kind of political environment are quite possible there too.

Murdoch runs the same playbook in the US, UK and Australia. He’s an Aussie.

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