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Comment by jdrc | Hacker News Reader

Little weird to be talking about peopel starving and lacking meds, but then again they re able to find fresh fish. Anyway, i wonder what this pattern of isolatation can create in terms of covid variants which may develop in china or australia but which haven't been introduced to the rest of world this season.

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My wife's parents last week were able to accept delivery of only 3 garlic bulbs, a small cabbage and one or two other root vegetables. Every night they have to spend hours desparetly trying to put items in their basket, hoping that what they place in it remains in stock for longer than a few seconds. If the order is successful there is little certaintly that you'll get what you ordered. Some people will receive fresh meat and fish, many others won't.

So no, it's not a little weird if you engage your brain and attempt to show a modicum of empathy or understanding of the situation.

My wife is a proud Shanghainese and her parents have until now lived an extremely comfortable life in government and in academia. She's now determined to relocate them having seen them confined to a building, barred from leaving for even essential supples (water and food), by a leadership that has shown itself to be too incompotent to ensure adequate measuress have been put in place to prevent malnourishment for many.

Well Australia is open and has been for a while. As far as I know there were no novel variants that were found first here because the lockdowns suppressed case numbers and besides, there is only 25 million Australians. We have the same variants as the rest of the world, except most Australians don't know anyone who has died from COVID.

Australia: 6.6k deaths, 25M population, 0.03% dead

US: 1M deaths, 300M people, 0.3% dead.

On the other hand, Australia's had most of their deaths recently and is still going, while the US deaths were mostly earlier. So the gap will likely narrow over time.

> So the gap will likely narrow over time.

No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.

I expect the gap to continue to narrow because it has been narrowing: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

If you start from the premise that a much larger portion of the vulnerable in the US have already been infected, the expectation would be that the gap will only ever narrow, so the direction isn't really an indictment of the policy in Australia, you have to look at where things end up.

I didn't say it was an indictment of Australian policy, and don't think that. But my parent was saying that the gap was unlikely to narrow, which is just wrong.

Besides the statistical anomaly at the end (probably a one time correction for some past cases) the US death rate has always been higher. So the gap has been widening until now. Look at cumulative cases.

Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.

Good point! In cumulative deaths per million:

                  US   AUS  delta
    2022-01-01  2477    87   2360
    2022-02-01  2673   141   2532
    2022-03-01  2852   204   2648
    2022-04-01  2948   247   2701

I didn't look closely at the graph and I misread the recent apparent spike, which I agree with you is likely some kind of correction.

I'm sorry I can't go back and edit my comment!

And by excess death numbers, the US probably already had that many deaths before the time Australia locked down. The world acted too late to not let the cat out of the bag. Australia definitely avoided a lot of impact by locking down and starting locked down, but it was happenstance and geography that allowed it to do so semi-effectively

I believe most of the deaths in the US were not actually early. They were in that May-October range were there was just... yeah.

Edit: data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

My old area under the curve skills require a bit more than a mark 1 eyeball. But most of it seems to be later, but there was an April spike.

They have a cumulative deaths option on their Covid data (the link is scaled to population, there's a toggle for that on the graph header).

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

The low China numbers prior to Omicron certainly seem to be a result of successful containment, I guess we will find out more over the next months about how Omicron goes (and whether they report it accurately).

I think living in the relative freedom of the US rather than Australia for the last two years has been worth way more than an 0.27% chance of dying.

We spent most of 2020 and half of 2021 living with no fear of the virus because it wasn't here. No one I know has even been hospitalised by COVID. It is hilarious to me (and most Australians I know) that Americans think we had a hard time or our strategy didn't work. It did. We came as close as possible to "winning" the pandemic. Now if you lived in Melbourne life kinda sucked. But everywhere else was fine. Perth and Adelaide had about ~2 weeks of lockdowns between them after May 2020.

Also a 2 in 1000 risk of death is frankly awful. I wouldn't take those odds.

Can confirm, up to a point, though I'm an edge case in AU -- in part because everyone I know has been careful, sane, and kept up with vaccinations.

The count of people I know who've had COVID is now up to 16, and they've all been fine, of course.

Naturally, no one I know has been hospitalised, let alone died.

All you had to do to 'achieve' this was sacrifice the education of the young, decimate small business, prevent citizens from leaving the country (you know, against the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which Australia signed and violated) and unleash police on the citizenry for peacefully protesting.

Australian police fired rubber bullets at peaceful assemblers [1], violently threw a compliant man to the ground causing brain damage [2], pepper spraying old women [3] and arresting people for the crime of... suggesting a protest [4]

After all this, massive damage was done to mental health to the point 1 in 10 residents in the lockdown capital Victoria seriously considered suicide. [5]

With all this damage and the decimation of civil liberties, it's hard to justify the measures. Especially not when you set fire to UN human rights standards to do so.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/victorian-police-offi...

[3] https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/watch-moment-...

[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-04/victoria-police-arres...

[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-25/one-in-10-victorians-...

Oh yeah Melbourne screwed up badly. But the rest of the country didn't. Don't conflate Melbourne's bad contact tracing and subsequent lockdowns with the quality of life elsewhere in Australia. We spent most of the last two years COVID free and without lockdowns. Even Sydney contact-traced their way out of multiple outbreaks before July 2021 without lockdowns.

It is genuinely pretty funny seeing Americans think they know more about what happened in Australia than the people who lived here. We still live up to our "The Lucky Country" moniker.

Apparently you have missed this part - "Three fresh fish, a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps, although you need to check it all day and be extremely lucky you can grab something for the split second it’s available." -

Covid variants are more likely to arise through large scale infections, as each infection is a chance of mutation. Long lasting infection in immuno compromised patients is also a fertile breeding ground (it is believed that Omicron was produced like this).

China had administered more than 2 billion doses of vaccines using alum based adjuvant. This combined with the very low level of prior infection is theoretically the perfect breeding ground for a different serotype of Covid. Time will tell of this turns out to be the case

What’s so special about the adjuvant?

Alum tends to result in Th2 response, which is not very useful against viral infection as the T cells required to clear infected cells are not sufficiently activated. A lot of antibodies will be made but an RNA virus could mutate very rapidly in response, eventually leading to a new serotype that would require a different vaccine altogether. Or worse, result in antibody enhanced disease.

Most modern vaccines made against viral diseases use specialised adjuvants to avoid this known problem.

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