you know those movies where all humans band together in the face of adversity? i now know the reality is that it will be full of nonstop misinformation and political infighting along the way. i suppose i understood it on an intellectual level but seeing it play out is something different. we are more idiocracy than contagion.
Something I find of interest is the set of all conjectures whose Bayesian probability estimates would be significantly revised in light of this discrepancy.
On 24 March, Western Australia closed its borders to the rest of Australia, and on 1 April, the state implemented borders between regions in the state.
By mid-April 2020, the state had eliminated community transmission of COVID-19, becoming one of the few places in the world to do so.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Western_A...
and: https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/department-of-the-premier...
Just delaying it to 2022 according to those same articles, as it had already exited the evolutionary fit population’s memory everywhere else in the world
I suggest you read the articles, from the linked Wikipedia source:
Why are there so many Covid cases in Australia?
Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, said Australia’s high reported infection rate may be the result of high “case ascertainment”.
Although PCR testing rates have dropped off in Australia, “we’re probably still doing it more so than anywhere else in the world”, Bennett said. “We still have free PCR testing. A lot of countries don’t.”
The number of confirmed Covid cases shouldn’t be relied on in isolation, Bennett said. “If you compare us to, say, the UK, they look much better for infection rates,” she said. “The UK’s confirmed case rate is 128 cases per million – less than a tenth of Australia’s 1,515 figure.
“Yet their hospitalisation rate per million is 209, and ours is 124. It suggests that they probably have twice as many [true] cases [as Australia].”
In short, we paid attention to case numbers, when we had zero cases we had zero cases and when we had 1,500 mild infections post vaccnation we had 1,500 mild infections.
Other places seemed to run on guesswork and magical thinking.
China’s surprise loosening was a disaster, as their vaccines were not the same and didnt have comparable efficacy.
We did, and the inevitable was 99% double vaccination, very few serious (hospitalisation) cases, very few deaths, at the cost of business as usual within the state and goods being quarentine 'airlocked' in and out across the border.
I wrote a longer reply but for some rare unknown reason HN ate my homework :( .. and it's late in the day here ATM.
In 2022, I'm sure pretty much any region would be much better prepared to get hit by COVID-19 for the "first" time.
my main observation is that it was too long for most of the population and your standard has no limit.
most places did not improve their hospital capacity and infrastructure. some conjecture about the virus was answered but thats it.
We have an aging population that has representatives like them, they optimized for themselves and it was not necessary for the rest of us. Beforesight, in hindsight, and we are still not represented in the mental health repercussions that should be weighed, especially amongst the maladjusted adolescent and now young adult population that makes more sense to have been optimized for in a functioning society.
And what did we do with slowing down how many elderly people died? We did not expand hospital capacity in but did buy time in a coincidence that has almost no standard of review. For example, In the US if only 100,000 people died instead of 1 million (or the 10 million some were afraid of), it still would be a political disaster for whoever was in office, the same at 10,000, or even the 3,000 matching 9/11. Its good that the hospital system didnt get overwhelmed, or for long in some municipalities, by mostly coincidence.
Response could have been tailored to factor in reality quicker, which is what ultimately happened anyway: A bifurcated system where those fit interacted with the world, and those not did not. Many of them are still functionally quarantined to this day. Could have been the same by 2021, everywhere.