It's not a shame at all. Lockdowns have a price. Besides the economic price, I care mostly about the well being of people price. I live in Massachusetts in an area where most people follow the guidelines about social distancing and masks. We had zero full lockdowns but we did have a stay at home advisory when it all started. During that time only essential businesses were open but people were free to go outside. Also, pretty much everyone besides essential workers moved to WFH and still are. Some schools had hybrid options and some were fully remote. This month almost all schools went back to fully in person after the governor of the state forced them to.
Overall I feel we managed the pandemic fine so far without lockdowns. Sure, people died and I'm sure in much larger numbers than Australia. But if we ever need to experience something like this again, I would still prefer this over strict lockdowns after a few new cases like in AU. I'm not against strict lockdowns, there might be times when they are a good solution, but nothing longer than a couple of weeks.
When you talk about the cost of lockdown, I suspect you don’t understand the deal.
My experience of Covid, which is the same for almost everyone in Australia, is nothing remotely like yours. For the vast majority of people living here, Covid is a minor inconvenience that doesn’t materially affect our day to day life.
I meet friends at bars for drinks and dinner, my kids take public transport to school and go on school camps, I go to the office for work, and I’m even flying to Sydney this afternoon for a couple of days.
Australia is basically operating normally with almost no restrictions. Situation normal.
You seem to be saying that lockdown was too heavy a price to pay for the freedom I now enjoy, but I respectfully disagree.
It was totally worth it.
The only thing that I’m unhappy about was that Melbourne stuffed it up the first time and we paid heavily for that. But you know what?
Well, my life here is pretty much back to normal too. But primarily thanks to the vaccines. My question is how many lockdowns you had and the length of each lockdown to achieve the normal life you're having now. I'm really asking as I don't know the details.
In Melbourne, we have been basically running at increasingly normal pace for about 5 or 6 months now, but most of the rest of the country has been "normal" for much longer.
In Melbourne we have had three lockdowns, the first was a couple of weeks, the second was extremely long (several months; I think it was one of the longest hard lockdowns in the world), and the third was 5 days (2 of which were over a weekend).
Importantly, the second lockdown was due to what seems to have been preventable problems, including a significant delay before enacting the lockdown itself; by the time we did it, the virus had taken a firm hold across the whole city (Melbourne's population is a bit over 5 million). If we had locked down a few weeks earlier, the duration of lockdown would have been much lower (easy to say in hindsight).
That said, the rest of the county didn't suffer the same fate as Melbourne, and they only had to endure a few weeks of lockdowns at worst. I don't know the specifics from other states because I live in Melbourne.
I think this parallels most of the rest of the world: had everyone agreed to one or two really good, solid, early lockdowns, much of the pandemic could have been avoided. The countries that did this - NZ, most of Australia and I think some of SE Asia - have not suffered nearly as much as the rest of the world.
The second Melbourne lockdown was super hard on everyone, and of course we had government support in many (but not all) cases, but I still say it was totally worth it.
I just thought it was probably worth adding that Victoria (2nd biggest state in Australia) has recorded a total of 820 deaths from Covid. That's the total. Not per day or per week. 820 people died from CV in Victoria, ever. And we were the worst state by far.
People seem to be OK discussing hundreds of daily deaths from Covid as if that's something that can't be prevented, but it could have been. Our lockdowns have literally saved tens of thousands of lives here.
Well, clearly if you have a very long and strict lockdown, you would have a low death count. If you optimize for that then nothing beats a lockdown. But everything has a tradeoff. If we optimized for low death counts then we would've banned cars long time ago. But instead we allow cars but try to prevent accidents as much as we can. And just to be clear, I'm not against short lockdowns when really needed.
While the lockdowns surely helped, you can't discount the advantage of being a non-densely populated island. Iceland and Japan, for example, also have very low death counts compared to mainland Europe or America.
Three months lockdown... is it worth it? Depends who you ask. If I had to go through such a lockdown in the US I would most likely move back to my home country or somewhere else. As for the rest of Australia (Sydney especially) and NZ - super impressive and totally worth it.
I've had one lock-down for about 6 weeks, starting on 30th March 2020. That's been the extent of it for me.
Lockdown meant the family stayed home with the children doing school remotely. We were allowed out for exercise (family group only) within a few km radius, supermarket shopping, medical and looking after aged family. I could have gone to an office, but was able to work remotely.
Other areas have been through more due to localised outbreaks. Parts of Northern Sydney did several weeks around Christmas due to an outbreak. Victoria's second wave was the most intense lock-down. That went for about 3 months. It was tough on the Victorians I know, but as a comparison at the beginning of the lock-down the UK and Victoria were in a similar situation. By the end of the lock-down Victoria was on zero cases whilst the UK was at risk of the NHS being overwhelmed.
We've now settled into a pattern of 3-day lock-downs at the first sign of any outbreak, these being lifted if there is no further transmission detected during the lock-down. So far there have been about 4-5 of these in different state capitals but all have been lifted at the end of the 3 days.
Vaccinewise, Australia's dropped the ball a bit. The government under spent on mRNA vaccines and didn't invest in local mRNA manufacturing. We're making the AZ vaccine locally, but there turns out to be a low risk of blood clots. Given the low COVID numbers it's borderline whether the risk of blood clots is outweighed by the risk of COVID for under 50s. The medical recommendation is for mRNA over AZ, but decent supplies won't arrive until the end of the year. I mention this as low COVID numbers makes decisions about vaccines more complicated.
Life here is "normal" in that there aren't many restrictions beyond overseas travel, but a significant number of people are choosing not to go back to their old ways, partly due to COVID risk and partly because they have figured out that some of their previous activities weren't actually that important and that life is good without them.
Sydney/NSW is an interesting case, as its response has very much relied on contact tracing, to the extent that it is probably a world leader in this area.
When a case is detected, the NSW government's contract tracers conduct confidential phone interviews to determine all contacts, both forward and backward. A forward contact is someone to whom you may have given the virus. A backward contact is someone from whom you may have received the virus. The "backward" contact is the more critical one, as it can lead to previously unknown community cases. The contact tracers are aiming to trace the new case back to an already known case. If they find any intermediate transmission or close contacts, they recursively do the forward/backward thing on the intermediaries and close contacts until they reach limits imposed by COVID's known incubation and infection times. The aim is to locate every person who has any chance of having COVID, given the known properties of COVID.
If the contact tracers successfully traverse the tree to all possible cases then lockdown is avoided. Close contacts are required to isolate at home for 14 days (with a support payment), whilst casual contacts are asked to get tested and monitor for symptoms. If the contact tracers are unable to traverse the tree or are overwhelmed by the numbers then a lockdown occurs. NSW has put significant resources into contact tracing as it recognises that the cost of a lockdown will always be greater than the spend on contact tracing.
Beyond phone interviews, contact tracing is assisted by a requirement for all public venues to keep a 14 day digital log of names, phone numbers and time of attendance of people who have visited. Patrons provide details on an honour basis, but most people do this honestly as they realise that it is their own interest to be contacted if they have been exposed to COVID. There's also a certain amount of pride that the country has weathered the storm (so far) and people don't want to be the one that stuffs it up.
I flew back in to the country in March 2020, did two weeks isolation, and life has been normal ever since. When I visited my mother in the hospital in October, I had to wear a mask. Which they were handing out at the entrance because no one has them. That's it. That is the extent corona virus restrictions impacted me here living in Australia.
Now what they have done is kept me here living in Australia. Which has been a particularly big deal for my specific lifestyle in which I was living overseas in a dodgy visa abusing way, meaning I couldnt qualify for an exception to the international travel ban by showing I was legitimately living elsewhere. Day to day though its like it almost didnt exist except online.
I can answer for Sydney. We had one "major" lockdown, which was still not as strict as most of the worlds lockdowns. Certainly at no point was it stricter than what my parents were experiencing in the UK.
Most shops were still open but had reduced numbers allowed inside. High risk venues like nightclubs and casinos were closed, restaurants went to takeaway only. This was early in 2020 when nobody knew what they were dealing with, really. They were talking about "Keeping numbers down until we can build capacity", but they just found out they were really good at keeping numbers down, and I don't even know what we did with our 2K extra ventilators when we peaked at about 60 patients in hospital in NSW I think.
We switched from a suppression to an elimination strategy and have been mostly normal since then.
One small group of suburbs had a lockdown around Christmas/New Years, but it only affected about 100K people I think and only for a few days.
The model in Australia seems to be to keep community transfer to zero, and if a case is detected, a 3 day lockdown of the suburb/city in question to let Contact Tracing and Testing travel faster than infections.
Overall I feel we managed the pandemic fine so far without lockdowns. Sure, people died and I'm sure in much larger numbers than Australia. But if we ever need to experience something like this again, I would still prefer this over strict lockdowns after a few new cases like in AU. I'm not against strict lockdowns, there might be times when they are a good solution, but nothing longer than a couple of weeks.