Chris,
You need better data/context for your Straya anecdotes…
First up, Australia’s population is currently shrinking, not growing, as all growth here for the last twenty years has been derived from an immigration ponzi, not natural increase.
More immigrants -> more wallets -> more GDP -> smaller per capita GDP -> static wages -> lower quality of life.
For the last year, the state & federal governments have been battling each other about closing borders and running quarantine. The defacto response to the virus has become “we’re an island FFS, keep the infected out” - ie suppression. For most of the time the rest of the world’s medical systems have been smashed, we’ve been largely unaffected. A couple of outbreaks here and there, with a largish one in Melbourne last year, but suppression has been successful until now and the biggest impact on most people has either been not being able to go on a jaunt overseas, or an inability to buy toilet paper now and then.
Sadly, the corruptards who supposedly run the joint have been completely incapable of organising a vax program or quarantine system, therefore the quarantine systems leak and less than 20% of the population have been jabbed, and most of those who have, with AZ, as that’s all the fwit PM ordered (one of his mates/ex employees/political fellow travelers runs the local branch of AZ), which is even less effective as a preventer of transmission than the stuff you have in the US (oh, & btw, when the PM had his jab, it was Pfizer, not AZ, which has been fabulous optics too).
In a therefore largely unvaccinated Sydney, hospitalisation rates are running around 10% of detected infections and intensive care admissions around 2%, so it does not take much effort to extrapolate the low numbers of infections into complete health system collapse (it’s mostly running near capacity without WuFlu patients).
Of those in intensive care, a substantial portion are under 50, with enough under 30s to get the health officials really running for cover. A majority of the over 70s have been vaxxed, so are not turning up in hospital much.
I also find your focus on deaths a bit disingenuous. The entire pandemic has been running in Sydney for less than six weeks. They’re basically at the same point in the pandemic as Italy was back in March last year. Deaths will start showing up soon, but they’re the simple thing to focus on, not the useful thing. Hospitalisation rates, intensive care rates and long covid rates are far more useful than a statistic that runs weeks or even months behind infections and really doesn’t indicate the severity of the disease.
I think the failure of the federally run vaxination program is really what has all the state pollies and health workers terrified of the hospitals crapping out - especially as they mostly run the line that there are no useful drugs to treat the disease after you have it. It’s therefore a real risk that the health system shits itself if the disease is allowed to run - as happened in a large part of the world last year.
On the other hand, there’s that vid you showed of all the bogans in downtown Sydney last week. They aren’t protesting for their freedom. They’ve barely lost any. Applying US centric ideas of “freedom” and “liberty” down under really doesn’t work.
And if the local government had learned anything from Melbourne’s experience last winter, the mockdown would be over by now. The Melbourne pollies learned - they had an outbreak of delta not long after Sydney - dealt with quickly in an also unvaxinated population.
With regards to your question of whether lockdowns work, the lockdowns in Sydney are better characterised as “mockdowns”, as the state, federal and local pollies have been confusing the hell out of each other and the populace with contradictary and ever changing rules and unclear definitions of what constitutes a essential/sacrificial worker/job, yada,yada, yada. Seriously, these guys couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery, so I fully expect the health system to freeze up and the suppression strategy to fail. Given that the government’s current hail mary is to get everyone vaccinated with a vaccine (AZ) that has pretty much no effect after the first dose and needs a 12 week break until the second to provide any lasting effect, I fully expect to be locking the gate on my farm and watching Sydney in particular turn into a serious shitshow.
Oh, & BTW, that woman is the chief health officer of New South Wales. Not a pollie, but a bureaucrat.
Cheers,
Les
