|
gay picnic defence posted:I think they’ll wait until everyone who wants to be vaccinated has got it and then open up as normal. If foreigners bring the roni in it won’t matter because the only people who can catch it off them will be anti vaxxers. I don't see borders returning to normal for years in Australia (and NZ, Taiwan etc). You will absolutely need to show proof of vaccination to enter for years to come. I remember reading something saying COVID might end up like tuberculosis - a disease only impoverished countries suffer, which is a barrier to travel for citizens of those countries, but which rich Westerners don't even notice or think about.
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2020 04:18
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:06 |
|
|
An actually smart America First president would have nationalised Pfizer in April
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 09:11
|
|
|
Mithaldu posted:didn't trump also try to buy exclusive access rights to the vaccine? making only a small order could be his way of slapping back their refusal? 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 10:03
|
|
|
Blitter posted:It's mind boggling to me that people are still dancing around rules lawyering details of "mask mandates". Yeah, this. If you are in a region where the virus is so widespread that mask usage is going to make a difference, you should be in lockdown, not having public debate about whether you should have to wear them into a restaurant or whatever.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 23:26
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:Couldn't track down the original source, but I did find a bunch of different versions which included the Battle of Antietam from the Civil War at #2 with 3,600 deaths I feel like D-Day should be on here too? And presumably some days from the Spanish flu?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2020 04:31
|
|
|
When Melbourne's 8-month lockdown ended (there was a gap of like 8 weeks in the middle there but I still didn't go out), and ended not just with lower cases but with elimination so I know it's 100% safe, it felt weird the first few times but then I got used to it again. It's a relief, so your subconscious is happy to go back to normal.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2020 23:35
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/newscomauHQ/status/1338295258988257281 Friendship ended with BALI Now QUEENSTOWN is my best friend
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2020 03:10
|
|
|
The Isle of Man is an Aus/NZ-style COVID-free green zone and this guy endangered that, but you have to admit his method of arrival is pretty sick: https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1338578819276476416
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2020 07:20
|
|
|
Hasn't Victoria's ambulance service been getting austerity slashed for a while? There was a massive union imbroglio over it a few years ago, when every ambulance you saw was painted with slogan ragging on the government.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2020 09:11
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:We put our heads together in the CSPAM thread trying to figure out if any historical pandemics had burned themselves out naturally and couldn't come up with any. Not even the Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD) which killed about a fifth of the population of Rome. SARS? Sweating sickness? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness Or is the key that they were epidemics rather than pandemics?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2020 00:25
|
|
|
Mayb it's cropped up in hotel quarantine but Australia's 67 currently detected active cases, entirely confined to Sydney at this stage, were sparked by an American strain. (Thanks.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2020 11:47
|
|
|
The other key thing people outside Australia may not realise is that second wave in the middle of the year was basically entirely localised to Melbourne. Life in the rest of the country has been pretty much back to normal since May, minus state border closures that only just started easing over the past few months (and have now gone right back up because of the Sydney cluster). Spinz posted:animals from hell I don't know why Americans say this all the time. You guys have bears and cougars and wolves and alligators. I felt less safe camping in the US than in Australia!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2020 07:01
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:The Sydney outbreak spread to Queensland a few days ago and has now spread to Melbourne. So far the known interstate cases have all been caught in quarantine and seem to have been contained, and Melbourne has now gone 53 days without any local community spread. I think it'll be OK. Sydney has crushed larger outbreaks than this. Just loving sucks that it was right before Christmas and thousands of people won't get to see family after all.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 09:36
|
|
|
7of7 posted:These are the same asshats sending IMs at 11pm to show that they're still working. gently caress off, you're setting a bad example, Greg Even in worker's paradise Australia where we get a minimum of 10 sick days per year, the common cold lasts 7-10 days and most people under ordinary circumstances catch a cold two or three times a year, so...
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2020 09:41
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:Nah they're white, they'll get a ride home on a comfy plane. We've actually been using Christmas Island quite a bit in recent years as a holding zone for deporting Brits and Kiwis who've lived here since they were little kids, never got citizenship, but were then convicted of a crime. Of all the countries to embrace the 18th century attitude that criminals cannot be reformed, only exiled...
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2020 23:49
|
|
|
biznatchio posted:Very suspicious they got 32,767 test results.... that's (2^15)-1. Sounds like they're keeping track of test results in some application that ran out of rows. And very possibly they lost a positive test result in those overflow rows. Is your tinfoil hat feeling comfy
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2021 09:33
|
|
|
Lazyhound posted:He’s not wrong, that really stands out to anyone with a programming background. Cool but this is actually a country that has things under control and I'm a bit sick of hearing about how it must actually be the weather/geographic isolation/population density/the wrong kind of testing/conspiracy theory du jour/etc
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2021 10:02
|
|
|
Greader posted:Then again, considering how things have been going, I would not be surprised if they actually had not anticipated how high the numbers will go up. Bonus points if after a few weeks of suspiciously no changes the number just suddenly became negative/straight back to zero Strongly encourage you to read about "how things have been going" in the state of Victoria in the year 2020 edit - like, this is not like a place elsewhere in the world where people are just like "ahhh this COVID poo poo sucks man." For most of 2020 this was the one red zone in an otherwise mostly green zone of Aus/NZ - in a place where people can go about their daily lives without even thinking about it - and people in Victoria went through one of the world's longest lockdowns waking up every morning anticipating what The Number would be, wondering when it would be that we could join the rest of them. freebooter fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Jan 7, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2021 13:44
|
|
|
PIZZA.BAT posted:He'd pointed out the strange number and had the mystery solved by the time you posted this. "That's a very particular number, do we know that they didn't hit a row limit?" and then immediately finding evidence that no, they hadn't, isn't tinfoil. It's normal healthy skepticism loving up a testing regime because you've hosed up the Excel spreadsheet is something that happens in a failed state like Britain where 1 in every 50 people had COVID over Christmas and test/trace/isolate systems are completely overwhelmed, not a jurisdiction that actually has its poo poo together
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2021 00:10
|
|
|
Nam Taf posted:How do you ask entire legions of staff who work for private hotel chains to give up their lives for well over a year? You offer them 10k a month with free board and food. I'd take that offer. And it would still be vastly cheaper than the broader costs of Victoria's four-month lockdown. I still believe the idea of doing quarantine in privately owned hotels was conceived in part as a bailout for the travel industry, thereby placing business interests alongside national security, and they've just never changed that even though it's repeatedly proved to be a bad idea. When we were evacuating people from Wuhan in February we didn't stick them on Swanston Street, we put them on Christmas Island or that camp near Darwin. Obviously we're way over capacity for that now but the idea of putting our quarantine facilities in the very heart of our most densely populated cities is dumb. Also, not being able to get fresh air and exercise has been a major complaint, and a purpose-built facility in a remote area could put people in ground floor units with their own backyards. I mean, gently caress, there's probably fifty or more mothballed FIFO housing sites around the country that would match that description.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2021 08:24
|
|
|
greazeball posted:I agree completely. So many people are using the "well at least we're not as bad as [X]" or "[X] closed their schools and it didn't really help that much so we shouldn't bother" that we need regular reminders that lockdowns work, when communicated well and backed up by financial support and law enforcement. I'm really looking forward to Australia's economic figures over the next two years because I think they'll show the hit to the public debt is much less damaging than some people have been predicting and their 2021 GDP growth should blow everyone else out of the water. Yeah, like, I'm definitely not trying to rub anything in anyone's face but... all your governments hosed up. And if the shoe was on the other foot I'd be rightly furious at my own government. And it's bizarre to me that so many people will instinctively start making excuses for their governments and try to explain away Australia's (or New Zealand's, or Taiwan's, or Vietnam's) success. What kicked off this argument wasn't that, it was someone looking at a spreadsheet and drawing a conclusion that might very well make sense in a lot of places in the world, but shorn of the context of what the pandemic is like here i.e. we basically do not have a COVID problem and if we're about to have a COVID problem it sure as hell isn't going to come from a clerical error. There's a sort of blindness in America and Europe to the fact that actually, yeah, you can beat the virus and you don't have to be dictatorial weld-the-doors-closed China to do it. And also, on a more agressive note, Brisbane just went down into emergency lockdown because the new hypercontagious English strain breached hotel quarantine. We managed to eliminate the virus but we're constantly besieged by the failures of other countries. Get your loving poo poo together.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2021 14:51
|
|
|
Jabor posted:I don't think it's a coincidence that the countries that were best able to get it under control were the countries that could meaningfully shut down travel and enforce quarantines on international arrivals. Every country is capable of doing this. Finding it difficult to imagine something happening is not the same as it being impossible.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2021 03:49
|
|
|
zgrowler2 posted:honest question, why did Brexiteer politicians not slam the airport gates shut in isolationist panic as soon as the virus started reaching Europe? It doesn't seem very UK #1 to commit to going it alone and then just leave the doors open when a viral menace starts jumping countries that you already think you can do without The flippant answer is $$$, but I also believe that Australia and New Zealand's geographic isolation, while that actually has a minimal effect on how disruptive/economically damaging it is to close your borders, has a very strong effect on the perception of closing borders (both among the public and politicians). There's no situation in which doing that in the year 2020 isn't a big loving deal, but I can definitely see how it seemed like a bigger deal - an unthinkable one - for an island country embedded in Europe than it was for Australia and New Zealand.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2021 01:47
|
|
|
MiddleOne posted:Hard pass. Distance dramatically alter what kind of goods cross borders and why people do as well. The UK is too close to Ireland, France and the Netherlands to be able to arbitrarily shut borders. The consequence of France doing so last month make it clear why this wasn't done earlier. What do goods have to do with anything? Freight is always exempt. Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam did not become autarchies overnight; the harbours and airports are still humming with unimpeded imports and exports. Trucks are still passing back and forth over the closed US/Canada border. And I do love how people crack out the word "arbitrary" these days. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2021 13:10
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:the UK like america choose to preserve the current social and financial hierarchy rather than human lives. it was a poor choice, but they have doubled down anyway Really, though, all it affects is tourism. Which is a big part of the economy but not that big. And international students, I guess. Freight is exempt, people in highly skilled roles (medical specialists etc) are exempt. I sincerely think the reason other countries didn't do it is really down to a failure of imagination more than anything else. It's worth noting that Australia, at least, didn't adopt an elimination strategy plus indefinitely closed borders until June. We closed the borders in March while fully expecting the virus was already here (it was) and that we'd get hammered even as we went into lockdown. But then it turned out that closed borders and a lockdown are actually a pretty good strategy for eliminating it and going back to normal life, and so after that initial crisis we made an official declaration of a strategy of "zero community transmission" (I also firmly believe they don't use the word "elimination" because they want to distinguish themselves from pop star PM Ardern, who went for "elimination" from the start) and those borders are staying shut for the foreseeable future. I sometimes wonder whether the PM regrets those early decisions and would rather be going down a UK/US road, but while he's in the right-wing party he's not really a Johnson-style neoliberal in his heart of hearts; he's more the sort of person Johnson pretends to be, a (supposedly) humble man of the people, who's more than happy to capitalise on the unexpectedly good results of results of having pulled up the rope ladder very early on, since it had undeniably good results and therefore played well with the voters.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2021 13:57
|
|
|
Pryor on Fire posted:lmao i'm pretty sure absolutely nobody regrets not being in the USA or UK right about now Maybe not being in but the NASDAQ outperformed the ASX 200 in 2020 so yeah there are a lot of capitalist ghouls and their allies in the Australian parliament who wish we would've just let her rip
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2021 14:07
|
|
|
Starks posted:The veracity of that statement aside, the post I quoted clearly said “every country” Every country is indeed capable of closing their borders. It's inherent in the very concept of being a country!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2021 00:40
|
|
|
It's amazing to me that even with the very diverse array of countries that have handled COVID well - islands or landbound, democracies and dictatorships, large and small - there's an endless litany of excuses for the failed states of the West.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2021 00:41
|
|
|
Starks posted:I don't understand why everyone thinks I'm talking about tourists. The vast majority of imports arrive in Australia by sea. They had a rule that cargo ships cannot dock if they have been to another country in the last 14 days. That is a huge advantage compared to a place like Canada where we had tens of thousands of trucks coming in every day from the States to deliver essential goods. That doesn't mean Canada didn't gently caress up its pandemic response, but it certainly means it's harder and more costly to achieve the same results. Canada has (rightly) closed its border to the US for non-essential travel; I'm talking more about Europe, which has indeed been open slather for tourists from the beginning because northern Europeans apparently have a god-given right to lie on a beach in Spain every summer. Australia and New Zealand obviously have some advantages to containment/elimination. Those advantages are outweighed by having governments, like any other successful jurisdiction, that took appropriate action. That is the reason Canada is doing better than the US and that is the reason the Atlantic bubble is doing better than the rest of Canada.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2021 05:36
|
|
|
jokes posted:Gotta understand that, while it might seem to us like Coronavirus is The Only Virus, to epidemiologists it's a blip. There are currently like 4 pandemics worldwide, each of them being barely thwarted at destroying all civilization. There's more coming down the pipe, no question. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe in 50 years. Not really. HIV/AIDS, MERS and Ebola are all far, far, far more difficult to transmit than COVID.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2021 23:52
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:A fever is one of the most common symptoms of coronavirus but it's not universal, so a lack of a fever isn't a sure sign of a lack of infection. This is the first I've known that it can make you mucus-y. I always thought dry cough = if you have a wet cough, don't worry. I'm glad I live in Australia because my sinuses suck rear end and I'm mucus-y almost all the time.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2021 23:50
|
|
|
Hippie Hedgehog posted:I still can't shake the feeling that the proliferation of mask-wearing is contributing to spread1. A lot of people seem to mistakenly assume it's OK to stay indoors with other people for extended periods, as long as everyone masks up. I'm also quite positive this is the case, especially in the US. In places where the virus is rampant mask wearing is obviously good and it's insane that it's become a culture war issue, but masks are not a panacea; yet many people treat them as such because they directly tie into the popular notion that personal responsibility and individual action are the most important things, as opposed to government action. Anecdotally I have plenty of acquaintances in England and America that I see on Instagram and FB doing social events "safely" because they're wearing masks. I get that it must be gruelling to have to be dealing with this for 10 months now, but masks do not make social gatherings "safe." There's a reason that when doctors go into a COVID ward they're wearing full PPE, not just a homemade cloth mask.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2021 09:42
|
|
|
stab posted:For context, my province infection rates is only outperformed by Hawaii currently. And I'm not in a major metropolitan city so the infection rates is a tenth of what's listed. For the day i was exposed, my city declared THREE cases. I was exposed by one of the 3. That's not how it works. In terms of doing your own personal risk assessment for how safe/unsafe your area is, "active cases" is a much more important measurement than "new cases," and from that you need to think about how many undiagnosed cases are also floating around. Anyway I don't understand why anyone wouldn't just embrace the full-on hair and beard growth opportunity. By the time Melbourne hit elimination I looked like Tom Hanks in Castaway, which is to say like absolute dogshit, but who cares if you're not seeing anyone anyway?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2021 23:36
|
|
|
I. M. Gei posted:More kids held back == more kids in the same grade == more kids crammed into every classroom for 12+ years? I feel like it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for people to start graduating at 19 instead of 18 anyway
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2021 23:37
|
|
|
Pistol_Pete posted:Yeah, some people seem to have lost sight of just how profoundly unnatural and damaging living like this is and do that awful scolding, humblebragging thing where they're all: "Well, I literally haven't left the house since last March and I feel great! You're a bad person for missing human contact and you should feel bad about that!" I was in self-imposed lockdown for basically eight months, in Melbourne which was in enforced lockdown for March/April and then again for July-October, and the only way I handled that without going insane was the knowledge that the rest of the country was doing just fine and if we could just get through it, we could join them (which we now have). We could literally watch the numbers going down each day until we hit zero. I can't imagine how much it must loving suck to have to isolate for longer than that and also not have the end anywhere in sight.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2021 10:22
|
|
|
Speaking of NZ this is a spectacularly bad take from a British journalist who got rightfully ratio'd for it: https://twitter.com/juliamacfarlane/status/1354375431949053953
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2021 00:21
|
|
|
Alan Smithee posted:anyone using respirators but covering the exhale vent? What are you using as adhesive Starting to think that Mask Chat is driving me into a hallucinatory alternate universe
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2021 12:55
|
|
|
Whooping Crabs posted:We are awfully close to hitting 100k dead this month It's absolutely insane the US is likely to go from 400k to 500k in the space of less than 30 days
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2021 04:16
|
|
|
SchnorkIes posted:Fomite spread always seems like an excuse to not admit it's airborne I've always wondered why this is such a sticking point - the Australian government has generally been pretty good but is apparently allergic to the word "airborne" - and I suppose the answer is that once you acknowledge it is, you can no longer pretend that while there's community transmission it's "safe" to have people indoors in groups for any length of time, so you can't open schools, permit indoor dining etc.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2021 03:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:06 |
|
|
Was at a beachside pub today in a country town which just happened to be the same place I read this Guardian piece while anxiously doomscrolling 11 months ago during The Week That Everything Changed, and I remembered it being one of the most clear-eyed and memorable pieces of writing from that period, basically laying out the options available to Australia. (The other was this piece in the LRB which might have been the first one that drove it home to me that this was actually gonna be a really big deal: "This is NOT business as usual. This will be different from what anyone living has ever experienced.") It's interesting to revisit it now: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/21/the-case-for-shutting-down-almost-everything-and-restarting-when-coronavirus-is-gone quote:We see three possible endgames. It lays out three options for Australia, and I distinctly remember thinking how loving badly I hoped and prayed the government would opt for Endgame C: shut the borders, do a hard lockdown, life goes back to normal internally and we ride out the crisis as Fortress Australia. And I distinctly remember thinking the government just wouldn't do that, even though they had actually shut the borders at that point. I just couldn't imagine it. It's interesting what it got wrong in retrospect (turns out you can actually crush the virus with a lockdown easier than we might have thought as long as your borders are shut, and the authors failed to anticipate the ability of Australian states to close their own borders which has wreaked havoc on the hoped-for vision of domestic tourism replacing international tourism) but on the whole, it was a prescient vision of an optimistic future which I'm very glad we mostly managed to pull off.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 09:21
|
|