I find it annoying that some people say that the disease doesn't have the signs of a deadly one. They fail to realise that lockdown is one of the reasons.
I did some rough numbers on this.
UK/USA have had about 2000 deaths per million people. Data from here:- https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Australia has a population of about 25 million.
Say we get to 80% vaccinated and everyone who is vaccinated is safe. That leaves 20% of the population as the percentage exposed to COVID.
In that scenario we'd get 10,000 deaths.
The flaws in those numbers are as follows:-
**1. The 2000 deaths per million population is over the course of the pandemic and not 1 year.**
2. That scenario assumes no deaths for vaccinated people.
3. Getting to 80% may be hard.
More people would die of heart disease and dementia compared to COVID.
Lower vaccination rates would chance the picture completely. If we were completely unvaccinated you are looking at 50 000 deaths which would be our biggest killer by far.
Happy for anyone to come up with rougher figures or point our anything I missed.
The way I view it though is if we can somehow get people vaccinated this isn't a big issue. The unvaccinated will also develop COVID and then develop immunity so deaths should decrease over time.
If people don't get vaccinated this would be a catastrophe. People are getting vaccinated though. From yesterdays figures I get a figure of 56% first dose protected in NSW. If we get to 80% by end of this lockdown and people follow through I think we can basically beat this.
https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/australias-covid-19-vaccine-rollout
For every 528 people in the US a person has died of Covid-19. 1 in 528. Think about that for a minute. That probable equates to 1 person in every street or two has died of Covid-19 in the US.
It's about 2 percent of the population. It's freaken horrendous.
I get a couple of broad takings out of this:-
1. Lockdowns/border closures in Australia have saved so many lives.
2. The Delta strain coming late in the pandemic has been exceptionally lucky for us. It's bad it's here but if the virus was this contagious at the start I think we'd be similar to the UK or the US.
3. Vaccines are going to save so many lives.
I'm trying to avoid large numbers and percentages as most can't get their head around it, as it seems incomprehensible and meaningless to some. That and wont happen to me syndrome. Showing the numbers on a more personal and neighbourhood level and the light bulb goes on, at least for some.
I checked your figures and I think you've understated the number a little. Not much and it misses the point. The point is this is how do you get people to realize this is a disaster unlike anything we've ever seen in terms of loss of human life.
I'm amazed people still believe this is some sort of fraud. I see crazy anti-vaxxers/conspiracy theorists in America stating something is killing people but they don't know what it is that is killing people. Can you imagine it.
The rallies yesterday were full of people saying that the virus isn't real. So it is not just the USA.
It's a small percentage though. They are the crazy right/conspiracy theorists.
People are so easily led. There was one podcast referred to on here so confidently at one point. The people running it were smart people. They just weren't the right people to discuss COVID and they got it so wrong in my opinion it was criminal. The podcast was taken down because the information was so wrong.
I'm starting to think we've beaten this. I'm a bit too confident because the proviso is we get to 80% people fully vaccinated. If we do this I think at this point we've beaten COVID. We've beaten it with such a low mortality rate compared to other countries.
We really need to get past this idea of 0 covid cases though. The idea is you eventually have a lot of cases as with high vaccination rates you really lower the seriousness of the disease. I know you agree with this as well but I just think it is important to add to your point because at present I think we have a couple of states that are still going to push for border closures even after we hit 80%. A covid free society is just not possible, a lot of the virus' that cause the flu are variants of the Spanish Flu. Likewise I think we will see variants of covid circulating in the community in the future.
It was feasible to have a zero COVID approach prior to this outbreak, at least until vaccination rates hit desirable targets across the country. I don't think it's feasible any longer. If COVID is running free in NSW then there is little point in the other states trying to maintain hard borders for any length of time as they just won't work. They'll constantly be beset by little seeding events by rule breakers and even honest mistakes and will be forced back into lockdowns. NSW is just too big a population and too big an economic centre for the other states to effectively shut it out to the extent that would be needed to contain this delta strain. WA might be able to get away with it because there are borders between borders, but that's it.
I don't think it was feasible even before this outbreak, that would have meant cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world for a very long time and that is just not feasible.
We had no community transmission, we just needed to control entry through appropriate quarantine measures and make a concerted push to increase vaccination rates so that we could move towards opening up. We didn't need to be cut off from the rest of the world, we just needed to put an effective quarantine barrier between ourselves and the rest of the world, which we failed to do. I appreciate that there would always have been a risk that even an effective quarantine barrier could have been breached, but ours was inevitably going to be breached given how lax and high-risk it was.
Mate - you can't do this. The cost is huge. Plus the vaccines make this like any other respiratory disease.
We should ban meat. It would make the same difference in mortality rates. I'm actually exaggerating but I'm exaggerating in favor of a zero COVID policy. If we banned meat the effects of that would continue for years on end. We'd permanently lower the mortality rate. With COVID we'd only lower the mortality rate until the unvaccinated develop natural immunity.
This is exceptionally good news.
I wasn't talking about doing it indefinitely, I was talking about doing it so that we could live freely *while* we got vaccination rates up. It is exactly what we were doing until this outbreak, we just showed **no urgency with vaccination then.** It failed because the quarantine measures failed. There is no going back to it now because it is just not realistic to think that we can get COVID cases from the level they are at now back down to zero within the next 6 months even with strict lockdown measures.
You are correct however the bolded part is the issue. I think since we have this horrendous outbreak people are starting to get it.
I don't care about downvotes. I've been downvoted so much I really don't care. You were downvoted on your post and I see nothing that wrong with what you are stating.
