Isolation only serves to slow spread to a level that your health care system can accommodate. We've tried isolation in a bunch of places. In my state in Australia, we even isolated with nearly zero cases all the way up until 90% vaccination rates. But once you open up, it still spreads. Most of our cases were for vaccinated individuals, who surely were better off for being vaccinated, but it didn't stop the spread. Unless you want to stay isolated for the rest of eternity, the best we can do is be hygienic and get vaccinated, and take care around vulnerable people.
Australia really messed up. They had it eliminated from their population entirely, but then let it back in by not screening or quarantining people coming in from the outside. Australia could have had zero restrictions and zero covid.
I think you're overestimating how tight a border can be while still allowing movement. Even when we had 14 day police enforced mandatory quarantine and no international travel, cases still got through from returning Australians. There is also all the staff at the interface, cleaners, hotel staff, security, airport staff, screeners, it was not a foolproof system. With that in mind, it was only a matter of time. The only reason it didn't spread as fast in spite of that leaky interface, was because of the lock downs.
Even in spite of those knockdowns it spread, and in spite of high vaccination rates it spread. It's not a solveable problem, citizens would not (did not) accept the terms necessary to be covid zero forever, so why delay it once everyone is vaccinated?
I was on team Covid Zero to begin with, but it was never meant to be a long term strategy. You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.
> I think you're overestimating how tight a border can be while still allowing movement.
We have the technology to lock things down at borders as hard as we'd need to, if Australia doesn't have that capability now they'd better start working on it.
COVID-19 has (so far) only ranked as the fifth deadliest pandemic in human history, but it was the perfect opportunity for Australia to test and evaluate their ability to defend against deadly viral outbreaks which would rank much much higher. Experts agree that global pandemics will be increasingly more common in the future and that it's only a matter of time until we face something else like this or worse. We couldn't even make it through this pandemic before seeing another one starting!
Cleaners, hotel/airport/quarantine center staff, security, staff, screeners, etc. could have been in full HAZMAT etc. just as they'd absolutely have to be if the virus were much more deadly anyway. It would have been better to make sure they could do it right last year when the cost of failure would have been limited to locking down one city for a few weeks to contain the spread than to scramble to figure it all out when a single fuck up could wipe out a huge percentage of the country's population.
> You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.
As long as people were still coming in and out of the country (albeit with a 7-14 day delay for those coming in) the nation wouldn't be "exiled" and it would have been the people of Australia who got to "move on", by living their lives without the virus, while the rest of the world was stuck in our ongoing cycle of wave after wave of infections, new variants, new/lifted/renewed restrictions, increases and decreases in hospitalizations, increasing numbers of deaths/disability, exhausted healthcare workers, economic uncertainty, etc. all while we try our hardest to just pretend that the virus around us doesn't exist.
I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.
> It would have been better to make sure they could do it right last year when the cost of failure would have been limited
What do you think they did?
> I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.
That isn't enough, that is what we did. Whilst that remains the case it makes that stance pointless to have. I agreed with you, I did all the right things, I advocated for lockdowns and was happy to see the 14 day quarantine periods. Guess what, expections are everywhere. It wasn't enough. It is absolutely not possible to lock down and still let people in and out. We are messy, shitty and selfish. Either borders stay closed or you accept cases will come in. The half measures are a waste of time.
Australia is a good example, because we had the 14 day quarantine period in an isolation hotel, and were technically closed borders to anyone but exceptional circumstances yet outbreaks kept happening. Melbourne was in full home isolation for months and months, while borders were closed to interstate and international, and that didn't stop the spread.
It really doesn't seem fair to call their efforts "somewhat half-assed" given that they did so much better than other countries, but they didn't go to the extent or take the care that they would have if the virus were more deadly.
The staff at hotels and airports weren't decked out like this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Hazmat_D...) or this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Army_tra...), proper ventilation wasn't considered and staff weren't even being tested properly leading to the virus spreading amongst staff, in hallways, between rooms, and as a result of the generally lax attitude (in deadly plague terms) the virus got out of those hotels and into the public not once or twice but over and over, tens of times!
I do agree that Australia did do a lot to try to stop the virus! The 14 day quarantine was a good idea (at the time), severely limiting the number of people coming in was good too (although I doubt that would have been sustainable for long) and there's no denying that people's shitty actions hurt their efforts, but I just can't believe they gave it everything they had. There were reports that they didn't even have a plan to work from initially, and were just kind of making it up as they went along. That's just tragic, but it means they also had the benefit of writing a plan with our current technology and understanding on the subject in mind from inception. You could have asked a random person on the street decades ago to come up with a plan on how to quarantine a family and prevent the spread of a deadly possibly airborne virus and and you'd get something that looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn0-nPOb_KM and while moves are fiction and not sound policy, they'd have had the "protected staff" and "ventilation" boxes checked at least.
It's clear that for all Australia did to stop the virus (and again, I'm not bashing their efforts here which were well above what others were doing) it was clearly not being taken as seriously as it would have if they were dealing with the next Black Death. I'd really like to think that if they had tried their best in this scenario to keep the virus out they'd have been more successful and that while some people will probably always act terribly selfish, that it is still possible in 2022 to let people in and out of an island nation while keeping out a highly deadly virus. I'd really like to think that because one day we might not have the choice to do otherwise. If Australia really can't manage it, what chance do the rest of the nations have?
I'm sure they've since used this experience to help shore up their defenses for the future, I'm sure it was eye opening for a lot of people, but not going all out in their containment efforts while they had the chance to stay ahead of covid was a lost opportunity. The good/bad news is that they're certain to get the chance again with a new virus sooner than they'd like and hopefully the stakes won't be that much higher.
You're right mind you, there was indeed a golden period for our state, where other states had covid, and we didn't (we had interstate borders closed too). We had no restrictions and it felt like some kind of freedom utopia, like we had "won". But it was clear that it wasn't something that we could sustain for long. The community didn't want it to and eventually people have to move around again, to say nothing of required movements like transport and emergency health.
When we think about international travel, I think it's the same discussion. I do believe you that it's technically possible to have that level of containment, but I'm skeptical that it's possible at the scale that humans want to move about. The scale of travel is easy to underestimate, even mid-pandemic when the world was closed.
Australia only has a population of around 25 million, and in 2019, 4 million people flew in or out of Australia every month. In 2019 we moved close to the equivalent of the entire country across the border TWICE. For all of 2020 and 2021 it was still above 100,000 people per month, while we were locked down and international travel was banned, that's a lot of movements to get perfectly right to prevent a breach. Trying to scale that up to levels people are happy with is going to be really tough to get right. ( https://www.bitre.gov.au/statistics/aviation/international )
I think you're right that if a disease we decide is deadly enough comes along that we'll have no choice but to reduce throughput entirely, but at the moment I think you can reduce part of this discussion to a tradeoff we're making, between throughput and level of containment.
