Pretty simplistic. Harm as defined by? Deaths alone?
Just wanted to point out that not all health experts agree, and it's an unenviable position politicians are in trying to get the balance right. The criticism of the federal gov't is way out of whack IMO and almost entirely on the basis of political bias. I hear little but praise for Mark McGowan (and rightly so) who appears in step with the rest of Aust. Perhaps he could have a chat to Dan.
How long do we wait for? Are definitive peer reviewed studies on children and covid-19 are going to be available in a month? Two months? A year? Or are we waiting until 0 new infections Aust wide for at least a month? Is that even possible?
How many children and families are suffering from the school closures? What is the long term impact on them? Where does the balance sit?
I think people are much better informed about behaviour and risk and we need to start trusting them more to do the right thing.
You're making it out like there are no measures of when to open up.
There are. And we haven't reached them yet.
What we need is not necessarily to have zero new cases for a week (though that'd be great), but to have widespread testing and only find positives of known positive contacts.
This means there isn't undetected community transmission (depending on how widespread the testing is).
Here's the thing. We still have people popping up every day in Victoria and testing positive with no known positive contacts. It is still moving silently in our community. We still have no inherent immunity. We still have no effective antivirals. We still have no vaccine.
If we start opening up now, there is no reason why this wouldn't ramp up again. None.
If we can get our tracing, monitoring and testing levels to the point where we can actually effectively quarantine and isolate, then we can talk about opening up.
There's this odd sense of 'come on, surely we've been locked down long enough. It has to be better by now.'
It's like we think the virus will get bored and go away.
Nothing has changed. Not until we know where every case in the state came from. And there are two ways to do that. Proper testing and tracing, or getting our cases down to zero.
The frustrating thing is we are not far off.
But this is the exact opposite of near enough is good enough. Near enough is not enough.
www.abc.net.au
