We are due in NZ to finish vaccinating the population around the end of August. I think we are looking to ease the borders open around xmas and most likely limit entry to counties with some sort of handle on things. Im expecting to see the virus take hold here among those who wouldnt or couldnt be vaccinated and we will see some deaths and illness but hopefully in pretty limited numbers. We have been incredibly lucky down here not just in terms of being an island nation and being able to close borders but also in terms of our economy. Really good export numbers, unemployment hasnt gone up too much and the economy faring better than most. However when we do open up there will be some form of living with the virus that we havent yet had to do which will be a battle I think.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
In Australia the plan was that every adult who wanted it would have had both doses of primarily AZ by October. We are rolling out very slowly so that looks borderline impossible now. Everyone getting even one shot may be ambitious.
No exact plans regarding opening up have been revealed and as it is the Federal government (as opposed to the State government who have been very good) they probably don't know wtf is going on. At the moment there are having trouble working out why they can't spin their way out of the various sexual assault/rape allegations or faking having even an ounce of human decency, so they are even more hopeless than usual (already a very low bar). I have a feeling international borders to most countries will be locked until late 21 or even early 22. I hope the former so we can see my son for Christmas. Two years is a very long time between hugs when he was a few days past his 21st last time we saw him in person.
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I understand wanting to meet your mates and enjoy yourselves but why are they all acting like such twats?
I'd be annoyed if they were just meeting up but acting civil but in that vid I don't think I've seen a bigger group of wankers before
So selfish. The student community haven't come out of these looking particularly clever. That said the government should have never allowed normal term time. Should have been on line lectures only until next year.
Kind of inevitable when relaxing rules as soon as Easter holidays started. They look like college students rather than uni ones.
Off topic but I picked up on this one.
My much older brother got into a car crash a short while back. A young lady nearby made the call for the ambulance. He heard her say on the phone that an elderly man had been in car crash. I think that got him more than his car being totalled. He said he was wondering who she was talking about.
Limmy is a treasure.Thoughts on easing the 5km to countywide? Seems sensible enough, even if I would've liked to see click and collect open before May, but oh well.
So here's a another new variant plot twist.
These fcukers are like the Avengers. What's their next super power going to be?
These fcukers are like the Avengers. What's their next super power going to be?
This post deserves more love
I've followed this one as its relatively local to me. I'd need to pull up the right source, but there was talk that an issue with this strain here is that is harder to detect and that pcr tests on it were less effectively. However last I saw there wasn't any indication it was more contagious or had more serious effects.
No wonder the Chinese govt insists on anal swabs.
they made the virus.. they should know how it works.. amiriteguys
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they made the virus.. they should know how it works.. amiriteguys
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The fallacy of minimising restrictions to benefit the economy
The fallacy of minimising restrictions to benefit the economy
Given that some of the best performing countries on that list had far more relaxed restrictions than some of the worst performers it seems disingenuous to use it to infer that more restrictions mean less damage to the economy.
In fact looking at that list if you discount China and Australia (countries with very unique characteristics) you could use that data to argue the complete opposite.
The truth of course is that economic effects (like death rate) are far more nuanced than merely the level of restrictions implemented.
That's before even considering that the death rates of some of the countries on the list are markedly underreported. Mexico for example saw nearly 350,000 excess deaths between the start of the pandemic and the end of January (over 2500 deaths per 100,000 by now).
Criticising the UK shambles (up until the vaccine of course) is so easy that there's no need to be insincere to make a point.
The trend line isn't lying. And the best performing countries all had the most restrictions. Some of those that were close economically came at the cost of a huge death toll (500+ per million of pop) and likely would have done better still economically if they hadn't unnecessarily sacrificed their citizens in the name of the economy. And none of the countries who locked down really hard had mass death or bad economic damage (by comparison).
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It always completely fails to comprehend that Denmark or Germany’s GDP is directly affected by the restrictions of France, UK, Spain etc in a way Australia or South Korea never will be.
It once completely fails to comprehend how an island nation like Australia simply cannot be compared to Germany, a country smack bang in the middle of a continent.
How’s hard line restrictions Portugal’s GDP doing vs. much softer Denmark?
I also saw Wibbs reckoning countries “sacrificied lives for the economy” which once again is utter drivel for the most part.
In short, I’m amazed that over 1 year in Wibbs still thinks there’s one answer for all countries. That’s mindblowingly ignorant.
In a globalised economy, we are all interdependent.
The biggest Australia's economic partner is the over-performing China, then there are countries like Japan and the US.
The fallacy of minimising restrictions to benefit the economy
So Sweden’s infamous herd immunity tactics resulted in fewer deaths and less harm to the economy than the extremely strict lockdowns of Italy and Spain. Not sure how that supports your argument?
Not to mention that Japan seems to have had identical outcomes to Australia’s zero covid policy, despite half a million cases of covid and counting.
It’s also incredibly cherry picked, Norway have done as good a job as any but have had their GDP seriously hurt.
Where are the likes of Thailand on the list? Another with “great stats” and hardline on borders etc, but GDP absolutely twatted, of course.
Very few cherry picked nations have done well in both deaths and GDP and as someone who’s lived in HK, I’ll forever take anything the CCP says with a pinch of salt.
As I said in my earlier post, you’d think that after one year folk would understand that the likes of Australia and South Korea have a unique set of circumstances/advantages to tackle this. Both are essentially island states with the Korean DMZ.
There is no situation here in which France could simply have “done what Australia did” and have gotten back to normal life and normal GDP by July 2020.
It defeat ignores countries you’d think should be on there. Although from both sides of the argument. I think NZ’s economy has done pretty well, hasn’t it? Should be on there, somewhere near China.
Isn’t Norway’s economy fairly heavily reliant on Oil exports? So no matter how well they coped with the pandemic internally, they would never have been able to shield themselves from the economic impact of a global pandemic.
I imagine you’d be able to do a similar analysis on each data point.
Every country should've just become a (literal) island when the pandemic started, and this could've been avoided.
That is pretty much impossible in the EU in fairness, at least on the continent.
I do wish we had adapted a one island policy here in Ireland though*. I don't think we could've gotten to New Zealand levels but it would've helped drastically. So many of our worst outbreaks started off in the fecking border counties.
*I also realise that was essentially impossible cause politics innit
Italy and Spain only locked down factor.late and relaxed far too early and far too much. Sweden had huge death rates - over 500 per million head of population. Japan succeeded partly because they locked down (a bit late) but then we're hugely disciplined with internal restrictions, distancing and mask wearing and also have amazing health facilities.
The countries that dealt with it as a health issue also got the best economic outcomes as having next to no covid allowed the domestic economy to do far better than it would be able to otherwise. Economically large support packages also tended to be less contentious which also helped.
When the next pandemic arrives rapid border closures, immediate distancing and mask policy etc combined with costly social and business support measures until a vaccine is developed should be the norm. Of course we probably won't learn.
Yeah no I agree, I was just trying to be a sarky prick, and I couldn't even get that right.
Land borders aside we were too interconnected with the UK for a one island approach. There’s a huge constant flow of both directions with people basically commuting in one direction or the other. An “Ireland and UK islands” approach would have been a more realistic goal but again, politics innit.
Except they aren't fake or being manipulated.
Examine each country (assuming comparable data exists) using multivariate statistics and border closures, lock downs, mask wearing etc will be statistically significantly correlated with good economic outcomes.
Not if the EU had emergency pandemic policy that allowed it. You could havexthat policy EU wide and not just at national border level.
Do you think it's feasible for countries such as Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, ..., etc. to completely close their borders though?
And countries such as Spain and Italy had quite strong lockdowns, right? But they were still ravaged.
Reliance on overseas trade has an equally strong correlation to that GDP chart. China, Australia and Japan are amongst the least reliant on foreign imports and exports, EU countries are the opposite.
There's not a one size fits all solution. Closing borders and locking everybody inside was never a realistic option for Europe.
Yeah I suppose the 300,000 Irish people over on the mainl.. sorry, Britain, would've disagreed. Still, one can dream eh?
What approach did Aus and NZ take though? I know they are a lot more separated but they did set up a shared border with only flights allowed between the two countries right? Would've been the correct approach.
Its mental to think countries can follow the example of NZ or Australia.
We are hugely dependant on imports and imports. The biggest difference is that all our imports and exports are by sea or air which have continued with little interuption. The pain point in Europe is you rely much on road transport. Not a trivial thing to change but not impossible.
No it isn't. You just need to plan for the next pandemic and have the balls to then do it.
Yes I do. It needs planning and preparation of course. Spain and Italy didn't l9ckdown anywhere neat fast enough orchard enough or for long enough. We need to learn from this for the next pandemic which is inevitable.
What hardline restrictions? The Portuguese have been incredibly unruly, December was a nightmare that brought us 5200 Covid deaths in January, nearly half our total. For practical effects, there were no restrictions in Christmas.
From 300 deaths per day in late january/early february, to 2 deaths yesterday, after lockdown has been reinforced.
One year after we last argued, you're still blindly following the same stupid idea. You've clinged to Portugal's demise without even informing yourself of the most basic issues behind the numbers, and how the situation has changed since we often used it as an example of good pandemic handling.
Think about it for a second. Portugal's situation makes your arguments look even stupider now than one year ago, yet you decided to bring it up to make an innane point.