We Must Not Go Back Into Lockdown
The first wave of the coronavirus began in January, with people returning from holidaying in China to celebrate Chinese New Year. Most of these people were Chinese nationals and had visited the city of Wuhan to visit family. This affected people in Melbourne and Sydney only, with a total of 30 cases Australia-wide. Of these, there were 24 in Sydney and 6 in Melbourne. No other states were affected.
The second wave began in March, with visitors from Iran, Italy and USA, who for some reason our government didn’t know had out of control infection. This hit the entire country at once in massive waves, as people had entered the country disguising their illness, and we soon reached 5,000 cases nationwide, with every part of the country affected.
This led to massive lockdowns and some of the harshest restrictions in the world. This eventually started to come under control in the middle of May, with only Melbourne and Sydney still having cases. By the end of June, most parts of the country were virus-free, and we would have been virus-free nationwide if not for the third wave.
The third wave began in June, as a direct result of the Black Lives Matter march in Melbourne on 6 June 2020. For a week afterwards, we saw Victoria’s cases drop from 75 to 40, and it seemed like the dangerous 10,000-strong march would not impact us, but then we found out that 2 infected people had attended, and had spread it to many others. Within 2 weeks, that 40 had jumped to 400, and it continues to increase. This third wave has only hit Victoria, as the rest of Australia are now virus-free, or close to it
Back on June 5th I wrote how to best manage the Covid-19 outbreak. Since then I’ve had some time to think about how the Coronavirus could’ve been better handled from the start knowing what we know now so he’s what I’ve come up with for Australia:
1. Shut down the borders immediately.
2. Repatriate all Australian citizens back to Australia immediately
3. Protect the nursing and retirement homes as a top priority. 70% of the deaths in NY state were in those homes because the trash governor, Andrew Cuomo forced sick elderly people from those homes to go back to those homes rather than be isolated in a hospital
4. Vulnerable people in the population with preexisting conditions or elderly people must choose their own risk on whether they should go out but strongly recommend that they don’t.
5. Encourage people to socially distance and do all of the other hygiene stuff usually recommended.
6. Encourage Wearing face masks when you’re out and about in large closed public areas like a shopping centre.
7. Release Bluetooth case detection tracking app to monitor any flares in cases to enable an early response.
8. Ramp up production of PPE gear & ventilators and prioritise medical professionals receiving them.
9. Don’t shut the economy for the love of God. Young people (45 and younger) can keep the thing going without it collapsing my.
10. Protections should be made to allow for the choice of older or vulnerable people to be able to work from home within reason.
11. An immediate tax cut to everyone. Corporations & personal income tax.
12. Keep the interest rate at 0.25% set by the RBA
13. Ensure that there is a wide testing capabilities available.
14. Don’t close schools because a study in Iceland suggested that kids aren’t vectors of the disease.
Now I’m sure I’ve missed stuff but that generally speaking in my view would’ve stopped this recession for Australia & the results when the final tally is done for this pandemic would be about the same. We could keep something like that up for a number of years as the quality of life is not totally demolished and businesses are given more than enough wiggle room to operate within.
People keep forgetting that we have to keep in place whichever containment measures or lockdown we decide to implement until there’s a vaccine unless we go down the herd immunity route. At least this way we can reach heard immunity sooner but also prevent the threat of a second wave as we’ve seen with nations such as China which has led to the lockdown of tens of millions of people. Now obviously, hindsight has 2020 vision an I’m getting these pointers from watching what has and hasn’t worked in South Korea, Sweden and the US.
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