My biggest problem with the each individual states approach to Covid, and Australia in general, is the aproach they are taking looks like they are trying to eradicate the disease. That's a nice ideal, but totally the wrong approach to take. The only way you will eradicate the disease is totally stop the movement of people not just in your region/state, but in the whole country. Think about that. No one is allowed to fly into the country, until it is eradicated ....... WORLD WIDE. Anyone flying out of the country has to stay out, until it is eradicated world wide.
The eradication approach is totally head in the sand, and impossible to achieve, unless you cease all movement of people into the country, and that includes ships bringing in good etc. Given how long it would take to eradicate it world wide, this is actually impossible.
The approach needs to be, how do we live with it, and best contain while we work towards high enough vaccination levels?
I'm not saying Denmark is anywhere near the pinnacle of the approach to Covid, but compare the approaches.
6 weeks ago Denmark was recording around 1,000 cases/day. Keep in mind, Denmark is the size of Tasmania, and has the population of Victoria. This had climbed fairly quickly over a 6-8 week period, from around 300-350/day. Denmark started vaccinating in December, but really didn't ramp it up until around 2 months ago. With less than 10% of people having had their first shot around 6-8 weeks ago, Denmark started opening things up more. You still needed masks pretty much everywhere indoors, unless you were seated, but shops etcwere back to normal. Remember, at this point they were getting 1000 new cases/day. Denmark now has 60% of people with their first shot, and 30% of people with both shots, and are now recording around 180-200 new cases/day.
One of the biggest things to look at is, when Denmark was getting 1000 new cases/day the number of people hospitalised stayed consistent at around 230, and the number of people on ventilators was consistently around 15-20. This is way less than it was 12 months earlier, when we were getting 300 new cases/day. We were handling it and treating better than 12 months ago.
Australia's vaccination process is pretty bad, but unfortunately, there are also a lot of people taking a "I will just wait and see" approach to the vaccination, which really isn't helping matter much.
Now, a lot of people will say "Yeah, but we're preventing deaths here!!! The lock downs and inconvenience is necessary to avoid stop people dying!".
I'm not trying to be heartless, just pragmatic. The large majority of Covid deaths are people that were already chronically ill or old.
The first Covid attributed death in Australia was in March 2020.
Since then there has been around 930 Deaths in Australia attributed to Covid.
In that same time around 1400 people have died in car accidents.
Do we stop people driving cars, to save lives? No, of course not.
Yes, Covid has the potential to get of control quickly. What I'm saying is, Australia needs to take a balanced approach. Stop trying to eradicate the disease, and learn to contain it, and live with it better! The approach at the moment seems to be if one person gets it, then 20 or 50 people WILL die, unless we lock everything down in a 500km, or sometimes in WA 1500km area!!!
The eradication approach cannot possibly work, so find a better path!