Quote:
Originally Posted by mousquet
^ Excuse my French, but this is just a motherfucking feat. We don't know how you guys do that where I am in France. Are you guys totally shut down to the world or something?
For example, how does the youth act in your country? Over here, youngsters go depressed if you deprive them from their weekly parties, their college mates and so on. So a lot of them keep spreading the virus by their undisciplined attitude, but I personally can't even blame on them, because I would've done the same and possibly worse when I was 20.
Anyway, the so called 2nd wave is going under control here, while the government, their advisors, scientists were freaking out a couple of weeks ago.
So restrictions are about to be eased for Christmas and New Year's Eve. But then, I would expect a "3rd wave" for February and March. Lol.
Only a vaccine can effectively free us from that curse. But the French (including myself) are a bit skeptical about the latest announcements. We're like - how did the Pfizer/BioNThec consortium or Moderna manage to develop their vaccines so fast, while it normally takes at least 2 years to seriously make it? Sure, the latest tech can make their tests faster, but it's still a bit astonishing, if not uncertain. So approval to their products might take a little time here. No doubt the French bureaucracy will carefully watch them anyway.
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Apart from obvious geographic differences (i.e island country versus a country with land borders), I dunno what it is, really. Even then using an island as an excuse is a load of shite anyhow - Victoria's second wave was a breach in hotel quarantine and a super-spreader event from security guards working there. South Australia had one of these events 3 weeks ago - the virus can still get into island countries and it can be rapid once it's in the community.
Broadly speaking, Australians generally want their governments to fix fuck ups / lead during crises and we just give them lee-way to do it. For the past year, I've seen a lot of libertarians crow about all sorts of crap - and that just doesn't work here. The Murdoch media tried, and failed.
The second wave had 3 months worth of lockdown - 6 weeks of very very little contact with other people, then we were allowed in "single buddy bubbles" (if you were living alone, you could nominate one other person and visit them once a day) and then restrictions were eased gradually.
Also, the state's public health system was completely and utterly unprepared and they used the time during lockdown to bolster everything. The contact tracing system saw a major upgrade, they started using different quarantining strategies (mainly for every case, their close contacts and the close contacts of the close contacts - 2 ring fences - are quarantined). We also learned that if you're having more than a couple of hundred cases a day, no contact tracing system is going to be effective (hence hard lockdown is the only way to smash case loads down).
Broadly - once again - libertarian arguments don't really work here in Australia. We get that you need a little bit of authoritarianism (on the lighter scale) every now and again and you need to work together as a society to get a collective outcome.
Seeing the economic wash up after all of this is done is going to be interesting. Yes, the centre-right side of politics (or those participants who just wanted to sink the boot into the state government because politics (rather than helping with a public health response) was It'S aBoUt ThE EcOnOmY StUpiD, but we had 3-4 months of major restrictions and things are now roaring back to life (December's unemployment figures for Victoria will be interesting as they'll reflect a full month of severe restrictions having been lifted and continung to be eased through November). It'll be interesting to see how things go - where each country/sub-national jurisdiction ends up whether you go down the path we did versus trying to balance things that other countries seem to be doing (hoping for vaccines to do the job etc).