Australian Response

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852351#Comment_117852351

That's funny, there's a lad who's so obsessed he has about a fifth of all posts in the thread about Sweden's response who's been doing his nut about how terrible Sweden has been.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852879#Comment_117852879

Yes I am, but I have my sights set on NZ.

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852873#Comment_117852873

I don't know if you were watching the rugby championship last year or any of the Aussie Rules games recently vs the premier league or 6 Nations... It's like different planets from the POV of crowd sizes

Hector Savage

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852879#Comment_117852879

How are you ?

Do you need to fork out thousands for quarantine ?

HBC08

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852924#Comment_117852924

Yes I have to pay for quantatine same as everybody else traveling there for the last 18 months.

It works out as about €1300 per person for me and my partner.

Don't get me wrong,I'm not happy about that aspect but my point is that's it's possible to travel to Australia at the moment.

If you're an Australian citizen then yes you do have to get a permission to leave visa.This makes for great clickbait headlines but the reality is it's just a form you fill out.

tinytobe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852882#Comment_117852882

I think I'd rather prefer staying at home voluntarily, than somebody imposing ridiculous fines for being out alone not meeting anybody but in the late night.

I've also never been too concerned what others are doing whatever that was.

I would have suggested some form of extra charge for those who end up needing intensive care hospital treatment rather than some ridiculous travel rules or fines of being out and about at 3am at night completely alone. ( Germany had those rules )

However the easy part was that I am single living / staying alone in an apartment. It's certainly more challenging if one is living with a partner a family and having children, especially if schooling is involved.

In the same storm but not in the same boat is the best description.

However there is no excuse for those long queues at airports these days, or that idiocy they did at Dover port in the UK just before Christmas. This is clearly not science based.

cnocbui

You'd think there were never any Covid fines in Ireland or restrictions, the way some people here are carrying on.

"Fines for non-essential travel abroad to increase to €2,000"

"The seven Covid fines still in place in Ireland as lockdown reopening continues"

"Gardaí have said more than 4,500 people have been fined for breaches of Covid-19 restrictions – of which 3,500 were for non-essential travel."

Australia is such a mental police state, they have lost the plot...

"Why Ireland Has the Most Miserable Lockdown in the Western World"

"Spare a thought for your neighbours in Ireland – the lockdown capital of the free world."

"Ireland has the world's highest Covid-19 rate. How did it go so wrong?"

tinytobe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117853233#Comment_117853233

In Germany they could fine you when you were out and about at the wrong time at night, even if you were alone. There was a case where one guy went at 3am to the automatic wending machine to buy cigarettes and was fined. I am an avid non smoker myself, but it was then and there, when I understood that the corona mesures were getting ridiculous. This guy was walking alone without meeting anybody to buy something at a vending machine.

Germany never had a 5km radius limit on movement, but various different states in Germany had a night time stay at home order. So in practical life, if you were caught in a traffic jam on the way home from work, or something else, or your tire had a puncture and needed changing, you could either speed home and risk lives or demerit points on your license, or drive according to the rules, but face fines for not being at home at a certain time.

In Germany they also did other ridiculous things like limiting shopping hours of essential food stores, meaning the same amount of people was congesting at a shorter period of time.

Last time I was in Dublin, was in 2017, and there was a massive, massive housing crisis to the likes I've never seen. Even renting in London was cheaper. People were renting and sharing properties, even with salaries of 50 to 60 k upwards and viewings for rental apartments were with 30 or 40 other punters and was more like a lottery getting a letting agreement. I would largely believe that that situation alone would have been a massive driver in upwards figures in Covid 19.

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852882#Comment_117852882

Others might conclude you have an obsession with the Australian thread! We all have itches to scratch!

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117854129#Comment_117854129

I'm an Australian living in Ireland. You think I should be disinterested? I don't think my post count on this thread is in the many hundreds, like the clown I was referring to. I might be forgiven for thinking you couldn't think of an adequate come back. I suppose it was one step better than posting nothing but a link to some Youtube video of a guffawing head like some other dimwit did recently.

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117854171#Comment_117854171

You can be as you wish but it is a tad puerile to call posters out on threads they frequent as supposedly some form of logical argument. Some have lived on the same threads for years! Anyway moving on here.

Xavi6

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852347#Comment_117852347

Yes, so trustworthy 🥴 https://twitter.com/abcmediawatch/status/1434843095632265221?s=21

godzilla1989

COVID Madness

Australia threatening people with gas in the quarantine hotels

I certainly couldn't handle 14 days in a room. This world is fu#ked & sadly it's only going to get worse now with the money involved to keep this thing going

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_emP9BcP2E

tinytobe

The problem is that the quarantine is completely senseless. Australia can't keep the virus out this way anyway.

14 days in a room is one thing, but listening to all these f-words and punching walls by other "inmates" is another thing.

It's probably wise to avoid Australia.

A 14 day hotel prison sentence for a crime one didn't commit isn't worth Australia.

ceadaoin.

Jeez that's scary. Imagine kids hearing all that they'd be traumatized. **** nuts. I feel for the guy, it must be extremely tough to be confined to a room for weeks, its breaking people mentally. Look at all the escape attempts too.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117855155#Comment_117855155

Australia has a very long history of hardcore bio-security and of keeping things out to protect the agriculture industry, and has been quite successful at it, particularly WA. No foot and mouth, no rabies, etc. I once flew back to Perth with my son, and they ran a beagle over all the bags. The pooch nabbed my son's and I was asked if there was any food in it, particularly meats or dairy. I replied that it hadn't and it was searched thoroughly - then I was asked had there been any food in the bag earlier, and I replied there had been a ham sandwich that had been duly eaten in Singapore. :-) I won't bother describing what goes on with asking people about having been anywhere near a farm overseas and the cleaning of the soles of footwear with chemicals if they have.

Try taking a family pet to Australia - usually it would have to spend months in quarantine, with a hefty bill. They arrested Amber Heard when she and Johnny Depp thumbed their noses at the strict rules and brought their two dogs with them on a private jet, and presumably lied about it in the declaration.

The eastern states managed to get starlings, so WA had Agriculture Protection Board officers stationed at the border with SA with rifles on the lookout, and awaiting reports of sitings of of a starling or two, then they would be off to hunt them down if a report came in, as they did. Last I heard, they had been pretty successful in finding and killing them. They were also stopping vehicles entering WA from SA or the NT and checking for and confiscating all fruit and vegetables because of fruit fly. I remember way back in the 70's, a newspaper story of the APB getting reports of brambles and hunting down and exterminating the last of them. I believe they actually did manage to hunt down and eliminate brambles from WA. The one that they were hot on, last I heard, but which I think might have been gaining the upper hand, was the European Wasp, the ones we get.

They managed to keep the Spanish flu out for all of 1918 with tough measures, but a case slipped through in 2019 and then 15,000 Australians died.

https://www.naa.gov.au/blog/closed-borders-and-broken-agreements-spanish-flu-australia

So what's happened here is just an extension of that mindset and history, only I think you are right, this one couldn't have been kept out without far, far more stringent measures. Had Covid been a latter day Bubonic plague, with a 50-75% mortality rate, Australia could and probably would have kept it out, even if it meant using the military to kill any and all trying to get in. With Covid, the stakes aren't high enough to warrant such measures, thankfully.

Real Donald Trump

Australia is a basket case

Slideways

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856484#Comment_117856484

Quite a lucid post from an American fanboi. Congrats

Real Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856505#Comment_117856505

Quite a lucid post from an Aussie fanboy, congrats

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856484#Comment_117856484

Very apt username/post combo there!

648,000 Americans have died, and even now US still more Covid deaths every day than Australia has had during the entire pandemic. But Australia's the basket case, apparently.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117852743#Comment_117852743

Here on planet Earth, AZ is widely used in Australia.

In any case, a preference for Pfizer over AZ is hardly "vaccine hesitancy".

Real Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856539#Comment_117856539

You and your fellow Australians need to realise this is an endemic that will never end, and need to learn to live with it, instead of caging people up like animals. BTW 648,000 Americans died with covid , that word is always missing, WITH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856541#Comment_117856541

Thats why you donated AZ to Papa New Guinea, but your short on Pfzier and pleading with countries like UK for favours for Pfzier doses.

Hence the shortages of pfzier as older people want it and rejecting AZ.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856542#Comment_117856542

As I have repeatedly pointed out, and as you try desperately not to understand, we've had a lot less "caging up like animals" than Ireland and other European countries have had. That, together with the lower infection and death rates and the lower economic cost, is why Covid restrictions have been enduring popular in Australia. They have worked much, much better than the policies you are advocating.

It's awkward when the facts don't support your ideological preferences. But continuing to ignore them is not a good look; if you want to persuade anyone to your point of view, you're going to have to start engaging with reality at some point. Until you feel ready to do that, perhaps a discreet silence would be the wiser course.

As for people dying with Covid being assumed not to have died of Covid, we can bypass that controversy by simply measuring excess deaths during the pandemic. Excess death for the US since the pandemic struck: 745,780; for Australia, a reduction of 4,080.

But, yeah, in Real-Donald-Trump-world, Australia's the basket case. I think that tells us all we need to know about real-Donald-Trump-world. You stay there; I'll stick with planet Earth, thanks.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856544#Comment_117856544

Which, as I repeatedly point out, and as you studiously ignore, is not vaccine hesitancy. People wanting a vaccine is pretty much the exact opposite of vaccine hesitancy.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856555#Comment_117856555

OK no hesitancy.

Open up as you have vaccinated everyone and are donating AZ vaccines.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856556#Comment_117856556

At least try to follow the thread of the conversation, Woody. Australia hasn't vaccinated everyone; that point has been made several times in this thread.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856558#Comment_117856558

You could have if people wanted to take it.

The supply was there, Romania is at the same craic exporting unwanted vaccines.

Austrailia is Romania, vaccine sceptic.

UK and Ireland are only donating vaccines now at 90% vaccination rates.

You only donate vaccines when supply outstrips demand.

Real Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856553#Comment_117856553

Go live under a rock for the rest of your life so, and let everyone else get on with it, with a fatality rate of below 1% percent we have more important things to worry about. Maybe if the population wasn't so obese we haven't to worry about people being hospitalized considering 80% are who end up in ICU, but hey, we won't talk about that, incase we upset a certain group.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856562#Comment_117856562

Trump supporters?

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856560#Comment_117856560

Lookit, Woody, this isn't that difficult to follow, so sit down, take a deep breath and have a go. People prefer Pfizer to AstraZeneca. You may or may not share their preference, but having that preference is not, on any view, "vaccine resistance"; it's a vaccine preference. Because Australia's pandemic control measures have been so relatively successful, many people feel able to wait until their preferred Pfizer becomes available, rather than take the immediately available AstraZeneca. That's still not vaccine resistance.

If you want to coin and use the terms "AstraZeneca resistance" go ahead and be my guest.

Xavi6

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856562#Comment_117856562

More important things to worry about yet here you are on the internet dictating to people who live in a completely different country. Righto.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856542#Comment_117856542

Sure they were all hit with buses

gral6

I'd rather to live in Russia now than in this Australian open air Gulag. Australia is making Putin's Russia look like a liberal democracy now.

Avoid Australia at any cost.

Slideways

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856665#Comment_117856665

Russia’s loss, our gain.

I’m devastated

augustus gloop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856665#Comment_117856665

Lol, well I’m here in Australia at present. Spring has sprung, lockdown has been uncomfortable but necessary. Vaccination rates improving daily and almost no deaths.

im sure Russia is lovely, but I reckon I’ll keep running the gauntlet here if it’s all the same.

Noo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856696#Comment_117856696

Im in australia too, and what lockdown? Ive no restrictions, life is all relatively normal.

godzilla1989

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856560#Comment_117856560

And UK with 90% vaccinated already setting of alarm bells

Circuit breaker lockdown openly talked about in October when we are supposedly opening up fully

No one has a clue what they are doing except for China

UK, Ireland, Australia, USA absolutely hopeless, all as bad as each other

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.walesonline.co.uk/news/health/october-firebreak-lockdown-england-reportedly-21500227.amp

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856706#Comment_117856706

Nitpick: the UK population is 65.1% vaccinated. That's large enough to make a signficant dent in the spread and, more importantly, severity of the infection, but obviously there is considerable scope for further vaccination.

The Chinese vaccination rate is probably similar to the UK; about 65%, though we don't know exactly. From reported figures, the Chinese have administered enough vaccine doses to give two shots to 75% of the population, but on the assumption that some people have as yet received only one shot, the number who have received two shots must be less than that. Plus, China is predominantly using Sinovax, which is thought to provide a lower level of immunity than AZ, Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson.

Nevertheless China does appear to have the disease under quite tight control; it maintains this largely with very tight travel restrictions, plus rapid local and limited lockdowns in response to outbreaks - pretty much the Australian model, in fact.

These don't work as well against the delta-variant as they did against earlier variants, which means that local/limited lockdowns are becoming more frequent. That's not a reason for abandoning the strategy, though, if - as I think is the case - it is still more effective than the alternatives at limiting infections, limiting deaths, and minimising fiscal and economic impact.

Plus, it apparently annoys Trump supporters and libertarians, which is nice. 😀

bob mcbob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856754#Comment_117856754

80% of the eligible population (>16) in Scotland has been fully vaccinated which I believe is the national figure for Australia opening up.

Scotland opened up on the 9th August and children went back to school around the same time. Unsurprisingly with a virus as infections as Delta, case numbers soared - Scotland currently has the highest case incidence in the world. However there are now signs that the virus has peaked - the only age group where it is still growing is in children (<16). The hospitalisation and death rates while higher than before are manageable.

There is little appetite for another lockdown in Scotland as there is almost an acceptance that when any country opens up, a surge of Covid will follow. In fact I believe that opening up was done in the UK in summer to "get it over with" when the NHS is in a much better position to cope with it. than in winter.

If Australia opens up on 80% and follows a similar trajectory to Scotland then you will be looking at circa 30K cases per day at peak.

augustus gloop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856701#Comment_117856701

I’m in Canberra, coming out of LD Friday

josip

When will the Pfizer supply increase to the point where 75% of the entire Australian population can get doubly vaccinated?

At that point in time, we'll know if vaccine hesitancy/reluctance/bloody mindedness is an issue or not.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856569#Comment_117856569

My sister in Perth was vaccinated before me yet Ireland has now vaccinated over 90% of adults.

Annecdotely she says plenty dont want to take the vaccine and the statistics bear that out.

I'm not going around the houses again with you again.

If you think vaccine hesistancy is low in Austrailia good for you.

MadYaker

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117856562#Comment_117856562

You do realise that when this is over the aussies will have waaaaay less deaths and hospitalisations than Ireland or most EU countries right? If they stick to their vaccination plan they'll have spent a lot less time in lock down as well, and half the country isn't even in a lockdown now. Is this what bothers you and other people in this thread? You can just can't deal with the fact that others have it better than you so you concoct this false reality of what it's really like to make yourself feel better? Do you know people over there and you're seeing it on social media or something? I can't understand this bizarre phenomenon.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117858730#Comment_117858730

Because of course vaccine hesitancy is the only possible reason for the slow progress of vaccination, ever. Limited supply can never have anything to do with it. 🙄

Your decision to stop discussing this is probably a wise one.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117857373#Comment_117857373

There are a few points of difference between the Australian plan and the Scots plan. The opening up will be less dramatic - i.e. less of a change from the current position - , because Australia is currently much less closed than Scotland - e.g. apart from Victoria and NSW, schools are open right now, and mostly have been for the past year. A less dramatic opening, starting from a lower base of infections, may see a lesser spike in new infections. Plus, 80% adult vaccination isn't the target for full opening in Australia; that's to be the trigger for "stage 3", which involves the lifting of restrictions on vaccinated adults; the unvaccinated will still be subject to restrictions. And while vaccinated Australians will be free to travel internationally, residents of other countries will not necessarily be free to travel to Australia without restriction; that will depend on conditions in their home country.

The plan does envisage a stage 4, when these last restrictions will be lifted, but no particular target level of vaccination has yet been identified for stage 4.

Worth pointing out that the plan is a plan of the federal government; the states are not yet fully signed up to it. In some cases they are withholding commitment to the plan as a bargaining chip to try to press for a greater share of the vaccine supply, which is still very limited. In other cases they just don't think the plan will be popular with their electorates.

AdamD

Large parts of Australia are significantly more restricted than Scotland

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117862230#Comment_117862230

And large parts are significantly less restricted.

josip

The only meaningful metric to use for restrictions, especially in Australia's case, is population percentage.

bob mcbob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117861572#Comment_117861572

Sorry I should have said, schools are back because it is the end of the summer holidays. They were also open before the holidays started. In terms of current restrictions in Scotland, they are - you have to wear a mask indoor in public places (supermarkets, public transport, etc) and you have to register on for track and trace in pubs, cafes, etc. That is it, really not very onerous.

I can also go abroad on holiday (for countries that will have me) and there are a noticeable amount of international tourists going around here (mainly Europeans and North Americans).

While I can see your point about a lower base maybe resulting in lower numbers, there is also the argument that Australia's figures could be worse. After 3 significant Covid waves here there is likely to be much higher infection acquired immunity here than in Oz. Also it maybe the case that there are more people who are too infirm / elderly to survive Covid even with the vaccine in Oz than Scotland.