COVID-19 updates comments and concerns

[Tha_Phantom]

The results of an independent review into Australia's handling of the covid-19 pandemic:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/frac...18-p5bqso.html

I am surprised to see lockdowns given such disdain here. Intuitively, they seemed like the right move, but according to the panel it should only ever have been an initial response and not something we kept relying on.

[griffin]

Reviews are going to be flawed if they are prioritising the wrong things as being most important. Saving lives should be the most important factor, and if there were economical issues that impacted on the citizens of a particular country, it is not the fault of the current government, but the fault of decades of previous governments for prioritising resources to just 4 largest capital cities to create a petrie-dish of concentrated virus transmission, and a more significant hit to the economy when just one of those 4 cities has to lockdown to save lives. Instead of having over 5 million people all condensed into one location, driving up the cost of housing and the cost of living, there should have been a long-term period of developing infrastructure and business incentives to five other cities in the state, so that living there is more affordable, and shutting down one or two cities because of a virus (or natural disaster) doesn't impact on the rest of the country and economy (and it is a lot cheaper to fund through welfare payments).
People got upset over the lockdowns, but they were stuck having to live in cities that shouldn't be this big, because of crises like this and other natural disasters. It's like the expression - don't put all of your eggs in one basket... and this is why.

I think Australia was one of the few countries that put aside politics long enough to do the right thing... to stall long enough until a vaccine was available and covering 90% of the population so that the virus didn't crash our hospitals, businesses and welfare systems. And if the review was focussing more on the economy, lockdowns helped protect businesses by limiting the number of people infected before there was a vaccine, which would have shut down businesses due to lack of available staff (a lot worse than what we saw when the variants hit at the end of last year).

[Autocon]

The results of an independent review into Australia's handling of the covid-19 pandemic:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/frac...18-p5bqso.html

I am surprised to see lockdowns given such disdain here. Intuitively, they seemed like the right move, but according to the panel it should only ever have been an initial response and not something we kept relying on.

There were no medical people on the board.

[mikeyc7m]

Yeah seems like petty hindsight handwringing when one considers the number of people dead overseas. If the feds had bothered to secure vaccines sooner we would not have needed so many lockdowns.

The big benefit of a lockdown is the economy can bounce right back when it's over - if there was no lockdown all the sick/dead would have stalled the economy anyway, and for a long time after the emergency is over too.

[Tha_Phantom]

There were no medical people on the board.

What are "health experts" then? Genuine question.

[Tha_Phantom]

If the feds had bothered to secure vaccines sooner we would not have needed so many lockdowns.

The report said this.

“Many lockdowns were avoidable,” the report found. “Some were the result of failures in our quarantine systems, our contact tracing systems, a sluggish vaccine rollout and shortcomings in our communication with key parts of our community.

[GoktimusPrime]

"Health expert" sounds like a broader term than "medical expert." All medical experts are also health experts, but not all health experts are medical experts. Dietitians, personal trainers, Chinese herbalists, counsellors, physiologists are all health experts but not medical experts. It would be helpful if the article told us who these health experts were. Governments were acting on the advice of medical experts like Dr. Kerry Chant etc.

This article is also loaded with emotively biased language... so much for professional journalistic neutrality. I wouldn't even write a toy review with this level of bias, and quite frankly, if a student ever tried to use this kind of language in a persuasive writing text, I would have to give them a pretty low score (as they're trying to use emotional bias rather than objective evidence or logic to persuade the audience).

[Autocon]

They have a name. Virus pathogen people. Only heard the word on the news when it was in the media