Dear GrahamY,

You wrote;

“How many Anzacs died so that one hundred years later a cowardly generation would shut down the economy lest they run a tiny risk of catching a nasty disease?”

Sorry mate but that was utterly inane.

The herd immunity which you guys seem so keen on requires 70% of the population to have been infected. I do not have a single risk factor for the disease and in some ways it would be less complicated to have caught it and recovered.

Why I am scared of though is how many others might end up infected, grievously ill or die from me being a carrier. I have a surviving parent who is rightly terrified.

People are stepping up to do the right thing because they believe in protecting Australian lives. I have nieces and nephews dropping fruit and vegetables around to isolated elderly folk in our community. I think on the whole there is a lot more reaching out to others going on at the moment and that care should be applauded not derided.

Unlike Sweden we haven't shuttered major manufacturing industries here in Australia. Much of the pain is being felt in peripheral businesses like cafes, restaurants, movie theatres, sporting codes etc. There will obviously be huge adjustments made to our economy but this may well be an opportunity to reset and reinvigorate it. House prices deserved to be pulled back and speculative share markets brought to heel.

Like Aboriginal burning this may well be a chance to heal our systems like lessening our dependence on overseas workers and offshore manufacturing.

Dear Lucifrase,

Just on your video the professor say “The main differences with other countries is that you are not locked up in your home. If you go out to buy food, groceries or drugs, I mean medicines, there's no police to stop you in the street and ask you what you are doing here, that is one thing. People are asked to stay inside but there is no reinforcement or enforcement of that, people do it anyway.”

I am not locked up in my home. I go and do grocery shopping and buy medicines without being stopped by police. I have been to Bunnings a couple of times and travelled into Officeworks.

Scandinavian countries are peopled by those who are far more socially responsible than the idiots on Bondi. That has obviously been a factor in the decision making there.

Our child care centres are open and speaking to a worker tending to capacity rooms. Our high schools and universities remain closed as in Sweden although Primary schools are open there.

The gatherings in public are restricted by less stringent there and this is obviously showing up in the excess death figures but they certainly haven't gone hands off and the government denies it is striving for herd immunity.

Australia is heading into a winter so I expect our restrictions will last longer that Sweden's for that reason. Hopefully better treatments and possible vaccines will mean we will not have to sacrifice a part of our community the way Sweden has done. We will wait and see.

The whole Sweden argument is just too premature. They have adopted a longer term outlook which involves getting the worst of it out of the way early and hoping that, with the majority of the population carrying antibodies to the KungFlu, their society will return to a degree of normality reasonably rapidly.

Its an experiment, just as our policy is an experiment. But since they are adopting a longer approach, its just wrong to declare it a failure at this early stage. I'm sure the advocates of their policy will hope that second and third waves will be avoided by Sweden while hitting others. Its only after those second and third waves have passed that we can evaluate their policy.

Its a marathon. They've adopted one strategy, we another. There's no point calling the 42km race after 5kms.

I think part of the effort to get Sweden to fall in line is the terror that they might turn out to be right and everything we've done was unnecessary. If everyone does the same thing, no one can be wrong.

"If Australia had adopted Taiwan's practice..."

Taiwan had two major advantages over us. First, due to proximity and bitter experience, they knew that "China is asshole" and therefore ignored China's propaganda on the virus. Second, they weren't caught in the WHO webbing and therefore avoided falling for their utter incompetence. Two lessons, we and the rest of the world will need to learn.

"Unlike Sweden we haven't shuttered major manufacturing.."
I think our government is still trying to find some manufacturing industry. :)
I don't think Sweden has shuttered its manufacturing but a lot of it is closed because supply chains from the rest of Europe are disrupted.

Count for six weeks from the last Wuhan Virus related death in Australia and if a death hasn't occurred in that period then I reckon it might be safe to step outside and start picking up your life again.

PS Did you see where the State of Missouri is taking China to court and suing for damages resulting from the Wuhan Virus? Go Missouri! I hope those bat eating parasites get what they deserve!

Our policy is ultimately hoping for one or two (or both)things to occur before the entire social infrastructure collapses.

First, there is the hope that a vaccine will materialise. Maybe it will. But remember that there's still no AIDS vaccine 35 years after the event. Banking the nation's entire future on rolling double-six seems precarious.

Second, that we can eradicate it in the homeland. Again, perhaps we can. But then what? Pre-virus Australia was open to the world, tourists visiting here and we visiting there, foreign workers, imports, exports. Our entire economy and lifestyle was predicated on that. Is every arrival of people and goods, foreign and domestic to be quarantined upon arrival to ensure the virus never reappears? We will be a very different, and poorer, place if that's the intention.

We can say hooroo to the tourism industry. We aren't going to get too many people visiting if they need to spend the first fortnight in seclusion.

The great export earner that was education will similarly be knee-capped.

Other imports. Well there's already stories of products coming out of Asia carrying the virus. So everything gets fumigated?

Of course all cargo ships and passenger planes would need to be isolated. And their crews.

And even one error, one inadvertent Ruby Princess, and it all starts over again. That'll get old in a big hurry.

Mhaze,

It's all or nothing, isn't it, when it's all boiled down? Either every country eventually goes for 'herd immunity', the devil take the hindermost, OR every country locks down until there are no cases within its boundaries.

After all, any country which tries to impose lock-downs may well reach a point where there are no new cases - but then, a plane-load of HI carriers might arrive from somewhere else and put the lot in jeopardy. Vice versa, people from a LD country can never visit a HI country.

So ultimately, LD countries have to restrict in-coming only to those who undergo isolation, or risk a new cycle of infections.

And how long ? SA had one new case in the last 24 hours, a woman who returned by air several weeks ago from an overseas trip.

Several weeks ago. Just showing up as positive now.

She is in her twenties.

Joe