> During May 2022, Western Australia experienced sharply rising cases amongst the highest per capita cases seen anywhere in the world throughout the pandemic.
Just delaying it to 2022 according to those same articles, as it had already exited the evolutionary fit population’s memory everywhere else in the world
Delaying any free active COVID presence until 99% of the state population had been double vaccinated and following COVID infections resulted in very few hospitalisations and one of the lowest per capita COVID death rates globally.
I suggest you read the articles, from the linked Wikipedia source:
Why are there so many Covid cases in Australia?
Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, said Australia’s high reported infection rate may be the result of high “case ascertainment”.
Although PCR testing rates have dropped off in Australia, “we’re probably still doing it more so than anywhere else in the world”, Bennett said. “We still have free PCR testing. A lot of countries don’t.”
The number of confirmed Covid cases shouldn’t be relied on in isolation, Bennett said. “If you compare us to, say, the UK, they look much better for infection rates,” she said. “The UK’s confirmed case rate is 128 cases per million – less than a tenth of Australia’s 1,515 figure.
“Yet their hospitalisation rate per million is 209, and ours is 124. It suggests that they probably have twice as many [true] cases [as Australia].”
In short, we paid attention to case numbers, when we had zero cases we had zero cases and when we had 1,500 mild infections post vaccnation we had 1,500 mild infections.
Other places seemed to run on guesswork and magical thinking.
I feel like delaying it isn't a bad move. There were no vaccines or known effective treatments available in early 2020, health services were unprepared and became overwhelmed, and no one knew even simple things about the virus, like how it was transmitted.
In 2022, I'm sure pretty much any region would be much better prepared to get hit by COVID-19 for the "first" time.
that only happened because everybody else fucked up - which is of course predictable, you can't assume 192 countries will do the exact right thing all at the same time. so I agree, they just delayed the inevitable.
We did, and the inevitable was 99% double vaccination, very few serious (hospitalisation) cases, very few deaths, at the cost of business as usual within the state and goods being quarentine 'airlocked' in and out across the border.
Sounds like you guys did pretty well :-) Here in the UK we always locked down too late, which meant we had to go for longer, and then opened up too early, and offered people free food so they would spread it around again, which meant we had to lock down again. And we sent sick people into old people's homes and then went shocked pikachu when a load of them died.
Use of the phrase "evolutionary fit population" in this (or any) context strongly suggests you support some/most/all of the ideology behind eugenics. Godwins Law violation inbound in 3...2...1...
We have an aging population that has representatives like them, they optimized for themselves and it was not necessary for the rest of us. Beforesight, in hindsight, and we are still not represented in the mental health repercussions that should be weighed, especially amongst the maladjusted adolescent and now young adult population that makes more sense to have been optimized for in a functioning society.
And what did we do with slowing down how many elderly people died? We did not expand hospital capacity in but did buy time in a coincidence that has almost no standard of review. For example, In the US if only 100,000 people died instead of 1 million (or the 10 million some were afraid of), it still would be a political disaster for whoever was in office, the same at 10,000, or even the 3,000 matching 9/11. Its good that the hospital system didnt get overwhelmed, or for long in some municipalities, by mostly coincidence.
Response could have been tailored to factor in reality quicker, which is what ultimately happened anyway: A bifurcated system where those fit interacted with the world, and those not did not. Many of them are still functionally quarantined to this day. Could have been the same by 2021, everywhere.
Just delaying it to 2022 according to those same articles, as it had already exited the evolutionary fit population’s memory everywhere else in the world