The other thing this misses about Australia is how catastrophically incompetent the federal government has been. If the Federal government had actually bought some bleeping vaccines when offered them by Pfizer in June 2020 (i.e. the deal that Israel took), we’d look awesome even with all their other stuffups.
If you want to get vaccinated, there’s currently a two-month waiting list
Canberra, where I live, went more than a year between covid cases. Yes, international travel was difficult (more than necessary for public health); but having literally zero covid was pretty great. Most state governments were fine; it just only takes one to stuff up the NPIs and a single federal government to stuff up vaccines.
From Australia, the hypothesis [that Australia succeeded because it was using good epistemics] was only ever plausible if you looked at high-level outcomes rather than the actual decision-making. … We got basically one thing right: pursue local elimination. This only happened because the Victorian state government unilaterally held their hard lockdown all the way back to nothing-for-two-weeks. … we continue to make expensive and obvious mistakes about handwashing, distancing, quarantine, and appear to be bungling our vaccine rollout. Zero active cases and zero local transmission covers a multitude of sins.
And in July: “I am so tired of this. Please don’t attribute Australia’s success to consistently good epistemology; we just did enough right early to locally eliminate it at higher than necessary cost. We got lucky with the virus, we got some lucky policies, and I can only hope our luck hasn’t yet run out.”
So yeah; Australia is not systematically competent—we just got a combination of patchy competence and luck which worked really well for a while, because zero cases and controlled travel is a pretty stable equilibrium (my preferred one, even). Learn from our example that elimination is possible and practical… and perhaps also that vaccines would be really helpful.
The other thing this misses about Australia is how catastrophically incompetent the federal government has been. If the Federal government had actually bought some bleeping vaccines when offered them by Pfizer in June 2020 (i.e. the deal that Israel took), we’d look awesome even with all their other stuffups.
If you want to get vaccinated, there’s currently a two-month waiting list
Canberra, where I live, went more than a year between covid cases. Yes, international travel was difficult (more than necessary for public health); but having literally zero covid was pretty great. Most state governments were fine; it just only takes one to stuff up the NPIs and a single federal government to stuff up vaccines.
In April, I said
And in July: “I am so tired of this. Please don’t attribute Australia’s success to consistently good epistemology; we just did enough right early to locally eliminate it at higher than necessary cost. We got lucky with the virus, we got some lucky policies, and I can only hope our luck hasn’t yet run out.”
So yeah; Australia is not systematically competent—we just got a combination of patchy competence and luck which worked really well for a while, because zero cases and controlled travel is a pretty stable equilibrium (my preferred one, even). Learn from our example that elimination is possible and practical… and perhaps also that vaccines would be really helpful.