I absolutely agree. Australia has done substantially better than most other nations regarding COVID from all of economic, health, and lifestyle points of view. The two largest cities did somewhat worse in lifestyle for some periods, but most other places had far fewer and less onerous restrictions than most other countries for nearly 2 years. I personally was very happy to have lived with essentially zero risk of COVID and essentially zero restrictions both personal or economic for more than a year and a half.
A conservative worst-case estimate for costs of an uncontrolled COVID outbreak in Australia was on the order of 300,000 deaths and about $600 billion direct economic loss over 2 years, along with even larger economic impacts from higher-order effects.
We did very much better than that, especially in health outcomes. We had 2,000 deaths up until giving up on elimination in December last year, which was about 0.08 deaths per thousand. Even after giving up on local elimination, we still only have 0.37 per thousand compared with United States at 3.0 per thousand.
Economic losses are also substantially less than US in terms of comparison with the pre-pandemic economy, but the attribution of causes there is much more contentious as with everything to do with economics.
I absolutely agree. Australia has done substantially better than most other nations regarding COVID from all of economic, health, and lifestyle points of view. The two largest cities did somewhat worse in lifestyle for some periods, but most other places had far fewer and less onerous restrictions than most other countries for nearly 2 years. I personally was very happy to have lived with essentially zero risk of COVID and essentially zero restrictions both personal or economic for more than a year and a half.
A conservative worst-case estimate for costs of an uncontrolled COVID outbreak in Australia was on the order of 300,000 deaths and about $600 billion direct economic loss over 2 years, along with even larger economic impacts from higher-order effects.
We did very much better than that, especially in health outcomes. We had 2,000 deaths up until giving up on elimination in December last year, which was about 0.08 deaths per thousand. Even after giving up on local elimination, we still only have 0.37 per thousand compared with United States at 3.0 per thousand.
Economic losses are also substantially less than US in terms of comparison with the pre-pandemic economy, but the attribution of causes there is much more contentious as with everything to do with economics.