The hypothesis that Australia succeeded because it was using good epistemics to make decisions is not holding up well in the endgame.
From Australia, this hypothesis 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. Without going into details, this only happened because the Victorian state government unilaterally held their hard lockdown all the way back to nothing-for-two-weeks, ending our winter second wave. Doing so created both a status quo and (having paid higher-than-if-faster costs) a very strong constituency for elimination.
Victoria remains the only area with non-negligible masking. Nationwide, 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. I attribute the result as much to good luck as epistemic skill, and am very glad that COVID is not such a hard problem that we can’t afford mistakes.
Strongly disagree. Australia has done many things right:
Close the borders early (and close them for real)
Very efficient contact tracing. Even after months with 0 cases, we still are asked to sign up to every bar we visit
2 weeks supervised quarantines for returning Australians
Very quick reactions as soon as one case is detected in the community, e.g. Queensland lockdown from a few weeks ago
Tons of testing
Etc
Handwashing has no effect on the transmission of the virus. Distancing is meaningless if there are no cases.
I will concede though that the vaccine rollout is being inefficient, but it does not have such a high cost: people are not dying in the thousands. Australia can afford that.
Deaths in the USA (correcting per population) are 50 times higher than in Australia.
I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing much about outcomes (which I agree have been great!), or even that Australia has competently executed at least enough of the important things to get right. Of the five items you mention I’d include borders, quarantine, snap-lockdowns, and testing as part of the local elimination policy; we haven’t done them perfectly but we have done them well enough.
I understand “using good epistemics to make decisions” to require that your decisions should be made based on a coherent understanding and cost-benefit analysis of the situation, even if both might change over time. “Merely” getting good outcomes doesn’t count!
For example, we still encourage pointless handwashing and distancing while iffy on masks or ventilation—and because we got to zero transmission in other ways, that’s OK. Similarly, it’s true that Australia’s slow vaccine rollout hasn’t cost many lives so far and I hope that neither winter nor variants change that. The cost-in-expectation of an unlikely outbreak should still drive faster vaccination efforts IMO, especially when e.g. increasing local production is not zero-sum.
From Australia, this hypothesis 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. Without going into details, this only happened because the Victorian state government unilaterally held their hard lockdown all the way back to nothing-for-two-weeks, ending our winter second wave. Doing so created both a status quo and (having paid higher-than-if-faster costs) a very strong constituency for elimination.
Victoria remains the only area with non-negligible masking. Nationwide, 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. I attribute the result as much to good luck as epistemic skill, and am very glad that COVID is not such a hard problem that we can’t afford mistakes.
Strongly disagree. Australia has done many things right:
Close the borders early (and close them for real)
Very efficient contact tracing. Even after months with 0 cases, we still are asked to sign up to every bar we visit
2 weeks supervised quarantines for returning Australians
Very quick reactions as soon as one case is detected in the community, e.g. Queensland lockdown from a few weeks ago
Tons of testing
Etc
Handwashing has no effect on the transmission of the virus. Distancing is meaningless if there are no cases.
I will concede though that the vaccine rollout is being inefficient, but it does not have such a high cost: people are not dying in the thousands. Australia can afford that.
Deaths in the USA (correcting per population) are 50 times higher than in Australia.
I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing much about outcomes (which I agree have been great!), or even that Australia has competently executed at least enough of the important things to get right. Of the five items you mention I’d include borders, quarantine, snap-lockdowns, and testing as part of the local elimination policy; we haven’t done them perfectly but we have done them well enough.
I understand “using good epistemics to make decisions” to require that your decisions should be made based on a coherent understanding and cost-benefit analysis of the situation, even if both might change over time. “Merely” getting good outcomes doesn’t count!
For example, we still encourage pointless handwashing and distancing while iffy on masks or ventilation—and because we got to zero transmission in other ways, that’s OK. Similarly, it’s true that Australia’s slow vaccine rollout hasn’t cost many lives so far and I hope that neither winter nor variants change that. The cost-in-expectation of an unlikely outbreak should still drive faster vaccination efforts IMO, especially when e.g. increasing local production is not zero-sum.