The Kiwis have gone mad

The "Kiwis" are actually the New Zealanders. Austalians are "Aussies".

As for why...well, News Corp. Because Rupert Murdoch - who was one of the first humans on Planet Earth who was vaccinated way back in December 2020, ahead of even the Queen of England - actually spends most of his time in Australia and he doesn't want COVID there...and since he owns 80% of the media in Australia, Fox News' Supreme Leader spins a very different line on COVID restrictions than he does in the US of A, that's why.

Very, very odd. Almost like his people say what they say here because they know it sells, and because Rupert doesn't give a $#%^ what happens to Americans as long as they keep watching. I dunno, judge for yourself.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/

Tiggity®

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It isn't. They responded great originally, as I said.

Sep 30, 2021, 9:04 AM

Now they're screwed, as I've also said. The problem was their response was so good/effective, people carried on as usual, no one was dying, and as a result they blew off vaccines. The government blew off buying them and people blew off getting them. For the majority of the time Australia has been wide open (internally). They had the luxury of catching cases early, contact tracing, quarantining, and doing local lockdowns, and regional ones only very rarely (they're an island after all, a built-in advantage).

BUT, along came Delta. It is beyond their capacity to stop it as they had with prior strains. As such they kept their policy in place, and locked everything down. With Delta that doesn't work, and they realized it. BUT, they again had no vaccines to give, and people didn't feel a need for them either as they were lulled into thinking they could beat it. They can't. So now they're playing catch-up with the vaccines, and have been locked down far longer than before, and as I said, they're now screwed.

Had they invested early in vaccines as others did (England/Israel/Singapore/etc), and people took them earlier, they would not be screwed right now with Delta. Most of the anger in Australia is towards the government's squandering of the opportunity to acquire vaccines. We offered them, they declined.

Seems they now are vaccinating roughly 10% of their population per week. But by the time the vaccines become effective, it will be too late. They're in for a lot of deaths.

This has happened in other countries as well. Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, many places (esp islands) did a very good job, too good, at keeping it out, only to be slammed by Delta. The plan is the same worldwide (in developed countries) now. Vaccinate, and carry on. Always been the plan, since the spring really in the US and UK. It was our own plan, but we have too many mouth-breathing conspiracy theorists to get enough people vaccinated, so we got nailed almost as hard (WORSE IN SOME PLACES) as last winter. And here we are, with all the vaccines we need, and the most effective vaccines, and we're refusing to take them while the rest of the world, in places, are desperate to take the vaccines we refuse to take. If you look at the countries over 80% vaccinated, there is a massive drop in deaths related to case numbers. Cases don't matter if everyone is vaccinated because the death rate approaches influenza at that point. Portugal, Spain, UAE, Qatar, etc. Hospitals don't look like they do in Florida, or Idaho, they look like hospitals in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

As a side note, some of the best research and information has come from places like Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. who aggressively and successfully kept covid out. When Delta hit those places, they had no cases. So in Australia, when a single person got covid, they could contact trace the heck out of them. They then could find case #2, and connect it to Case #1, and then they could actually track the spread, initially. That provided invaluable knowledge about Delta. When you have a cesspool of infection like here in SC, it's hard to do studies and contact tracing that leads to any insight. In Australia, with only a couple of cases in the entire country, they could find points of contact and transmission, and accurately determine the exposure location, time, and scenario. As such, we know you can literally walk behind someone in a department store for 20 feet, or stand in line behind them at the register for 2 minutes, and the Delta variant will transmit with that VERY limited contact. 10 seconds walking behind someone and you get it. You can also get it outside, never getting less than 20 feet from someone.

So when you see that plexi glass barrier, or see that 6-foot rule, or a "contact" being someone you were within 6 feet of for 15 minutes, inside, just know that's all BS. That's been known, but some places have proven it. China proved that back in April of 2020 by studying transmission between two families in a restaurant who never got within 10 feet of each other (it transmitted through the HVAC), but anyway.....their science has been proven accurate more than our own CDC. Take that FWIW. They probably invented it, might as well trust them on what they created.

We actually have so much freedom we can't even DO science. I mean how are we (in the US) going to locate a case, contact trace all contacts, then quarantine them all in isolation, then test them daily logging ct counts on daily PCR tests, to see viral loads and disease progression? We can't do that. China can. Singapore can. You get very accurate data that way, and as much as we enjoy our freedoms, we can't even know exactly what we face because of them.