It’s finally happened: Australia’s mandatory isolation periods for those infected with COVID-19 have, as of today, been scrapped.
While those who have tested positive for the virus can’t visit high-risk settings like hospitals and aged and disability care facilities for seven days post infection, there are no legal rules on staying away from public spaces, taking public transport or wearing a mask.
Since the start of the pandemic, local experts have cautioned Australia to look to the northern hemisphere’s autumn wave — where there’s been a small but steady rise of cases across the past fortnight — to predict what may happen here in the coming months.
In Germany, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach today called for Germany’s state governments to reintroduce masks in enclosed settings following a surge in cases. There has been a steady increase in positive cases around Munich following the start of Oktoberfest celebrations in mid-September. The country’s seven-day average of daily cases has reached more than 113,000 — the highest peak since April this year. At the start of this month, the federal government reintroduced mask mandates for long-distance trains.
Meanwhile, France has entered an eighth wave of COVID-19, with a seven-day average of 68,000 cases — while in the UK last week, COVID-19 cases jumped by 25%. 1012682
In Asia, China has also seen a small rise in cases over the last week after dropping following a September wave, with a seven-day average of 6700 new daily cases. A surge of cases led to new lockdowns in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in the country following China’s week-long National Day holiday at the start of October.
Beijing even saw a small but rare protest yesterday against China’s COVID restrictions (though police quickly removed banners and denied any protest took place).
It’s not all bad news: the US has seen a 20% reduction in new COVID-19 cases and a 10% reduction in ICU admissions across the past 14 days.
But despite nearly three years of COVID myth-busting, health literacy lessons and empirical evidence on the effects of the virus, misinformation is still rampant. After questioning Australia’s 17% increase in mortality rates, Queensland LNP Senator Matt Canavan shared another tweet warning that the mRNA vaccines were “killing people, plain and simple”. Both tweets have since been deleted.
The excess deaths that Canavan linked to vaccines, as stated by the Actuaries institute, are due to the more than 15,000 Australians who died from COVID.
Meanwhile, back in the US, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson discussed “findings” that alleged Pfizer had no proof that the COVID-19 vaccine reduced viral transmission — completely ignoring the fact that vaccines are designed to stop severe illness in vaccinated individuals, with reduced transmission a happy side effect from a reduction in viral load.
Despite these steps backwards in public information and Australia’s scrapping of restrictions, COVID-19 is not gone, with experts warning caution as the northern hemisphere sees a slow uptick in cases and new COVID-19 variants emerge.
That’s all fair enough, but any assessment of where the pandemic is going is incomplete without also looking at the incidence of long Covid. It’s undeniable now it is common and often serious. Sooner or later just about everyone will have been infected and some fraction of all those infected will go on to develop long Covid, with its many complications and debilitating results. It is quite remarkable how insouciant governments have become about this because it will not only affect individuals and families, it will have significent consequences for businesses, health services and society generally.
The astonishing thing about Canavan’s tweet is not so much the sheer stupidity-to which we’ve largely become inured-but that he said something unrelated to coal.
I’d long assumed that he was contractually obliged to spruik coal in every 2nd sentence.
Unwinding the measures now and ramping them back up as needed might be better politically than to keep the measures up indefinitely irrespective of whether they are achieving anything. Seeing what’s going on in the northern hemisphere should be taken as indicative of what’s to come, but I can hardly fault politicians and the public for wanting some respite when the situation allows it.
Well said. It’s been a long haul. Can’t keep people committed to restrictions if you don’t ease them occasionally.
China is frequently criticised in Western media for its Zero-COVID policy. One outcome of this policy is that China has had only around 250,000 diagnosed cases of Covid and fewer than 10,000 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion. Although it is often argued in right-wing circles that these figures are gross and deliberate underestimates, this position has no support in the peer-reviewed literature.
Many other countries including Australia have very high rates of total Covid infection (greater than 50% of the population with one or more infections), and correspondingly high rates of Long COVID. Vaccination appears to only slightly reduce the chance of developing Long COVID, whereas second and subsequent infections appear to each further increase an individual’s chance of developing the condition.
The long-term persistence of Long COVID is unknown at this point, but it is already clear that the health and economic effects on many individuals can be devastating, while the overall economic effects on societies are substantial. An August 2022 Brookings Institute report, for example, estimated that the annual value of lost wages in the US due to Long COVID is currently around $200 billion and rising, with additional much larger medical care and quality-of-life costs.
The abandonment of protective measures against this serious disease including quarantining of the infectious, the use of efficient (N95 or equivalent) masks, and ensuring that the entire population is up-to-date with vaccinations and boosters is nothing but a crude and shortsighted sellout to business interests and right-wing pressure groups. It has already resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths in this country alone, and unnecessary suffering on a large scale. There are no guarantees this will not get worse.
It looks like China’s policy of protecting its people first makes a lot more sense than Australia’s derelict policy vacuum, and judging by the recent rebound in Chinese GDP growth, it makes economic sense as well.
Or as the World Bank’s analysis puts it,
So China’s covid policy has damaged its economy and will continue to do so. Any recovery will be despite rather than because of its zero covid policy.
Yes, China’s Zero-COVID policy has caused a short-term reduction in its GDP growth rate in 2022 (I was looking at World Bank figures up to 2021). However, in quoting the World Bank’s 2022 analysis, you missed the following more positive statement:
”On the upside, if the pandemic is brought under control and domestic restrictions are fully lifted, full year growth could be higher than currently projected, thanks to the recently announced additional stimulus measures.”
In any case, China’s growth is widely predicted to return to high levels in 2023 and beyond. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), China’s GDP is well in excess of the US GDP and the gap is predicted to widen rapidly over the medium to long term. Yet by way of comparison, in 1990, India’s GDP per capita (PPP) was actually higher than China’s ($1,200 vs. $981). By 2021, China’s figure was $19,338 vs India’s $7,333. These are World Bank figures in “current international $.” And this rapid growth in GDP has been used for good. It is a matter of record that China has done a far, far better job than India in eliminating poverty for many hundreds of millions of citizens. At the same time, while it is true that Chinese military spending in absolute terms has increased enormously, it has remained static as a percentage of GDP (around 1.8%), far below the level of the US (3.7% in 2020), although you would not realise this from the nearly hysterical level of reporting about all matters Chinese in Australian news media.
You write “So China’s covid policy has damaged its economy and will continue to do so. Any recovery will be despite, rather than because of its zero covid policy.” However, you seem to have forgotten that letting COVID rip also has serious costs, as I noted in my original post. I quoted an easily-accessible August 2022 Brookings Institute report to the effect that “the annual value of lost wages in the US due to Long COVID is currently around $200 billion and rising, with additional much larger medical care and quality-of-life costs.” So the situation is not as simple as you make out. Additionally, the human costs of all the COVID death and suffering in the US, for example, is not taken into account in most economic models, but should be carefully weighed in any just society.
In 2020 alone, COVID itself caused a global loss of 3.4% of GDP, or more than US$2 trillion. Billions have fallen ill and uncounted numbers have died (the official statistics are known from peer-reviewed studies often to undercount drastically the true number of both cases and fatalities, even in some advanced countries). Long COVID is a very serious long-term problem in all countries that have let COVID circulate.
Yet somehow it is a “problem” if China makes decisions which have prevented probably around a billion people or more from catching COVID, with the massive number of fatalities that would have entailed, particularly early in the pandemic as happened in the US and many other countries. China has also avoided having potentially hundreds of millions suffering from Long COVID, with all the individual suffering, loss of livelihood, and economic destruction that this is causing globally.
It seems to me that China’s COVID policies are very much for the benefit of their ordinary citizens. As an otherwise relatively healthy older male with a hereditary immunodeficiency that has predisposed me to frequent bouts of pneumonia starting at a young age, I can only wish that Australia maintained a much more rigorous suite of anti-COVID policies based on science.
Why make this issue about China?
Their lockdowns are a serious problem to them and seemingly not driven by science. They also just haven’t tried hard enough on vaccines. Getting dressed up in full plastic body covering is just cosplay. I have seen several (and been in) households where some had Omicron and the spread was contained by sensible measures.
Our head in the sand approach is a serious problem to us – fully agree with you on that.
I am absolutely sick of making Covid about politics and the lack of focus on the fundamentals, i.e.:
* Good masking:
* Good ventilation:
* Sick leave provisions for infected people:
* Improved and updated RATs
* Updated boosters:
* Mandatory masking on public transport.
* Ongoing education about the above.
I know people who have died of Covid and people who it seems may be permanently damaged by it. I can see young relatives who have impaired social development because of less socialisation.
Perhaps we should start to get our eye on the ball (ie the above tedious details etc) and not the scoreboard (political systems and other crap).
Personally I think both ours and China’s current approaches are inept.
Thanks for your agreement on Australia’s current head-in-the-sand approach. It is deeply frustrating to see the hard-won accumulated scientific knowledge about COVID so openly flouted.
I am not going to debate you on the science of lockdowns, other than to say that the Chinese approach is, in fact, very successful in restricting the number of cases, and thus the resulting number of deaths, cases of Long COVID etc. Perhaps you mean the economics of lockdowns?
You also say “They also just haven’t tried hard enough on vaccines.” Whatever do you mean? The main Chinese vaccines are very effective at reducing serious illness and death (have a look at the summaries of results under “Sinopharm” and “Coronovac” on Wikipedia, with links to the findings). And 90% of the Chinese people are vaccinated (56% boosted), figures higher than many much wealthier countries. China had no choice but to make its own vaccines using traditional methods, and fortunately they have turned out to be sufficiently effective, and much cheaper than mRNA vaccines. They may need to adjust their strategy as time passes, but that is true for everyone.
Further, China began a massive campaign of vaccine sale and donation to other low income countries well before most advanced countries had helped other countries with vaccines at all (advanced countries had, of course. ordered huge numbers of doses, effectively seizing the global supply chain). No doubt China’s generosity will be attributed, as usual, to some malign intent. In 2021 alone, China sold or donated around 1.8 billion vaccine doses to other countries through bilateral agreements, double the level of the Western-sponsored COVAX initiative (910 million doses, China being the second largest donor).
To me, all of this sounds like China trying pretty hard indeed on vaccines.
Your posts are most welcome.
Er and you believe their data?
A refereed paper in the British Medical Journal that is a useful source of information is “Excess mortality in Wuhan city and other parts of China during the three months of the covid-19 outbreak: findings from nationwide mortality registries” by Liu et al (2021). This uses standard epidemiological methods to show that the deaths from COVID-19 pneumonia during the critical first few months of the pandemic were restricted almost entirely to Wuhan, and in agreement with other figures, amounted to roughly 5,000 excess deaths.
You may choose to believe that this entire paper (and many other excellent pieces of work from China on SARS-CoV-2 such as the sequence of the virus) is a fiction; as a scientist, I do not.
I notice people are quoting the Chinese official covid figures. We should note that most people never believe any official statistics published by the Chinese for the simple reason that the agenda is to create the impression that all is rosy in the garden. Especiall as China has chosen to be offended by suggestions that it originated there.
I was not quoting “the Chinese official covid figures” alone. As a molecular geneticist with an interest in this field, I also examine the scientific literature. Please see my response to the previous comment where I quote a refereed paper from the British Medical Journal. This paper is open access (like almost all COVID papers) and is easily located by searching its title. I recommend reading it.
I don’t think China “has chosen to be offended by suggestions that it originated there.” It is much more the case that China has been offended by the baseless suggestion that some sort of “lab leak,” possibly even deliberate, of a possibly even deliberately engineered Coronavirus designed specifically to attack humans occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This shape-shifting family of conspiracy theories, promulgated extensively by right-wing US media, was always a fringe endeavour. It has been dealt a succession of further blows by publications this year in top journals. Australia’s very own Professor Eddie Holmes from Sydney has played a key role in some of these papers. I’m happy to supply details of these papers if you want them.