Shame Australia and other places around the world have had no success with lockdowns. It might give a way forward for the rest of the grown up world .
you open back up and people start to congregate together in
The places that had success using a lockdown to reduce community spread to a manageable number and then continued to have success controlling spread all replaced the lockdown with new measures of containment instead of the lockdown once community spread was low enough.
There's no sense arguing with anyone on this thread that a lockdown cannot work as a full solution, none of them think it does. The only ones with this perspective are those arguing lockdowns don't work for anything.
It's a broad based indirect tactic to disrupt all interactions and get community spread down to a manageable level where other tactics can replace it. That's a HUGE key point in opening back up, other tactics of infection tracking, namely rapid testing and contact tracing to isolate infections and contacts faster than the virus can spread.
Locking down and then opening without implementing other measures once community spread is understood is a disaster. It negates all the value of the prior lockdown. That's where we've failed as a country. All the more so in areas that had low community spread and didn't need to lockdown. They could have implemented the other measures without ever locking down first, and they didn't.
TB is endemic in many parts of the world, but not the US. There's a TB vaccine, but practically nobody in the US gets the vaccine. Yet, somehow when someone tests positive for TB in the US, usually after being overseas, there's a plan and infrastructure that kicks in to isolate, contact trace, rapid test contacts, repeat faster than it can spread and become widespread. Even this has been underfunded in recent years but it's still getting the job done well enough.
