I think Australia proves that it is impossible to get rid of COVID through mitigation, testing and contact tracing. The only thing those measures do is "flatten the curve" and slow the pandemic. The only thing that will ever get rid of COVID is herd immunity gained through vaccination, natural infection or a combination of the two.
Sure. But apparently you can't just "lock down for a couple of months" and beat this thing.
That's always been true, since day 1. The entire point of those items was to buy time. Not to reach an end goal but to buy time to get a better solution. It's always been about buying time until vaccination was available and then enough people were vaccinated. With no vaccine, it would have been about getting early warning and response processes in place to tamp down outbreaks as fast as possible locally.
We've been making the same mistake since day 1 too, thinking that the first step was enough and we could just end it without the second steps. As evidence, we have no early warning and response process at all. Of course, we never got cases low enough for that to work anyway. Other than the vaccine, we didn't do anything else with the time we were buying. It was mostly just wasted time delaying. We did manage to flatten enough to avoid complete healthcare system failure, so that was nice.
That's kind of my point. Locking down for a couple months, weeks or whatever would not have stopped this for us.
What's the Australia vaccination rate? They can't really "open up" until they get that high enough. In their case, "open up" really means opening the boarders. Since that's how they're mitigating, working like a huge bubble with strict ingress quarantine restrictions. They're not really locking down within the bubble.
If we had gotten the cases low enough (they did), and created the early warning and response processes to find outbreaks fast and contain them while still small (they seem to have done this), and done the controls to minimize ingress of infected people (easier for them than in the US), overall cases and impacts could have been smaller. None of that works once case counts are large enough.
The US plan is clearly Vaccinate or Bust. There is no fallback plan. Unfortunately, there's currently to many people nationally choosing Bust. The good news, for some, is that it's not equally distributed. Some areas are achieving the Vaccinate goal, others are way down the Bust path. Given the choice on where to travel to, I'm avoiding the Bust areas and places people from the Bust areas tend to visit.
