Thread by @troyhunt

COVID in Australia: I’ve had a bunch of people from other parts of the world ask if we’re ok or in some cases, make derogatory comments from afar. Here’s what’s happening and what it’s actually like on the ground:

Geography first: we’re on a sparsely populated island in the middle of nowhere with a handful of major cities. Half as big again as Europe and almost the size of continental USA, but with only 25M people.

International border control is much easier than most of the world so for the most part, we locked the virus out and didn’t spread it too far when it hit. There were still outbreaks, but contained to various extents until more recently.

Part of that containment has been due to locking down in either local government areas or entire states, often creating a “hard border closure” with limited exemptions to travel across it. This has led to very different circumstances in different states.

For example, this is “Australia” last week; we were at a party on the beach with thousands of people and not a single mask, because there’s not a single active case of COVID in the Northern Territory:

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1433700341380308993/

In our own state of Queensland, life is almost 100% normal. Restaurants and bars are open, kids are in school as normal, everything is open and the only time we’re reminded of COVID is either checking into a venue or wearing a mask in public indoor spaces qld.gov.au/health/conditi…

We’ve had a good run of it here; since the start of the pandemic in a state of 5.2M people, there have been only 13 people hospitalised and 7 deaths (only 1 since April last year). covidlive.com.au/qld

But because we’ve had it so good here and earlier, so good in the rest of Australia, we’ve been slow to roll out vaccines. The above link shows only 36% of QLD presently double-jabbed and at the current rate, it’ll be December before we hit 80% for the state.

Which brings us to the southern states, New South Wales in particular and to a lesser extent, Victoria. Let’s just look at the numbers and in particular, what started happening in NSW at the start of June (which is also our winter): covidlive.com.au/report/daily-c…

It’s steadily gotten worse and worse in those states and increasingly harsh lockdowns haven’t brought it under control. It’s a tough time for people there as they go through what much of the rest of the world did earlier on in the pandemic.

It’s particularly hard for people who have jobs impacted, are home schooling or are stuck in confined locations with little freedom to get out of the house or apartment. It’s also hard on the border; this pic is 30km from me now, dividing a town:

There are some sparsely populated protests and threats of truckies “shutting down the country”, but nothing to the extent some friends are telling me they hear overseas. Take a look at a local Sydney paper and it’s a mixed bag of good and bad COVID news: smh.com.au

I talk to friends in those states a lot and whilst it sucks to varying extents, everyone just gets on with life. And again, it’s no different to what’s happened in other parts of the world except for it being now instead of 12 months ago.

Vaccine rollout is pushing *hard* and NSW is now at 43% double and 76% single. They’ll hit 80% double at the end of next month and 70% in 6 weeks. These are the rates at which the gov has indicated easing of restrictions so they’re key numbers… and they’re very close.

International commentary feels a lot like bush fires and shark attacks. South Australia will be burning and friends will contact me: “yeah, that’s 2,000km away”. Sharks? Front page news in Norway, but there’s only been 237 fatal attacks… since 1791 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_att…

Some final COVID perspective and I’ll pick Norway as a comparison given it’s @charlottelyng’s home and we’re pretty in tune with what’s going on there. Since day 1 of the pandemic there have been 171k cases there and 826 deaths in a country of 5M people: worldometers.info/coronavirus/co…

Aus wide - including the uptick since June - in a country with 5 times the population of Norway we’ve had just over a third as many cases (66k) and 28% more deaths (1,060). This isn’t a competition, but that perspective is often missing.

Chuck the numbers onto a chart with other parts of the world as well and you realise we’ve had a *very* good run of it: ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-…

In summary, the situation is hard on 2 states in particular but life is normal in many other parts of the country. Those states are doing it tough, but they’ve fared exceptionally well on the global scale and vaccine rates mean we’re getting very close to easing the lockdown.