Thread by @RageSheen

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1

#auspol #COVID19Aus

Australia (and the world) will never escape this pandemic until we abandon our root strategy, to 'minimise severe disease'. That's a hospital management strategy, or as I call it, a public disease (rather than public health) strategy. /2

It directly causes the infection of the entire population, over and over. It makes the public sick, potentially permanently. A total collapse and failure of public health responsibilities, we don't manage any other infectious disease in this way,.../3

...and trying to do it with a novel pathogen is bananas. It's the politics of the 'Economy' parading as public health. The root strategy has to change to what it is for most other infectious disease - to PREVENT INFECTION. /4

Not, as the journos suggested, to go down the idiot UK path of relaxing isolation requirements or removing them entirely, that only accelerates and magnifies all the problems we're wallowing in. We have to stop people catching Covid, whether mild or moderate or severe. /5

We won't stop all of it, the infinite Covid crowd always raise that straw man. We just need to control spread, as we do for all other infectious disease. Jump on outbreaks, minimise spread through the community. We have public health teams and engineers who know how to do it. /6

Without 'locking down' everybody, more infinite Covid straw man logic. Though a very brutal, reasonably short national lockdown might be the circuit-breaker that would give disease control a lower baseline to start with, but I doubt there's an appetite for it. /7

Critically, this isn't a choice of A or B. If we don't stop infections, the 'Economy' is toast. Infections are orders of magnitude more damaging to the Economy than hospitalisations and deaths. If you work just about anywhere right now, you're living it . It can't go on. /8

The only way to stop the drain on the Treasury (all politicians enslaved to Economy politics care about) is to stop mass infection. That Economy is just us, the people. Infected, we can't work, and there goes the Economy. How hard is that to understand? /9

There are also no 'waves' of Covid, a wave is just the outcome of all the non-wave idiot times of pretending to 'live with Covid', which is really just months of mass, saturation infection, priming the Covid pump. /10

Until we change the root national strategy to a public health strategy, of preventing people getting sick, preventing infection, none of this will change. Not doing that is already overloading hospitals, so the current strategy doesn't work anyway. /end