France has roughly twice the size of Australia 60m and got 30 000 deaths so far
Do you mean that Sweden with 10 millions did as well as France with a lockdown pretty severe by any standard?
So shutdown and 30k deads for 60 millions matching the Swedish experience with school open all along and no lockdown except aged care
How do you reconcile this with your belief.it is a belief.@Smurf1976 with all the respect i have for you.
I'm saying that 30K deaths in France or circa 150K deaths in the USA, or comparable results anywhere else, is not a good outcome period. How it was achieved or that it could have been worse does not change that - it's a bad outcome as such.
If that number of people were killed due to any sort of industrial accident, natural disaster, plane crashes, terrorism etc then neither the political Right nor the Left would stand for it. Everyone from Donald Trump to the Greens would be demanding action.
I won't claim to know all the facts on this, that finding unbiased information is so difficult is my largest concern in fact, but I'm yet to see a convincing explanation as to what prevents the USA situation, a disaster by any measure, occurring elsewhere other than the actions being taken with lockdowns and so on?
If Australia adopted the "let it rip" approach, then what ensures we don't end up with statistics comparable to the situation in the US?
My other concern is a strong suspicion that the loudest screams are coming from those who, to borrow from one of Warren Buffet's well known quotes, have been caught swimming naked. There probably are businesses who took risks which were always in the "gambling" category and who've now come unstuck. So be it - capitalism has a solution for that.
If I were confident that the medical facts were being correctly communicated, in full, to the public and I were confident that poor business management wouldn't be covered up at the expense of human lives then I may well have a different view of it all.
I certainly don't claim to know the truth but what I do know is that the USA situation, as per their own official statistics, is not something Australia should contemplate following and likewise any other country with similar results. So back to the point - apart from lockdowns, what's stopping the US scenario unfolding in Australia?
There's also the question of how many end up with brain damage, lung damage or whatever? What are the odds? Without even being able to put a reasonable estimate on it, it would be pure madness to subject the majority of the population to an unquantified hazard. That's gambling.
Now if someone can put some proper figures on it which show what the outcomes would actually be and that we won't see a US-style failure, we won't see "brain fog" or whatever actually happening, then it becomes possible to make informed decisions based on accurate figures.
If new data emerges which shows it can be done then my mind is certainly open. It's not a fixed position, just a cautious one given what's going on overseas. Conducting an experiment on the entire population with unknown consequences and no known means of reversal is not at all smart.
There's also a point that it isn't all bad. Prior to COVID-19 there were plenty of people commenting about "kicking the can" economically and pointing to the problems of over-reliance on China, service industries and so on. If this pandemic forces a resurgence of local manufacturing then that's a good thing not a bad thing for the future. It's not as though certain other countries are likely to stop cheating on wages after all, so we're never going to have that mythical "level playing field" on which to compete so no point pretending otherwise.
It's a very brutal way of doing it but we've now got a recession and the economic system does need one of those periodically to flush out the dud ideas and to refocus the mind of governments and business leaders who otherwise tend to become rather lazy and unfocused.