Lockdown!

[Bruce Stephens]

The 800+ deaths is actually a very small number and that will be balanced to a very large degree by cancer patients etc who die because of covid restrictions. It's a numbers game in the end. People will die regardless of the approach taken.

Have you looked at excess mortality figures? (I don't know that Australia is available, but New Zealand looks pretty good, overall.)

 

[pm133]

Have you looked at excess mortality figures? (I don't know that Australia is available, but New Zealand looks pretty good, overall.)

The pandemic is not over yet though. Not by a long shot.

Has New Zealand fully opened its international borders yet and removed all restrictions? I don't actually know but until such time as they do that and get through at least a year with cases under control it's probably too early to be drawing conclusions like that I think.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Has New Zealand fully opened its international borders yet and removed all restrictions?

Definitely no to the international borders (and presumably that's why we don't seem to have considered adopting that approach), but the internal restrictions have been more or less lifted now, I think. I suspect someone with suspected cancer (say) would have an easier time in NZ than in the UK since things there are more or less back to normal (with no healthcare staff isolating themselves because of coronavirus).

And yes, there's certainly a question about how sustainable such isolation might be. (Presumably our government decided they couldn't consider it.)

 

[Eddy Edson]

The 800+ deaths is actually a very small number and that will be balanced to a very large degree by cancer patients etc who die because of covid restrictions. It's a numbers game in the end. People will die regardless of the approach taken.

The main reason for excess non-COVID deaths is lots & lots of virus in the community, stressing health systems, taking HCW's out of action & making people unwilling to seek care. It's not lockdowns. If you have zero/very low levels of virus, there are no or negligible excess deaths. In Oz and NZ, closing the borders has meant also no flu, so there's actually been negative excess deaths vs the long term average.

Fig. 2: Posterior distribution of excess deaths from any cause per 100,000 people from mid-February to the end of May 2020 and posterior distribution of each country’s rank. | Nature Medicine

www.nature.com

Short targeted lockdowns, implemented early before community spread gets out of hand, don't disturb that picture; health systems function normally, efforts are made to ensure continuity of normal care. The 800+ COVID deaths in Vic over a few months will have disturbed it a bit, probably, but because it happened in the midddle of the local flu season, which this year didn't happen, the effect will no doubt have been small vs the long term average for total deaths.

800+ deaths in Vic is 90%+ of the total COVID mortality for Oz. Per capita it's equivalent to ~8,000+ in the UK. That may seem small but I think that's more due to getting de-sensitised to the situation.