I'm Australian. We did a few things Hotel quarantine for 14 days. (Free for the first 6 months of covid to get people home) But now costs anywhere from $3-5K depending on the state / territory you quarantine in. Also each state had its own temporary quarantine measures of other states if there was an outbreak there. Victoria had a big outbreak & they went into one of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Also non-Australians weren't allowed in except for special conditions (they brought lots of money into the Australian economy). And they still needed to quarantine for 14 days. It's mostly been successfully. Some quarantine failures, Ruby Princess being allowed to disembark. Has been a very disruptive year but I think most Australians would take how we did it vs the majority of the western world. We obviously had some benefits like being an island nation.
Australia more or less has a two party system and the country is currently governed by the right wing Liberal-National coalition. So all of these strict measures were implemented by the LNC (with the opposition Labor Party also backing them). That's the equivalent of the Republicans being the ones to implement strict restrictions. As a result, you don't have a situation like the US where a political party is constantly challenging restrictions. Both parties were endorsing the rules together with the LNC being the primary backer since they run the government. To me the lack of partisanship meant much higher compliance. That's a trend across countries that successfully limited the virus. Restrictions just weren't political issues in those countries so the governments there could implement very restrictive quarantine rules. You see similar things in countries like New Zealand, Taiwan etc.. Yes they're all islands but they also had very restrictive quarantines that played a huge role. I dont think the US could have ever gotten to zero cases given that it isn't an isolated island but it could've done substantially better.
Honestly, they don't need them right now and the ethical thing for them to do would be to push their vaccines to the most vulnerable countries 1st.
His wife is so hot in those pics I think I could almost be OK with here smashing the r****ded guy from The Village.
There were some protests against the rules but I think only attended by 50 or so people. Nothing substantial. Inheritly we decided on elimination as our strategy. And both parties worked towards that. Victorian lockdown had more push back. Victoria's Premier (Governor) is left wing Labor party Dan Andrews. Murdoch newspapers called him Dictator Dan. Today most people agree the lockdown was necessary. At the time Victoria & UK were getting 700 cases a day. Victoria got to zero & UK has been a disaster. The quarantine failures though have been very frustrating. Victoria's being the biggest failure, but all states apart from WA I believe have had failures. Also the border lockdowns between states has led to some sad moments. With people not able to see dying relatives etc.
We are taking Pfizer & AstraZeneca. Pfizer will be given to our elderly, health workers & at risk population. The cheaper AstraZeneca to everyone else. They started immunisations a week or so ago. Our own attempts to create a vaccine by Uni of Queensland I believe was a failure due largely to lack of patients to test on.
They stayed at home and watched the Muppets and were not offended like super dumb Americans who are offended by real comedy shows in the 80s
