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Australia Medicine

Can New Zealand and Australia Eliminate All Coronavirus Infections? (nytimes.com) 300

Posted by EditorDavid from the great-barriers dept.
"What Australia and New Zealand have already accomplished is a remarkable cause for hope," reports the New York Times, in an inspiring article shared by Slashdot reader tflf (also republished here and here): The results are undeniable: Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve. Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,670 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world. New Zealand's own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million...

It all started with scientists. In Australia, as soon as China released the genetic code for the coronavirus in early January, pathologists in public health laboratories started sharing plans for tests. In every state and territory, they jumped ahead of politicians. "It meant we could have a test up and running quickly that was reasonably comparable everywhere," Dr. Collignon said. The government then opened the budgetary floodgates to support suffering workersâ¦

Both nations are now reporting just a handful of new infections each day, down from hundreds in March, and they are converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations.
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Can New Zealand and Australia Eliminate All Coronavirus Infections? More

Can New Zealand and Australia Eliminate All Coronavirus Infections?

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  • This is how (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:43PM (#59994532)

    Civilised people with competent leaders deal with pandemics, the opposite of the United Stars of a Retardistan. It helps having an educated population that have self discipline.

    • Re:This is how (Score:5, Informative)

      by mikaere ( 748605 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:49PM (#59994556)
      I am a kiwi and it is interesting how our respective lockdowns were enforced. In Australia the police can fine you AUD1334 for breaching the conditions. In New Zealand you get warnings, and you don't listen to the police they arrest you and put you before the court, who have been happy to put these idiots in prison.

      • Yeah thats mainly Victoria where the police were hanging out for an excuse to pull people over for whatever reason.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          AKA situation normal. Wasn't it Vic police ticketing people for using their phones for payment in drive-through take-aways?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by redback ( 15527 )

            yeah, counts as using phone while driving.

            still a dick move though.

          • Yeah the victorian cops are notorious dickheads.

            I *think* it was those guys that arrested those two poor guys (who where housemates) who had driven to buy a pizza because buying a pizza was "non essential". Nobody was entirely clear what part of "going to buy food" counts as non-essential.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dwywit ( 1109409 )

              Which state's police was it issued a ticket to a 17-year-old learner driver (then withdrew it)?

              Learning to drive = education not possible to do at home. Seems pretty simple to me.

      • "A Kiwi" is a New Zealand citizen. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @09:18PM (#59994660) Homepage
        "I am a kiwi..." New Zealand citizens often call themselves Kiwi [wikipedia.org].

      • That's one more person in a Petri dish who will come out infected to spread COVID-19 further.

        In my state one prison puts three men in a 6 by 8 cell. There's no such thing as six foot social distancing in a prison.

        Punishing people with house arrest would make more sense.

      • Here in America we do this [youtu.be].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        The police don't fine you, they give you a ticket, alleging that you've broken the law somehow.

        You can either "plead guilty" by paying the fine, or you can elect to go to court about it - where the magistrate will convict (and fine) you, or acquit you.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        The police's first arrest was for some jackass who went out partying, and claimed he didn't know about the lockdown. That worked the first time he was pulled over, but doing the same the second night in a row put him in the "Please make an example of me, everyone in the country hates me" category.

    • Re:This is how (Score:5, Funny)

      by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @09:00PM (#59994604)

      We (in New Zealand) have been successful because we have been using stronger disinfectants and brighter UV lights than the the US president has access to. What's more, we've been keeping our super antibiotic, you know, the one that kills viruses, a secret for all these years but now we're finding it very useful.

      If only Trump knew what we were doing he'd be able to tell the world that *HE* was right all along! :D

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )

        Don't forget the chloroquine in the tap water.

      • A hotter environment may help.

        • Like Singapore?

          No.

        • New Zealand is many things.

          Alas, "hotter" is not one of them.

      • It's the ozone hole, duh!

  • Eliminate Definition (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrsAliceBeeblebrox ( 6778708 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:49PM (#59994552)

    I've no idea why we are using the word eliminate when people are still going to get ill.
    Eliminate is going to confuse people.. "wait we've eliminated COVID-19... why are we still practicing social distancing???"

    It's meant to be used the context of a the COVID-19 "medical elimination strategy"....
    But yay we're out tomorrow it's going to be the takeaway RUGBY WORLD CUP :) - NZ loves takeaways.

    Dictionary definition:
    Completely remove or get rid of (something).

    Ministry of health definition:
    We must identify and manage cases and contacts early, and be aggressive with the management of clusters.

    https://www.nzma.org.nz/journa... [nzma.org.nz]
    https://www.health.govt.nz/our... [health.govt.nz]

    Posting from New Zealand :)

    • Good on ya mate. I have been planning the take aways for a few days now. only 10 hours to go. :) Proud to be a NZer!

    • She just redefined 'Eliminate' as 'Zero tolerance for cases..' - nice postmodern solution..

      For the inevitable naysayers: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/121206976/prime-minister-needs-to-be-held-to-account-over-coronavirus-claims
      'However, during Monday's announcement about the move to alert level three, the prime minister said that we had "taken a quantum leap forward in our goal to eliminate the virus", but "elimination doesn't mean zero cases, it means zero tolerance for cases". What? E

  • Thanks due to (Score:5, Informative)

    by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:49PM (#59994554)

    Moderately competent leadership (highly-competent in NZ), generally suspending partisan politics for the greater good, a well-funded health system, and populations who mostly understand that temporary suspensions of some civil liberties are necessary to protect everyone, not just the vulnerable.

    But hey, freedums, amirite?

    For those interested, here's the movement restrictions directive for my state. As you can see, it's not draconian.

    https://www.health.qld.gov.au/... [qld.gov.au]

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Without a vaccine (Score:3)

    by Tangential ( 266113 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:49PM (#59994560) Homepage
    This rapid squashing of the virus implies that most of their population won’t be exposed to it (and hence won’t develop any immunity.) What are the health implications of that for either their citizens that travel abroad or for foreign visitors to their countries?

    • Re:Without a vaccine (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:52PM (#59994568)

      The rapid squashing means:

      1. healthcare/hospitals won't be overwhelmed
      2. breathing space to produce a vaccine

      I've accepted that sooner or later, I'll be exposed to the virus and get the disease, mild or severe. I'm glad that there'll be a hospital bed in case I need one.

      • 2. breathing space to produce a vaccine

        Yeah, the word from medical scientists is, there may not ever be a vaccine, because of the way this virus infects the body. An anti viral drug treatment may come first.

        • Yeah, the word from medical scientists is, there may not ever be a vaccine

          Source?

          • It was posted on reddit by a medical scientist.

            Basically there is no vaccine for any corona virus. The virus primarily infects epithelial tissue which gets very little blood supply and attention from the immune system. Once you get a cold, it can come right back. Its a different coronavirus.

            If the immune system won't keep the virus out, then boosting the immune system with a vaccine may never help.

            • Re:Without a vaccine (Score:5, Informative)

              by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @09:55PM (#59994792)

              Basically there is no vaccine for any corona virus.

              That's not true. There's an effective vaccine for bovine coronavirus ( https://www.merck-animal-healt... [merck-anim...th-usa.com] ).

            • So I guess the vaccines currently in human trials in the UK and elsewhere are all fake?

            • It was posted on reddit by a medical scientist.

              Here's a better source. [nymag.com]

              We Might Never Get a Good Coronavirus Vaccine

              Hopes for a return to normal life after the coronavirus hinge on the development of a vaccine. But there’s no guarantee, experts say, that a fully effective COVID-19 vaccine is possible.

              That may seem counterintuitive. So many brutal viral diseases have been conquered by vaccination — smallpox, polio, mumps — that the technique seems all but infallible. But not all viral diseases are equally amenable to vaccination. “Some viruses are very easy to make a vaccine for, and some are very complicated,” says Adolfo García-Sastre, director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “It depends on the specific characteristics of how the virus infects.”

              Unfortunately, it seems that COVID-19 is on the difficult end of the scale.

            • Re:Without a vaccine (Score:4, Informative)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Monday April 27, 2020 @12:53AM (#59995244) Homepage Journal

              It was posted on reddit by a medical scientist.

              Basically there is no vaccine for any corona virus. The virus primarily infects epithelial tissue which gets very little blood supply and attention from the immune system. Once you get a cold, it can come right back. Its a different coronavirus.

              If the immune system won't keep the virus out, then boosting the immune system with a vaccine may never help.

              Wait... isn't one of the major purposes of epithelial cells the activation of the adaptive immune system? *blinks*

              Here's what we know: People produce antibodies in response to this coronavirus strain, which means the adaptive immune system does kick in at some point. It would be kind of surprising if that didn't result in, at a minimum, immunity to the worst of the effects for as long as you have those antibodies.

              The biggest reason you don't get immunity to colds is that most of them (about three-quarters) come from rhinoviruses, not coronaviruses. COVID-19, like most of the (relatively huge) coronaviruses, has significant machinery dedicated to repairing transcription errors, mutating at a rate of only 10^-6 substitutions per nucleotide site per cell infection [arxiv.org]. That makes coronaviruses one of the slowest RNA viruses mutation-wise, at a comparable level of mutation to the fastest DNA viruses. Rhinoviruses, by contrast, depending on what numbers you believe, mutate one or two orders of magnitude faster.

              At about 24 mutations per year (COVID-19), there's a chance of somewhat lasting immunity. Flu mutates twice as fast, and there's evidence that people have partial immunity to flu strains many years after exposure (possibly decades after, even), because most of the antibodies end up targeting parts of the virus that don't change often.

              With rhinoviruses mutating 100x that fast, there's no prayer of any real immunity. They just change too much, too quickly. As a result, there are well over a hundred strains of rhinovirus, each of which looks different to the immune system (about 160 as of 2007 [theguardian.com]).

              And yet even with rhinoviruses, there is still some adaptive immunity [biomedcentral.com]. Once you have gotten a strain, you tend not to get that strain again for a while. But with triple-digit strains, you could get colds two or three times per year and not get all of them in a lifetime.

              Given the rate of decline in antibodies seen in MERS and SARS, odds are, people who get this virus will have at least partial immunity for a year or two, though possibly not enough to completely avoid getting sick. At least with SARS (or was it MERS?), what I've read suggests that the speed at which the adaptive immune system kicks in has a big impact on survival rate, so even if antibodies don't completely keep you from getting sick, the resulting immunity is still nothing to sneeze at. :-)

      • You don't understand. Squashing it as well as Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea have done means that if the virus should be re-introduced, it'll be practically the same as a new outbreak because only a tiny fraction of the population is immune. It doesn't guarantee that subsequent waves will be knocked down just as quickly as the first time. The hospitals there could still be overwhelmed in subsequent waves. In fact the better your first response, the harder it will be to fight off these later wave

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Easy, we’re not idiotic enough to travel overseas in the current environment, and anybody returning from or visiting overseas goes into quarantine for 14 days when they arrive. We will just wait for a vaccine, meanwhile our economy will restart easily due to the financial support given by the govts that has kept businesses viable, and supported workers.
      When you’re not a poorly educated rabble, it really helps.

    • Yeah it means we are going to be cut off from the rest of the world for a long time. I can see us opening the border with NZ soon, then possibly Taiwan and South Korea.

    • Health implications are a health system that isn't overwelmed and collapsing, the ability to start up the local economy (at least somewhat) while maintaining some social distancing. Yes international travel will be a problem until vaccines are out of human trials but international travel was realistically months away anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      Citizens that travel abroad and foreign visitors alike are subject to a 14 day quarantine on arrival. This is likely to continue until a vaccine is available and widely administered, or the rest of the world has eliminated the virus, whether through similar measures or reaching herd immunity levels.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 )
      There's still no current evidence that you develop an immunity of any kind to COVID-19, therefore needlessly exposing your population to it means the potential for unnecessary deaths. Without something that provides at least a few months immunity (whether through recovery or a vaccine) ANY exposure - especially for those that are susceptible to succumbing to this virus - should be prevented.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        If people are developing antibodies (and recovering) , it's reasonable to expect a more robust immune response when re-exposed at a later stage. Maybe not forever, but for a few months at least.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skegg ( 666571 )

      You make valid points.

      But imagine the alternative: carrying-on as normal and allowing the virus to rapidly spread throughout society. The (number of deaths) / (infections) would be massive. Australia's Covid-19 mortality is about 1%. Some other countries are at 10 or even 15%.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fintux ( 798480 )

      In New York City, when antibodies were tested, it was found out that about 21% people have had the disease. At the time, there were over 20,000 deaths in NYC. So also in NYC - the most affected region in the US - most of the population hasn't been exposed to the virus. It's quite easy also to do the math of how many deaths the herd immunity will require (as it requires at least 60% of people being immune, perhaps even more).

      Additionally, we don't know almost anything about the immunity development against t

  • We have a better idea in the US (Score:5, Funny)

    by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:56PM (#59994580)
    Who needs science? Just shoot up a couple cc's of Lysol.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      As Winston Churchill (allegedly) said, America can always be counted on doing the right thing.... after exhausting every other possibility.

  • The reasons for this success. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GimpOnTheGo ( 6567570 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @09:11PM (#59994650)

    1: Educated and (mostly) sensible population who understand what needs to be done.
    2: Politicians with enough sense to listen to the medical experts and get out of the way.
    3: Closing borders and instituting quarantine periods on any arrivals.
    4: Highest levels of per capita testing in the world.
    5: Aggressive contact tracing to ring fence new outbreaks.
    6: Strong public healthcare systems and support mechanisms.
    7: Strong worker protections, so they're not forced into working with possibly sick people.
    8: Government and opposition parties attacking this issue unilaterally and not each other.
    9: Nationwide attitude of "We're all in this together, help each other".
    10: AUS and NZ don't have a borderline retarded Head of State (although Adern isn't far off).

    Most of the AU cases trace back to overseas infections, and some cruise ships. Actual community infections are very low.

    Being islands also helps a lot with 3 and 5.

  • The warm months are ending in that hemisphere. Singapore did a good job against the virus too. For a while.

    Since they are both island nations, New Zealand might be able to do as well as Taiwan.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      The warm months are ending in that hemisphere. Singapore did a good job against the virus too. For a while.

      There were very little indication that warmer temperature had any significant effect on Covid-19's spreading.

      Singapore's number [worldometers.info] shot up because the infection reached the crowded living areas of foreign labors, there was a special on BBC a few days ago about that, and it shown people living 8-10 people in a room there. There was no possibility of distancing, and the virus spread within that community as fast as any country without quarantine.

      India [worldometers.info], another place with high temperatures, also had rapid growth

  • Australia did trace and track early on, and our Prime Minister Scott Morrison got all of the state Premiers together (many from opposing parties) to create a coordinated national response with the Chief Medical Officers advice being closely followed.
    This meant most of our cases came from China/USA/Italy, but very few got out into the community.

    I created this graph to show how COVID cases have been tracking on a daily basis. based on data from ourworldindata.org
    https://imgur.com/G1SztUj [imgur.com]

  • No

  • Nice to put away the partisan BS for a while (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adfraggs ( 4718383 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @10:46PM (#59994950)

    This government is about as nailed-on conservative as you would have gotten in Australia, elected with a clear mandate, lower taxes, no clear "green" agenda, a record of hard border controls, tight fiscal policy etc etc. I'm not a nailed on "lefty" but I didn't vote for these guys and didn't want them running the country. But Scomo has stepped up and dammit they've done a good bloody job with COVID 19. I don't hate his squirmy smiling face anymore. I see him on the telly every now and then and think to myself "Bloody hell Scomo mate you're not all that bad after all". I like that feeling. I like not hating my government, trusting that it's doing the right thing, trusting that it is making good decisions. I like not thinking that the bloke in charge is a complete and utter tool. The economy is suffering but you know that as fiscal conservatives they will get it back ASAP. They're dishing out welfare all over the place and sure, getting some of it a bit wrong, but in a heartbeat they have put aside all of the typical low-tax-no-welfare dogma and are doing what needs to be done. They're hard where they need to be hard and understand where that is required too. I am just all-round massively impressed and genuinely proud of what this country has done.

    And no, we're not idiots either. We don't think this is "over" or "done". We don't think the virus is gone, because it's not gone. We don't think it's all going to be shiny and happy and easy. But what we do have are choices. We went hard, got it under control, made serious sacrifices and now we can actually decide what to do. Do we let it spread? How fast do we let it spread? Can the hospitals handle it? What do we do about international travellers? What about the economy? These are all valid questions, but the difference between us and some parts of the world is that we get an actual CHOICE in how we answer them. For, at this stage of things, that's about the best you could ask for.

    • What made the difference in Australia at least, is a national health system and an early approach on a national level.
      A national health system means centralised coordination for health resources. none of this silly states bidding against each other for resources.
      Also, very early on, a "national cabinet" was convened which consisted of the Prime minister and the state premiers. They coordinated policies across the whole country which were then implemented in each jurisdiction. There was none of this "we do o

  • So, then nobody in Aus/NZ will be immune, nobody can travel anywhere and one single infected bat flying there can cause it all over again.

  • Australia is an island? Guess my grade school was wrong; they called it a continent.

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