EDIT: I'm very confused as to why the confusion over AUS/NZ border.

AUS is on target to eradicate it like NZ, even if they can't as confidently say they have as high chance of succeeding.

If they succeed, great, we reopen.

If they don't, we don't.

It's all contingent on how the future plays out.

NZ's tourism will recover much faster by closing our borders & eradicating it since domestic tourism is half of the tourism industry.

If we opened up borders like impacted countries might with each other, then their tourism will not recover to pre-covid levels because again - travel insurance usually doesn't cover pandemics.

I'm 100% sure our tourism will have a much higher bounce from having freely moving domestic citizens not afraid of getting covid-19, than if we were under social distancing measures with open borders as an impacted country.

Yes, I�m looking at known cases. And testing numbers and percentages testing results. Atm NSW, the example you used, is testing 3000-5000 per day and getting 10-15 positives. Your assertion that the cases in NSW are much higher because of a seriology study in a different country with much less testing while ignoring the actual testing results in the state your talking about doesn�t stand up to any semblance of intellectual rigour. There is certainly be some community spread in NSW and there will certainly be some cases not discovered but with a testing rate of over 19000/mill (one of the highest in the world) and a positive rate over the last week of less than 0.1% it certainly isn�t extensive.

I cannot see many people spending the first days of there holiday under quarantine. Same goes for a business trip. 2021 before anything returns in my view.

I cannot see many people spending the first days of there holiday under quarantine. Same goes for a business trip. 2021 before anything returns in my view.

It's useful to look at the IHME models that the health organizations and governments are using. Here is the US, but you can view other countries as well. https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

The number of deaths get quite small as we get closer to summer. The following update from yesterday (April 17) is a really good read if you are interested: COVID-19 estimation updates | Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

We are now using estimates from our COVID-19 death models and estimates of infection fatality ratio (IFR) to produce estimates of COVID-19 incidence and prevalence. We then use these estimates to identify the date after which the number of COVID-19 infections is predicted to fall below 1 per 1,000,000 people in each location. This date can be viewed as the earliest time that locations could consider easing social distancing restrictions – conditional on containment measures already in place to avert potential resurgence of the virus. Such necessary containment efforts include extensive testing, robust contact tracing and isolation of new cases, and maintaining restrictions on mass gatherings of people.

We have chosen this threshold – 1 prevalent COVID-19 infection per 1,000,000 population – to represent a conservative estimate of the number of infections each location could reasonably try to identify via active case detection and contact tracing in order to prevent COVID-19 resurgence.

They then show rough dates for each state when this would occur. Mid May for California, first of June for Texas and New York.

This is the most interesting philosophical, ethical, political, religious, public policy debate, how any incremental deaths is acceptable to begin to relax. Unlike flu, car accidents, obesity, smoking etc. etc we've baked that risk into the general mindset as "acceptable" risk/cost for the convenience and living a "life" This pandemic mixes a lot of things, everyone and group has a opinion.

TO keep things restricted absolutely saves a few more lives while impacting so many more, what is that tradeoff?

That trade-off is different for everyone - I expressed an opinion on Facebook of all places that we were going to have to open up again (in the UK) at some point relatively soon and allow this to become an acceptable risk, much like flu and I was met with a lot of reactionary vitriol.

The general public seem to think that money and the economy doesn't matter and we could survive a global depression to save a few thousand lives. Every life lost is a tragedy, but how many would lose theirs in the midst of a depression....

The difficulty is of course defining that point. There will be a lot of reactionary anger if and when things are relaxed and a second spike on cases occurs. This global stoppage can't go on forever, and can't happen every few months. No matter what Joe Public thinks

Very interesting thanks for posting, does depend on more mass testing and contact tracing though to be successful by 1 June. The NHSX contact tracing app needs to be rolled out in the UK soon.

I'm fully with you. And I have noticed the same thing. Anytime I have suggested anything along these lines, I've pretty much had reactions as if I had supported murder or something.

I also agree with you and lives will also be dangerously affected by ongoing shutdown of economies but have also been shouted down on other forums. I know it's a hard decision for a government as there will always be an opposing view.

Assume y'all are happy to potentially lay down your own lives and those of friends and family so?

+1. The herd mentality has become very scary to me we need to have educated discussions rather than shaming and counter reactions like what is happening in Michigan right now. Tumultuous times, things could go off the rails fast.

My point to those with the vitriol is where were you last year? Masses advocating spending billions/trillions to save the lives of thousands of elderly with a few years/months to live. I didn't hear you advocating spending billions/trillions to save millions of lives of children and young people in the 3rd world? Do their lives not matter? Edit: Perhaps this is hypocritical of myself and this is itself too reactionary/inflammatory, but we do need to be able to get through to people that there is more than one perspective on the situation somehow.

Something I find ridiculous is this idea that oh, if we just open the doors and stop social distancing and let the virus filter through society and kill "the old and vulnerable" (why are ya'll getting so mad? Don't you see? You aren't in the old and vulnerable group so why are you so afraid?! So much fear! You have no empathy for the poor Africans dying of hunger! Why do you care about your older parents and friends recovering from cancer! Gosh! Hypocritical much?) that the economy would just restart.

Yeah, no. People aren't just going to return to their normal lives when a virus like this is wrecking havock. Past history and even Swedens economy has shown that actually, people don't just return to normal, because they don't want to put their friends and family's lives that do fall into that group at risk, and economies suffer REGARDLESS.

The question is, do you suffer with a huge loss of life, or do you suffer with less lives lost.

EDIT: Just to add to the ridiculous argument of "why don't ya'll care about the third world" just imagine if the first world countries didn't GAF about this virus and kept flying around the world and spreading it on their luxury vacations in poor countries. It would very much spread to THOSE countries, and kill people in much greater numbers that what we can even imagine as they aren't rich. So if you want to do the responsible thing for third world countries, stop flying and stay home.

It very much has spread to the third world.

The rest I defer as I am afraid we have strayed far off topic for this forum

The mere fact that COVID-19 exists created a shock where no matter what people/governments do, death rates will be higher this year than years past and real GDPs will get smaller. The question is how the impact of various policies would compare to each other in supporting people - it's not appropriate to compare against past years' health or economic statistics, since we can't achieve those baselines.

The truthful answer is we don't really know how various policies would play out - the decision to shut everything down is informed by a fairly easy to quantify metric (how many people were infected/died because of this disease), while disadvantages of this policy are harder to quantify (second and third-order impacts like how will it impact unemployment, substance abuse rates, crime rates, divorce rates, suicide rates, domestic violence rates, health impacts of delayed elective/preventative medical procedures, negative impacts on student learning/achievement, medium-term impacts on industrial organization and monopolization/the loss of small business, marginalization of lower-socioeconomic classes (and people in less developed countries), broader impacts of quality of life for the non-infected, etc.).

A well informed discussion about what policies to adopt would include analysis of all of these types of factors - the fact that the only statistics most governments seem to be focused on is infection rates is reminiscent of watching young children play soccer - i.e. everyone running after the ball. Perhaps the right policy decisions for society are being made, but it's understandable that discontent is going to be widespread with people who are acutely witnessing/experiencing second and third order impacts of the policies with no end date in sight. The unfortunate reality of the situation is if these policies continue in the medium term, they will likely result in social unrest which may be more harmful than the virus itself.