Are lockdowns the best response to Covid spread? (2021)

Hi everyone, this is Armstrong with the Snapshot Channel. Today we'll be talking about the coronavirus second wave and how countries around the world are responding to it and the response from governments in different areas. Initially when coronavirus out broke from China, the communist party had a very interesting response, a very serious response, and videos were coming out of China where people were falling to the ground, but we haven't seen that anywhere else around the world. People have not been falling to the ground and people have not been dying on the street, which was some of the videos that came out of China initially. And so the communist party had a very strong lockdown response and so it led to other countries treating the first outbreak very seriously. And so it's interesting to see what the second response is as some countries like Brazil and Indonesia, India, Colombia, the UK, Australia, how they are acting towards the second outbreak of coronavirus. The UK for example are actually lifting, fully lifting restrictions on the 19th of July, although the cases are 30,000 per day. The PM Boris Johnson said the government is now allowing people to make their own informed decisions about how to manage the virus, which is a very interesting situation and it would be great to see the outcome of this. So we're going to see whether infections are going to rise, this is probably going to be the case, but what is going to be the outcome of that? They're basically treating this as a common cold, which is fine. Now let's look at Australia and how this relates to Australia. And even though the government is never actually saying this, they are basically adopting the eradication strategy or zero COVID strategy. This may be best for Australia as we are slightly isolated from the rest of the world and we can, we're not exactly next door neighbours to any nearby countries, just like New Zealand. So lockdowns are the most common strategy that governments and Australia is using at the moment. And so we have daily cases at a two-digit mark and there are lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and this is a lot less than other countries, right, but we are having some very serious lockdown measures. And so we'll, it looks like we will continue to get these measures as long as there is an outbreak or as long as there are double-digit COVID numbers. There are pros and cons to this and the pros would be that this is public health over the economy and a good economy needs to have a healthy population. So even though COVID infections are rising or they may rise in the future, is a lockdown a good idea for public health? And so there are opposing views to this. So there have been some sceptics and they have usually been shut down in terms of their opinion. Many have kept a low profile such as Gigi Forster, a University of New South Wales economist. She believes that many of the human costs of our lockdown response have been paid by the most disadvantaged in our communities and have gone unnoticed by policymakers. This includes damages to people's mental health, rise in domestic violence, loss of jobs leading to depression, etc. All of these could possibly lead to a much higher death rate than COVID. Some strong supporters of lockdown have recently shifted in their views. For example, another University of New South Wales economics professor, Richard Holden, who used to be in full support of lockdown, said to the Australian Financial Review last month, we are going to have to tolerate some non-zero COVID-19 in the community. This means slowly starting to open our borders and move away from a zero COVID policy or eradication strategy. For example, people around the world such as David Naborro from the World Health Organization has said, stop using lockdowns as a primary means of controlling the virus. Develop better systems for doing it. And he also said the only way that lockdowns are justified is to buy your time to recognise, regroup, rebalance your resources and protect your healthcare workers. Philip Lamoni, a researcher at CSPI was actually in favour of lockdowns initially. However, after doing more research found that in places like Melbourne and Australia, which adopts the zero COVID strategy, cases continue to rise for almost a month after the lockdown was put in place. What was driving the numbers down was changes in people's behaviours, not the lockdown itself, very interestingly. So when incidence of spread is high and reported through the media, people's behaviours change, which actually brings down the rate of transmission. Then as case numbers decrease, people's behaviours become more relaxed and transmission can go into a rise again, even if restrictions stay exactly the same. Also in Australia, what we've seen in some states is locking down suburbs where there have been no cases at all. For example, in recent Sydney lockdown, suburbs from Greater Sydney, which have no cases such as the Central Coast, are being locked down as well. When the reasons for lockdown is not convincing enough, people lose trust in authorities who are implementing these measures and are more likely to flaunt the restriction laws. This will certainly make it harder to convince people to follow orders next time if the area really becomes a hotspot. However, if the majority of the population is vaccinated, lockdowns may be unnecessary and so we'll see that reaction come soon as vaccination numbers rise. So are lockdowns the best way to go or the best response to a COVID outbreak in Australia or around the world? As Australia is a slightly different country with a different population density and geographic location, please leave your thoughts in the comments, we'd be interested to know what you think.