“Some on here have been blowing trumpets for Australia and New Zealand.”
And still do. For context Michael, Australia cases per million 1534, New Zealand 585. UK cases per million 91,783, Ireland 64,955, Spain 100,343, USA 112,463. Australia is still amongst the lowest in the world and they are reacting quickly in NSW with a 7 day lock down state wide. It’s the most populous state but not the only state. The other six states are not in lockdown yet.
Also, Michael, you should appreciate the geography of Australia with 25 million people spread across the very large continent. A lot of their health care infrastructure is rural and/or remote. Whilst most people live on the east coast there are still remote populated areas. A doc might be assessing a patient who is 600km away, pop in so I can take a look at you doesn’t cut it. There are a lot of small towns where the local small hospital is run by a single doc or even smaller towns without any hospital and one GP and a long way from a hospital. They use medivac services a lot, small aircraft, helicopters and their ambulance system to transfer people from rural/remote areas to the bigger urban centres where there might be ICU facilities. Sometimes it can take hours for those services to get to you.
“Australia vaccine roll-out, massive failure.”
As I pointed out in a previous post there wasn’t vaccine availability, they couldn’t get their hands on a supply to buy. A position most of the world is in thanks to hoarding on behalf of the EU, UK, USA and India and not just vaccines but their precursors too. And patents. So who failed who? Australia has a very good health system and their docs are very well trained, and broadly trained across a number of disciplines as junior docs.
Who is going to be in a better position if the vaccines fail to contain the virus? Numbers are rising across most of the “western” world despite vaccinations.