Here’s an interesting article from the Globe and Mail, comparing the experience in Canada and Australia.
Bottom line: you guys are lucky you have no shared borders. Our relatively porous border with the US has been a major contributing factor to the spread of the disease, especially in Quebec, because of the number of snowbirds and spring-breakers who came back from the US in early March.
An Australian couple has been fined for photos of a vacation they took a year ago.
Robin Williams: “Canada, like living in a really nice apartment … above a crack den”
So you have my sympathies about your problems with your neighbours.
There are many advantages the Southern Hemisphere has had in the current troubled times which has helped our situation immensely. Both New Zealand and South Africa are in similar to better positions. But we could have pissed it away.
More correctly an infringement notice was issued following a tip-off, but in this and other cases has been rescinded.
A couple of over-officious grunts which is unfortunate and unhelpful, but cooler heads have prevailed and they weren’t shot in the street.
Here in NZ we have also been benefiting from a hugely mild autumn. As we move into winter, it’s going to get colder and we will be running into flu season as well. Hopefully we will have so little Covid-19 circulating that we don’t get a winter resurgence.
This is less of an issue for South Africa or Australia, where winters are milder.
Is cold weather as such actually a factor in flu infections? I have always been taught that the main reason there’s a flu ‘season’ is just that people change our behaviour in colder weather, stay indoors more. AKA the “you don’t get a cold from being cold” principle
I thought it was because the cold dry air make us more susceptible to it; according to this Harvard blog we could be both right.
Here’s an update from one of the Canadian banks on consumer spending in Canada over the past six weeks. Take a look at the first graph, for spending generally by cards. No wonder our GDP is predicted to contract by about 9% this year.
Oh, it wasn’t problems with our neighbours; not criticising them. Just that our border is almost non-existent for travel back and forth by Canadians and Americans.
Quebec has been hit particularly hard because Quebecers have a tendency to go to Florida for the winter and students’ spring break, and the Quebec spring break happens to be earlier than the rest of Canada.
Florida seems to have been one of the original hotspots, so there were lots of Quebecers down south at the crucial time when the virus was circulating, but before the social distancing and lockdowns started. The Canadian government called them home in mid-March.
Perfect recipe for lots of people inadvertently picking it up and bringing it home. Quebec currently has over half of the cases in all of Canada.
It looks to me that rules in Victoria changed last night (Saturday night).
Restricted Activity Directions (No. 5)
https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/202004/state-emergency-directions-restricted-activity-directions-No5-signed-24-04-2020.pdf
As I read that, the RAD4 “stay at home, with exemptions” restriction has been removed, and replaced with specific, limited, restrictions: shops,clubs,pubs,churches, etc are closed, social distancing rules remain, but the general “stay at home” restriction has been removed.
So golf courses are still closed, but sailing and fishing and learner-drivers are now ok. In vic.
Well, there you go! I learned a thing today.
(Actually I learned two things, the second of which was ‘still never read the comments, even in a Harvard science blog…’ :smack: )
Interesting - though doesn’t 1.3 say this runs alongside the stay at home directions?
Yes. I was looking at several different documents, and got some of them confused. I got it wrong.
Sydney seem to be doing better that other states from what I’ve heard. I’m in the whitegoods supply line and the problem is while we have a couple of months of stock on the water the German factory closed for a number of weeks, eventually if you rely on imports there must be a crash in sales eventually.
My observation this week is people have pretty much given up on isolation, picnickers matched the number of joggers in my local park.
Sydney’s a state? 
An update:
Firstly the FMCG company I work for has just completed it’s 1st Qtr results (Apr-Jun) and in whitegoods and homewares achieved budget for the quarter and the business as a whole is now forecasting it will achieve the full year plan. Which is flabbergasting in the circumstances.
Unfortunately we have had a breakout of COVID centred on Melbourne and in particular some high density housing towers. This the first time community transmission has exceeded overseas sourced infections and consequently has seen partial lockdowns within the city and the closure of the state borders between VIC and NSW which last happened in the 1919 Spanish Flu pandemic.
Overall rates of infection and fatalities remain currently at a low level with 1,300 active infections and 106 deaths.
The BBC seems to be reporting rather more than a partial shutdown in Melbourne.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-53316350
Rather shocking that they went straight to 6 weeks.
Well look at it this way, if UK were to start right at the beginning again I am sure the lockdown would come in far earlier and be more stringent, same with Sweden.
Its now reasonably evident that heavy lockdowns over periods over a month are the current best tool to use.
I wouldn’t say it’s evident that locking down a city of 5M for a month and a half because of an outbreak <200 cases in some of its housing project is best practice. This stuff isn’t zero cost even in public health terms.
I think the experience has been that if you don’t go in hard and fast you lose the option to be selective in how you control the virus very quickly.
On another thread I posted some weekly figures for Melbourne - 4 weeks ago there were 0 new cases from thousands of test, yesterday 191 scattered across Melbourne.
The rest of Australia has essentially returned to new normality, as opposed to the faux politically-driven openings up we are seeing in the US and UK, where there is still a strong COVID presence in the community. No one wants to squander the effort that went into getting to that point.