I was just speculating what would be effective if the United States were structured to be able to coordinate a unified national response like other countries. It’s not hard to imagine better than real life, but I was wondering what exactly that better could look like. What sort of rules and schedule and laws would work equally well for NYC and rural Montana simultaneously? (IRL, there probably would’ve been at least a little regional flexibility, but assume less of it for the hypothetical.)
Australia has done well during this [97 deaths so far]. Leaving aside the specific responses, one of the notable things that has been done is the formation of a National Cabinet, which consists of the Prime Minister and the different state premiers and chief ministers. They take advice from a national expert panel, all medicos and other specialists, and the Cabinet acts on the recommendations turn into policy and practical measures. The individual premiers tailor what they do in their state to conform to the national approach, given each state has unique circumstances.
This has a number of effects - firstly its national but there is no sense of the needs of highly urban Sydney are driving the agenda for ultra-rural Upper Woopwoop. There is consistent targets but each state can tailor its response depending on its circumstances. Its collective response, so you don’t see states competing for resources, although that’s helped by having responded early there is much less pressure on the health system and possibly the economy.
Most importantly it separates the medical and scientific advice from the politics, but clearly holds the pollies accountable for how they respond with policy. There has been good transparency in many respects as the logic of different decisions have been explained. Each state will hold a daily briefing with its premier, chief health officer and other relevant officials, and the national cabinet sets weekly and longer frameworks.
Australia went through the bushfire crisis-drama at the start of the year, which probably played a strong role in forging trust in government at state level to get the job done and to reinforce community role in pitching in. I think that there is negligible trust between govt and people in the US, and no signs of it getting better with time. I’d also doubt there’s a strong spirit of volunteerism or collective endeavour in the community that helps to underpin the more formal efforts, but hopefully I’m wrong about that.
We need to first consider the factors that were present, irrespective of any policies that related to regulating social behavior.
Part of the problem is that Greater New York, which is where 40-45% of the cases have been so far, may have just been unlucky. It was unfortunate in that virus spread around the densest, most populous metropolitan area in North America, and one which uses public transit. The virus had time to get a solid foothold in the community before we even realized there was a serious problem.
But the US was also caught flat-footed at the national level. The lack of a functional testing and tracing apparatus is a monumental failure of the federal government. Beyond that, the patchwork healthcare system is not designed to take on a crisis like this. It’s debatable whether distancing would be able to put a dent in the numbers with the presence of these two factors.
The US has responded to varying levels of crisis in a co-ordinated, consistent, humane, responsible, sometimes pig-headed, more usually potent manner any number of times in my life time. I guess the usual basket of partisan politics, race, religion and individual rights trumped the collective good. (pun intended)
Banksiaman makes the point well.
The big difference between Australia and New Zealand in their response to COVID-19 is that the Kiwis have a national parliament and no state governments. In its response to COVID-19 Australia has got to much the same point in much the same time as NZ with the additional federal issue of herding the cats.
The primary constitutional bone of contention with the Australian commonwealth is the relationship between the states and the federal government. Much like Stateside. True, it does help that we haven’t had a civil war over the issue but that was quite a while ago.
The Commonwealth strategy worked here because the cats recognised they needed to herd. The National Cabinet has been a success through collective resolve, good-will and evidence based decision making. They have expressed differences, but generally one of those “We need to all hang together, else we be all hanged separately” moments. The state governments realised that, the local governments realised that, the populace realised that.
Example: my brother lives on a 5,000 acre farm. His nearest neighbor lives almost 5 miles away. There hasn’t been a single case of COVID-19 within 40 miles in the local shire of over 1mil acres. But there is a bucket of water and soap at the front gate. Anybody and everybody coming to the property scrubs up. As applies with his neighbors. The water bailiff and the postie have never been cleaner.
There is a non-zero chance that Australia and New Zealand could get through the economic aspect of this crisis without going into recession (ie 2 consecutive quarters of negative growth) and New Zealand was in total lock-down for 5 weeks. Australia got thru the GFC without a recession too.
We have some natural advantages, but it wasn’t that long ago we were in a continental drought of years duration with 50 mil acres ablaze so we have some natural disadvantages too. We have nothing intrinsic to our success that the US doesn’t have. But we just keep bobbing along.
*snip. I hear people arguing this, and it makes sense, but suppose you lock down Sydney and keep rural Upper Woopwoop relatively unchanged. How long will it be before enough people from Sydney get tired of the quarantine (many of them infected) and swamp Upper Woopwoop thereby spreading the virus to them?
Just like in the United States. I’m all for opening up rural parts of the country and it does seem silly to keep them locked down, but how do you keep the urbanites from flooding the place, desperate to get out of the house?
That’s a small part of the issue. Anecdotally the bigger problem in this scenario is how do you handle the people from Woopwoop who go to Sidney for non-essential reasons and then return back to Woopwoop. When it comes to Covid-19 spreading in rural areas the scenario seems to be more the locals returning from a visit to an urban area rather than an urbanite fleeing. I’m not saying the latter doesn’t happen, just that it seems to be a more typical scenario for an infected local to return and spread the illness.
So, is it technically true that if every American just locked themselves into a room, or house, for 3 weeks, and didn’t emerge, (and nobody came into the nation from abroad,) that Covid-19 would be beaten for good?
(Obviously, that’s not doable from a legal or practical standpoint, but just asking as a scientific question)
Sure, so far. But we haven’t had the scenario where urban areas remain locked down and rural areas open up…until just like this week. It will be (I would say interesting if it was not so serious) to see what happens when people from NY start fleeing for their hunting cabins in states that open up.
Probably not; we know the vaccine can infect various feline species, and possibly domestic dogs (and thus, presumably coyotes and wolves) as well. We also don’t know how long the virus can remain dormant in people; it is assumed that people will be asymptomatic but capable of shedding the virus for 2-14 days after exposure before displaying signs and symptoms (if they ever do), and then for some period afterward, likely no more than 5-7 days after the symptoms have disappeared, which is where the notion of three weeks comes from. However, we just don’t know enough about the behavior of the virus in vivo, and we are still learning new information and often contradictory data, such that children are not affected by and possibly do not shed the virus, except it now appears that children can have presentation with signs typical of Kawasaki disease, and that many children appear to asymptomatically shed the virus albeit for a shorter period of time. We don’t know if the virus can remain dormant indefinitely in some people, or if there are ‘super shedders’ who can host the virus indefinitely without any signs and symptoms. And this virus appears to be so contagious that even a few carriers in the population will quickly nucleate a cluster that will grow to epidemic proportions before any measurable signs or apparent symptoms are seen.
The point of the lockdowns isn’t to squash the virus but to manage the number of severely ill people at one time (the “flattening the curve” that public health authorities keep talking about) while hopefully developing therapeutic and prophylactic treatments that can protect the vulnerable and those who become ill. We could develop and deploy various non-therapeutic measures to minimize transmission while keeping essential parts of the economy running, but when you have armed loons protesting in big crowds at state capitals and people heading to the beach en masse you can’t really count on a sufficient degree compliance for any public health measures to work. And the lack of inexpensive, quick, and accurate antigen and serology tests means that we can’t either perform effective track & trace or have any confidence that one has been infected and has protective antibodies (which may convey some currently unknown degree of immunity).
What would have made sense from a national level is essentially what New Mexico and California have done; a prompt lockdown on nonessential business and travel with a (voluntary) 14 day self-quarantine requirement returning after travel, development of tests and an infrastructure to perform tracking and tracing, and then graduated lifting of restrictions while allowing municipalities to enforce tighter restrictions as they see fit and monitoring for signs of outbreak. But with every state doing its own thing, and many states doing very little to effectively control or track the spread of the virus, those efforts are of limited utility.
Stranger
When the Australian colonies discussed federation before 1900 one of the main benefits they saw was consistent quarantine provisions across the entire landmass. Although this broke down into inter-state politics for the Spanish Flu, the collective purpose and shared benefit was obvious. Different states doing different things which stymie their neighbours’ efforts are the weak points in any chain of protection. Dramatically reducing inter-state movement is probably reasonably straightforward in Australia, and seems to have been successfully maintained. I assume it has helped to minimise spread.
Many states are getting 0 new cases per day and the others getting few new community transmissions from unknown sources. Its become one of the pre-conditions for opening up, along with good take-up of the [still not working properly] mobile phone tracking app. Even so, the opening up process is being planned as 1 baby-step -> wait a month to see what happens -> next baby step -> … Painful (and long) as that will be, I think because communication has been clear its understood that this is necessary for getting back to normal safely without just pissing away the effort of the past 8 weeks.