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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

> The WHO warns that lockdown should only be treated as a last resort, to truly flatten the curve and no more. We ignored that.

Countries that have eliminated the virus have ignored this for good results. Some like us here in Melbourne have used lockdowns to eliminate the virus, others like New Zealand have used them as a first resort to contain outbreaks. Because we eliminated it we're now back to (mostly) normal, we don't have young people sacrificing anything, we have kids in school, we have large sporting events and it's not coming at the cost of everyone's lives. Despite WHO advice most countries that eliminated it have also kept borders mostly shut.

Ireland is a tragedy because the were so close to elimination but never took those final steps to eliminate it and keep it out. The worlds tragedy is that they gave up on elimination, it would have been much cheaper and less impactful than rolling lockdowns.

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I'm in general agreement with what you've said, but note that border closures are a far more difficult proposition for Ireland.

The Good Friday Accords make closing the border with NI a political impossibility, and failing that you'd be relying on the UK instituting border/quarantine arrangements between Great Britain and NI.

I thought that border did close briefly? I understand it's a touchy issue, but here we had some rather soft closures between states as well, borders don't have to be binary opened or closed. In some instances people could work permits to cross the border, for others we made virtual borders so people that live near the border could cross but no one else could. At various times we've thrown up some new borders, people couldn't travel from Melbourne to regional Victoria for instance.

Would options like that be viable with NI?

Remember this is somewhere that border checkpoints have in living memory been the target of violent attacks, where the idea of "partition" is at the core of the disagreements.

It's summer in the southern hemisphere and don't say you got rid of sars2 in your winter, you didn't, and there's still cases recently.

Let my comment be a warning that you might be in for a world of hurt in the next few months as you go into winter. You have to remain globally isolated until the virus is completely eradicated.

> It's summer in the southern hemisphere and don't say you got rid of sars2 in your winter, you didn't

Victoria had a large outbreak in winter, a (way too late) lockdown bought it under control. New Zealand had an outbreak in winter and a brief lockdown bought it back under control. I agree winter is hard mode, but we were 6 months ahead of the world in that regard, we were the warning that was ignored, we found it the hard way that soft lockdowns don't work in winter.

> and there's still cases recently.

Bought back from overseas, unfortunately flight crew are looking like a major vector. Current cases are low enough that good contact tracing is probably enough to keep on top of it, it's already stamped out a minor outbreak in Victoria and NSW just hit zero cases and will hopefully stay there.

> You have to remain globally isolated until the virus is completely eradicated.

We'll be globally isolated until enough people are vaccinated that exponential spread isn't possible. This is preferable to being personally isolated while a pandemic rages.

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