It’s early days into the major restrictions on life in Victoria & NSW (Australia) but we are down to under 7% case increases per day (after the number being 25%-ish per day for most of the last fortnight). And Australia is one of the top testers.

That’s great!

I truly believe that pandemic planners did NOT expect that:

1. The government would go for such drastic distancing measures & school closures this early
2. That most people would comply and even be reasonably supportive

And we haven’t even seen the full effect for another week. I think we’ll see sub-5% case growth and maybe even get down to 1-2% and then IF WE KEEP AT IT with our closed borders, near-eradicate COVID19, leaving spot fires to follow up with super immediate testing and contact tracing.

The daily death % increase (which is not very meaningful here given our low death count) will increase for a while but then come down too.

My predictions

I think we in Australia might end up with as low as 250-500 deaths if we keep up this approach and then go for early vaccine release so we can get back to normality.

In a shockingly blunt statement last night Dr. Fauchi said that he expects – at the low end- for 100,000-200,000 US DEATHS. That is finally an incredibly honest and sensible admission. The US has stuffed up hugely. But I’m more optimistic even for America. If they can just start turning their curve around via distancing. It’s harder for them because of how far they’ve let it go. But it’s still possible. China did it. You wanna live or die?

I’m predicting – if the US government and people are sufficiently shocked now – deaths more like 40,000 there. I hope. Could have been much lower.

UK maybe 10,000. I hope.

There should have been much more talk about eradication early on.

But pandemic planners didn’t believe we would bunker down as we have finally, even in America.

It took disaster to make it happen so it wasn’t even seriously modelled!

That is the tragedy.

I never doubted for a minute we would bunker down when the death tolls started rising in China & Italy.

And back in 2010 (as a PhD epidemiologist) I tried to push planners to include eradication plans in their reports to no avail.

They just didn’t believe we had the will to do what was necessary.

They were wrong.

I mean plain wrong. And I’m being kind in my selection of words.

All of this also depends on early vaccine release.

Early vaccine release upon safety trials

What’s DESPERATELY needed in Australia is some leadership from the vaccine community here to start TALKING about EARLY vaccine release upon safety tests ONLY (before efficacy is known) and continue to release new candidates until one eventually has really good efficacy (the others are likely to have at least partial efficacy).

There’s discussion of it internationally but nothing here in Australia despite our huge biomed/biotech expertise base in this country.

It’s so obvious that we should be planning for this but not a peep from the biomed community in Australia.

If you don’t plan for it it won’t happen in time.

You can’t think business as usual.

It is NOT business as usual.