More on Australia, from an MR reader

“A random observation, in four sentences:

1. I continue to see huge numbers of Australians (e.g. politicians like Dan Andrews, the Victorian Premier, and also huge numbers of random people on my facebook) say “if we don’t continue to lockdown, the health system will be overwhelmed; we have no choice”.
2. Most of the at-risk population in Australia has already been vaccinated with at least one dose, which reduces hospitalisation/mortality risk by something like 70% (or perhaps even better in practice; the SMH today reports 94 people in ICU, 83 unvaccinated, 11 have one dose, and ~50% of adults have 1 dose and obviously are very negatively selected on age)
3. The US never saw widespread overwhelming of the hospital system (lots of media reports of “hospitals in X about to hit capacity”, but it to date has always been one of those “just wait two weeks” things)
4. People in Australia widely believe the quality of the US hospital/healthcare system is substantially inferior to the single payer hospital/healthcare system in Australia

It would seem extremely difficult for these four things to mutually coexist.”

TC again: Here is a short video from Australia, how about some AstraZeneca and a bit of testing regime instead?  GG is right that the video resembles a bad dystopian science fiction movie from past decades.  You will note that some segments of the American intelligentsia are so invested in criticizing the U.S. “red state” approach, and so warm toward collectivist mandates, that they won’t raise a peep about what is going on here.