I want to slap those anti-distancing protestors,
Give them a bloody good shake, tell them to wake up to themselves and remind them that you are a long time dead.
Australia went into lockdown on March 23 - give or take a couple of days the same time as much of the US. A few idiots have been fined for having gatherings but, on the whole, people have been very good about this. As of today the current restrictions will continue for at least a month. There's a bit of grizzling and whingeing but in general people get it.
Then I see and read about those dropkicks protesting in Michigan, armed to the teeth, then more protests in more states. Someone is co-ordinating this, I thought to myself.
Going into winter, we're not out of the woods yet, but this article gave me hope that we may be turning the tide. At the moment the infection rate here is less than 1. That is, each confirmed case infects less than one other person. When your protesting idiots return to their homes, families and communities and infect five, ten, a dozen others, there is no end in site for Covid-19 in the US.
Australia's opportunity for elimination arises from a bit of overachievement. The authorities had earlier feared that the Australian epidemic would be just approaching its peak around now. On the original modelling, if no preventions had been put in place, by today the country's intensive care wards were expected to be full and turning patients away. All mechanical ventilators in use, and no more to spare.
Patients, untreated, would be dying by the score. It would have been the most dreadful Anzac Day, perhaps even worse than the original. The number of Australians killed in that benighted campaign was 8,141. This Anzac Day, the country would have been well on its way to the worst case scenario of 150,000 dead, as projected in the modelling released by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly on March 16.
Instead, by Friday afternoon, 65 people have died. The number of patients requiring mechanical ventilation stood at 42 on Thursday. Thousands of intensive care beds, equipped with mechanical ventilators, stand blessedly empty in hospital wards around the country, braced for the wave that has not come.
So where are we? "What we want to do now," federal Health Minister Greg Hunt told reporters on Monday, is "consolidate the containment, we want to work towards an effective eradication.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/it-wasn-t-planned-but-australia-is-on-the-verge-of-an-exciting-possibility-20200416-p54kld.html
Stay home, stay safe.
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... is doing so well. 
