Flattening the curve or just muddling on?

So however I look at it, it seems clear that the unemployment and emotional costs of mass social isolation far outweigh the and the immediate lifting of nearly all involuntary isolations is warranted. It is not "safe" to keep the isolations in place.

Conclusion

When we started on this crisis the government should have had more information than the rest of us because they have commonwealth bureaucrats who had presumably done some planning for the eventuality of a pandemic. We were in a fog of war, and they struck out with what seemed a clear strategy - seal off the country and control the rate of infection so that the infrastructure could deal with it, while a significant proportion of us caught the disease.

Here we are a little way in, and it is clear that they've changed their strategy. They either think they can eliminate the virus without most of us catching it first, or they don't think we are prepared to accept the fatality rates that would go with the first strategy. Whatever way it is, there is a clear failure to discuss how this pandemic is to end in Australia, and what costs we should be prepared to bear.

All that is happening is that each state is getting more and more hairy-chested about imposing stricter and stricter limitations on personal limits, and in some cases confiscating private property rights, and the public's focus is just on the daily infection figures, as the progress of the disease is being called by journalists like a slow-moving Melbourne Cup.

That is not good enough. No one anywhere, government or opposition, state and federal, or health bureaucrats, is showing any sort of leadership. This is a crisis where muddling through is the only policy response being implemented, and the fatalities will be counted long after the virus has disappeared.