Common sense: quarantine is for sick people

I highly value the experts, and it would appear I value experts more than the governments making these decisions or their so-called oppositions meekly complying at a time when critical decisions need more transparency, scrutiny and accountability then ever from our parliaments.

I also learned to read so I could be informed by all the experts and think for myself; a kind of vaccination against narratives approved and disseminated by the Ministry of Truth. It's one of the reasons we send kids to school, or so I thought. Debating is not evidence of callousness, but concern. A government that so disdains the intelligence and character of its citizens that it cannot trust them to make good decisions, is itself not to be trusted to make good decisions, drawing its members from the same population of citizens.

With this marvelous power called literacy and numeracy, I and many others have weighed the advice of more experts, in addition to those anointed by governments to bestow advice upon their grateful subjects and reached different conclusions about the human cost of various courses of action.

Epidemiological modelling is notoriously unreliable and prone to terrifying exaggeration, yet based only on models proven to be severely flawed and not fit for purpose governments around Australia overreacted. They pointed to and were comforted only by the thought that everyone else in the world was doing the same thing. That reminds me of what my mum said about friends jumping off a cliff – don't follow them. Our governments consulted no other experts, or if they did, paid them no regard.

Politicians insisted on referring to speculative modelling as "science" and mainstream media impotently regurgitated this facile rhetoric with religious devotion. But within a month it was obvious from hard data that the mortality rate was nowhere near as bad as at first feared. In fact, for those under 60, fit and healthy, mortality is still proven to be no worse than the seasonal flu. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews insists this virus doesn't discriminate, yet with or without ham-fisted lock downs 19 out of 20 deaths have been over 60 years old, mostly the very old already with serious underlying conditions.

It was a mistake to quarantine the healthy and only halfheartedly quarantine the sick. Those with eyes to see could see this by mid April. Yet governments don't like to admit they got it quite wrong and should now take a different approach. That kind of admission could cost government and precious political careers. Normally honest people were now heavily invested in counting cases and infection rates among healthy people at little to no risk instead of the actually important measurements of mortality rates and available ICU beds.

One problem with sensational daily reporting of identified "new cases" is how vastly underestimated the actual number of cases is, care of asymptomatic, untested & undiagnosed infections.

The NSW Chief Health Officer recently said tests of blood samples for antibody markers have indicated between 250,000 and 500,000 Australians may have already been infected with COVID-19.

The fatality rate from seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S. With just 221 deaths to date, Australia's COVID-19 fatality rate is only 0.09% at worst, maybe just 0.05% in Australia.

So, are sustained and socially-devastating government restrictions really justified? How many lives should be cavalierly risked and lost to save a thousand from the China flu?

On the balance of advice from both highly reputed medical and economic experts, the most restrictions justified by hard data and actual science was:

• Robust enforcement of a strict quarantine & monitoring for those actually infected or awaiting test results
• Physical isolation of those at high risk (over 60 years old &/or with comorbidities), cared for by people with strict PPE protocols
• Rigorous personal hygiene and physical distancing etiquette for everyone else.