one coronavirus total lockdown australias

‘I have colleagues in the UK and it’s terrible over there.’ĭr Stanaway said she and her colleagues used all-cause mortality data due to known undercounting of COVID-19 cases and related deaths in the UK, as well as a sharp increase in non-COVID deaths, up by 32% in weeks 13 to 20, compared to the last five years. ‘What we were trying to say is all this stuff we’re doing, yes, it’s really hard and people have had to change their lives. ‘That’s why we wrote the article, in fact because when you’re successful people can sometimes think “Oh, it doesn’t matter”,’ she said. Speaking to newsGP, Dr Stanaway said a side effect of Australia’s comparatively successful response and low mortality rate may have led to a degree of complacency and difficulty in seeing the cost–benefit of measures taken. ‘While acknowledging that these measures carry with them substantial social and economic harms, we wish to highlight the scale of the loss of life avoided.’ ‘This enormous difference underlies the importance of Australia’s response using a combination of extensive testing and contact tracing, mandatory quarantine of people returning from overseas, and shutdowns to control community transmission,’ the authors wrote. While the total deaths substantially increased to 875 as of 29 September as a result of Melbourne’s second wave, the rate of 34 deaths per million population remains substantially lower than during the same period in the UK, when there was more than 42,000 deaths and a death rate of 618 per million. In contrast, by 24 May there had been 103 COVID-19-attributed deaths in Australia – and 1340 excess total deaths, according to provisional mortality data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. ‘This resulted in an estimated additional 16,313 deaths in Australia: 9295 men and 7018 women,’ Dr Stanaway and her colleagues wrote. Led by Dr Fiona Stanaway, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, researchers used data on all-cause mortality from England and Wales over the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak from March to May to directly estimate the number of excess deaths that may have occurred if the outbreak in Australia had been of a similar extent.

The University of Sydney-led research, published by the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA), is based on modelling that used the UK’s COVID-19 response as a template. Researchers have attributed Australia’s low COVID death rate to a combination of lockdown measures, extensive testing, contact tracing and border controls. Despite some saying the response has been ‘drastic’, new research has highlighted its strengths, and the need to remain vigilant.

One coronavirus total lockdown australias