Its a very different comparison. NZ and AUS are very similar to GB culturally and politically.
Its very notable that most countries that experienced SARS and MERS (burning it into their cultural and political will) are dealing with COVID very well.
Also "speaking for Australia", or at least my small inner-west Sydney microcosm of it - which is all my own anecdata really covers...
We are quite a way from being "almost back to BAU". This weekend we allowed cafes, restaurants, and food serving areas of bars to reopen, but only to 10 people at a time (so many have not reopened, since only 10 customers is completely unviable financially for many places). Bars (for drinking) and entertainment venues are still closed. The cafe nearest me is playing with fire right now - they have 8 outdoor tables, all more than 2m apart, but had al of them filled with 2, 3, or 4 people around each - easily 20-25 people seated while I was there. And there were still people crowding around the door clearly not "social distancing" waiting for a table to open up, and ignoring the cafe owner's request to spread themselves out to comply with the health advice...
The plan is to get back to "everything open as normal" by the end of July, but it'll only take a serious "second wave" for that plan to be found unworkabe, I suspect...
> Both were early to restrict international arrivals. The UK lagged behind.
This was a big factor. When Australia started closing its borders (on Feb 2), it was being condemned by the WHO and China for doing so [1]:
"WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva that despite the emergency declaration, there is "no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade"."
I was tracking conferences in the UK at the time (I run a website with conference listings), and one of the UK conferences kept quoting that WHO statement as a reason to insist their conference was still happening and people should fly to the UK for it... for another six weeks, right up until the UK lockdown. Meanwhile conferences in the rest of the world were cancelling themselves "out of an abundance of caution". The UK was one of the countries that took the longest for their conferences to cancel (Germany was the other).
Did we really "start closing our borders" that early?
I know we'd restricted direct flights from China or the Wuhan area earlier, but citizens and permanent residents (and their families) could still arrive. We were still allowing international visitors in mid March - they only cancelled the F1 GP in March 12th, the day it was supposed to star, when all the international drivers/teams/fans/media-circus were already in Melbourne.
That's fair - I meant that we'd started closing our border to China. Apparently Australia blocked tourists from China from February 1 and required other travellers from China to go into quarantine.
I'm still trying to find when the UK implemented the same restrictions on China that Australia did. Apologies for a Daily Mail link, but it suggests that a week later the UK was still struggling to implement restrictions on travel from China due to EU rules [1] (but then, the Daily Mail would say that). Deutsche Welle suggests that a Europe-wide ban didn't happen until 17th March, and even then the Schengen still remained open [2].
As for the F1 GP, I'll just paraphrase our WA Premier: "They do things differently on the east coast" ;)
More amusingly the Insane Clown Posse canceled their yearly event of themselves without any whining. Makes you wonder about the competence of a lot of people running things.
I will just speak for Australia... but Elimination was not the initial goal. It was just to ensure the hospitals could cope. It is true that Australia never entertained the idea of herd-immunity. I think some of the state governments later moved towards an elimination idea when it appeared possible.
I think that is not likely going to be possible now, since people were beginning not to accept the lock down like they had in the past. When you have a small number of cases in the hundreds for the whole of Australia, people had already started to change their behavior even before lock down restrictions had began to be lifted.
No Australian government has made any kind of indication that elimination is a goal, and nor was herd immunity a goal. The goal was time to prepare the country, and to minimise the death toll.
As it happens, it has been functionally eliminated in SA/NT/WA with no new cases in May and zero active cases. But the expectation is that new cases will arise as travel restrictions ease but contact tracing will be sufficient to control them.
> Both Australia and NZ are almost back to BAU, again, the UK will lag behind.
Not even slightly. We (Australia) only just (this week) had some states start to loosen up the initial list of restrictions, so some businesses and social activities can restart in limited fashion. But we're still on "stage 3" restrictions - with stage 4 being the most restricted.
In my own state (Victoria), we're going slower as we've recently had some new infection clusters show up, which we don't want to get out of hand.
Its a very different comparison. NZ and AUS are very similar to GB culturally and politically.
Its very notable that most countries that experienced SARS and MERS (burning it into their cultural and political will) are dealing with COVID very well.