I'm seeing a lot of sniping going on in Australian politics about whose fault the recent outbreak is, and whose "failure" it was.

First - this discussion is absolutely crazy.

Australia has had a massive unexpected success. The strategy was explicitly stated to not be an elimination strategy.

The PM explicitly stated there would be more outbreaks. He said we had to hold our nerve when we saw these outbreaks. He said that we should be like kangaroos and not emus and move forward.

Here were my thoughts at the time. I was not in favor. https://twitter.com/joel_c_miller/status/1258593537370644481?s=20

I was particularly concerned that Victoria was facing significant pressure to reopen even while they had by far the most active ongoing outbreak. Understandably, their health system was focused there.

I strongly suspect that the diversion of resources to the Cedar Meats outbreak while focusing on how to reopen likely affected the ability to observe an emerging outbreak from hotel quarantine.

But let's get back to that hotel quarantine. If the complete expectation of everyone involved is that we aren't going to stamp out the outbreak in the community, is it the appropriate use of resources to focus on incredibly strict and harsh Hotel Quarantine (HQ)?

At the time, I would have been upset that they weren't being stricter in HQ, but I was holding out hope they would stumble their way into elimination, which again, the Federal Government had stated was NOT the target.

If the full expectation is that community transmission will continue unabated, then such a strict HQ is very questionable ethically.

Once the outbreak started, it is undeniable that continuing to relax restrictions kangaroo-like would have led to a European style epidemic across all of Australia. The retreat into stage 3 was clearly not enough to bring it back under control.

An earlier retreat to stage 4 would have resulted in a shorter lockdown (I was wrong at the time in believing stage 3 would be enough - that clear within a few weeks).

We can argue over whose fault it was that the expected happened. There was an outbreak.

We could also argue over whose fault it was that the strategy that was planned for an outbreak was insufficient.

A different HQ policy might have changed things. But we have to judge people based on the information they had at the time.

And a key piece of information at the time was expectation that there would be more outbreaks in the community.

Given that an outbreak happened, and that outbreak was expected there's another question - whose responsibility was it to make sure that the response was sufficient?

The Victorian response was consistently challenged and undercut by the Victorian Liberal Party, with additional sniping from the Liberal Party in Federal Government.

So absolutely, the HQ was a failure, and that failure played part of the causal chain in many deaths. But I do not believe it was forseeable at that time how significant the HQ would be.

It was forseeable, and indeed it was expected that there would be outbreaks.

Where were the next causal links in that chain?

A failure to respond quickly enough and at large enough scale to the emerging outbreak in Victoria was the next mistake.

If we must assign blame, who?

The Federal Government which had a stated policy that was too weak?

The State Government that did not recognize quickly that the policy needed to be exceeded?

People like me who believed the policy would be enough?

The next link was failures in aged care facilities and health care facilities.

I think(?) (I'm not Australian, so I'm pretty ignorant of their health care system), much of the issue in health care facilities falls on state government.

But aged care facilities - that's federal.

If the explicit openly-stated expectation is that outbreaks will happen, then there is absolutely blame to be apportioned on who failed to ensure that policies were in place to protect health care and aged care facilities.

I should note - aged care facilities are very hard to protect. Nowhere has done a good job so far. And part of the problem is structural - it's very hard to change a system where many employees are part-time and hold positions at multiple facilities.

So I guess, have fun throwing blame around.

But - why not be happy that Australia has (so far) had an amazing success? Can we acknowledge that the only reason we care about HQ failures was that our suppression strategy was much more effective than we expected?

What should we be doing right now? Acknowledging that everyone at every level in this response has made errors. Those errors have all contributed to the near-disaster.

But errors are to be expected when responding for the very first time to a brand new epidemic.

Be happy that so many efforts were so successful that there was only one chain of multiple failures that led to a big, costly outbreak.

Now learn from those mistakes so they aren't repeated.

Right now it kind of looks like the virus is an expert at divide and conquer warfare.

It would be a shame if a sub-cellular not even fully alive "organism" was able to beat us like that.

But if we must assign blame, we should do so based on the information available at the time: we fully expected continual outbreaks country-wide.

that's one of my longer threads. I'm expecting a lot of trolls on this one, so I'll probably mute the thread... Please don't be offended if I seem to ignore a legitimate question.