As a Melburnian who lived 4 months last year under the world's most severe form of lockdown (outside Wuhan), we know that lockdowns work and they save lives.
The world's most severe lockdown and all you have to show for it is the biggest death count in all of Australia (8x the rest of Australia COMBINED), skyrocketing youth suicidality [1] and skyrocketing domestic abuse (especially among children) [2]
A staggering 1 in 10 Victorians "seriously considered" suicide. [3]
The Australian Medical Association projected up to 5,000 additional suicides, with a large portion of them being young people. [4] This is over 5x the current COVID death count in Australia in suicides alone, without considering deferred medical problems, domestic abuse and other factors.
As someone who lost my beloved grandmother and an uncle last year to this virus (all overseas), and after watching my mother become a shell of her former active self after 2 bouts of battle with this virus (also overseas), I am very thankful that my State's government did not follow the approach of many countries overseas and actually locked us down.
As for the deaths you refer to, the great majority of them were in private nursing homes, regulated and administered by the Commonwealth government. Yes I'm very sad and angry that that happened, but my criticism is solely targeted towards the people responsible: the federal government, in particular the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt.
As for the mental health issues you name, yes it's very sad, and very tough, but pandemics have costs. No one is doing it easy.
I'm not sure how you can't also criticise the Victorian government for their hotel quarantine disaster? That's an "upstream" event before the virus got to nursing homes.
This. It was hard, but we managed to go back to zero cases. And we've done it multiple times, and currently down to 4 cases today since the last outbreak.
Meanwhile, Sky News advocating no lockdowns, which NSW took to heart, and is currently at 240 cases today. Looking at the graph, they are following the exponential curve.
Of course NSW has lockdowns. Sydney in particular - which is where most of the cases are - has been in increasingly strict lockdown since June, and I think they've spent more time under lockdown than not since the start of the pandemic at this point. The lockdowns just haven't worked there.
Their lockdowns haven't worked because they have not been anywhere near strict enough.
As a Melburnian, looking at Sydney, I can't believe they call that a lockdown. Even right now with 200± cases daily, only 8 LGAs are in lockdown and even they are nowhere as strict as what we experienced in Melbourne. The rest of Sydney can only be described at what we here call Stage 2 restrictions.
We learnt this the hard way in Victoria last year, you need to go early, and you need to go hard. Since then we have managed to stamp out the virus using that strategy everytime it has entered our state. I just don't understand why the NSW government is reluctant to accept lessons from Victoria's experience in 2020.
If you talk to anyone in NSW, their lockdowns have been mockdowns. Nobody wearing masks, jewelry shops open because for some reason they are "essential" workers... no wonder their lockdown isn't working.
Compare that to Victoria. Last year, you would be stopped by police if you went out onto the road, and be fined without an essential working permit.
It's absolute insanity. One thing we know after 1.5 year of dealing with this is that outside in the sun is the least likely place one would catch the virus. Yet they are forcing people to stay locked in, not get sun, no gym, order eat out food and stay away from society. This would have been a perfect opportunity for governments to encourage healthy living, eating healthy, exercising, losing weight, doing cardio, going out and getting sun etc but they did the exact opposite.
As a Melburnian who lived 4 months last year under the world's most severe form of lockdown (outside Wuhan), we know that lockdowns work and they save lives.