They should just re-declare Australia a penal colony and be done with it.

Have they not heard that Covid has been over for a year or more ?

Well, Western Australia (where Perth happens to be located) has had just over 1100 confirmed cases and 9 deaths. That's total for 2020-21. They have been essentially covid-free since May 2020 (yes 2020). The same can pretty much be said of Queensland and South Australia.

NSW and Victoria have decided that, now that 80% of the population age 16+ has been double-vaxxed, it's time to "live with covid." Those two states, with much larger populations, combined for 11 deaths today.

NSW/VIC: 1593 deaths, about 15 M population
WA/SA/Qld/NT/TAS: 33 deaths, about 10 M population

Unsurprisingly, the Commonwealth is having a bit of trouble convincing WA, SA, Qld, Tasmania and NT that the Vic/NSW approach is the way to go.

NSW/VIC: 1593 deaths, about 15 M population

Serious question: is there any part of the united states with 15 million people in it with so few deaths? North Carolina, where I live, has fewer than 11 million people in it, but more than 17,000 deaths.

Pennsylvania, 13M population, 30,000 dead.

The Carolinas combined, about 16M, 30,000 dead.

Pacific Northwest (conservatively defined), 14M population, about 16,000 dead.

New England (including Connecticut), 15M population, about 33,500 dead.

I realize this is all relative, but even the best-performing parts of the US would love to have infection and death rates like Victoria or NSW.

I guess since Australia is so isolated, they didn't expect much in the way of COVID at all. (They seem to under the impression if they just close everything down for long enough that it'll just go away.)

In a mirror-image development, Major League Cricket, which was to begin in 2022 centered on the abandoned baseball stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas, has delayed its opening till 2023.

Will you honor it by teaching Netherland, Bob?

They seem to under the impression if they just close everything down for long enough that it'll just go away.

I mean,it pretty much did; Aussies haven't been in full lockdown since March 2020, but have spent most of that time (from what I gather) living relative normal lives beyond the closed borders. You stop epidemics/pandemics without a vaccine or lasting herd immunity by basically air-gapping the population so that the virus can't move to the next host, and it's worked basically everywhere people have done it in earnest. It's not fun, and the "with closed borders" thing gets more precarious the longer it lasts (or, I imagine, open only to other places like New Zealand and maybe Taiwan that have been taking the same measures), but it's not exactly Australia's fault - or at a lower level, non-southeastern Australia's fault - that the rest of the world decided to power through.

They seem to under the impression if they just close everything down for long enough that it'll just go away.

No, the impression was that once we got to 80% fully vaxxed our hospitals could manage it. We didn't want to have an issue where hospitals and ICU's were so overwhelmed that people with other needs(you know like heart attacks and cancer treatment) would miss out. Sure, being locked down was kind of pain, but we live in Australia which is mostly pretty nice with good weather, so it wasn't really that bad.
There are only 25 million people here and we don't have endless resources of medical staff/care, etc. It needed to be managed and this was the way they chose to approach it. Most state premiers have enjoyed approval ratings of over 70% so I would say it's been pretty well received.

#4: I and I think everybody in Australia are aware how lucky we've been. But it does give one a different perspective.

Also, Australia is difficult to compare to inidividual states on something like this because of its massive geographic size. Now if you compare Sydney and Melbourne to, say, Houston and Dallas (or Philly, Boston or pretty much any of the big non-LA/NY MLB markets) then you've got a reasonably apples-apples comparison.

The way the population is distributed geographically in Australia is also very clustered. Lord only knows how "urban" is defined for international comparisons, but Australia's population is estimated as being slightly MORE urban than the US with something like 86% of the population in urban areas (so population density). It's also almost entirely coastal ... supposedly about 85% of the population lives within 30-35 miles of the coast. So maybe New England isn't a bad comparison.

But that vast space does make it a lot easier to cut off internal borders. There are only a small handful of roads that cross the WA border and obviously airports are easy to police. The NSW-Vic border is much harder to shut down and it was only done relatively briefly. NSW-Queensland though is not easy and it was shut down pretty effectively. And of course once a virus gets across the border, closed borders have very little to do with whether it takes hold and of course don't really do anything once it does.

Anyway, pretty much the whole country spent 10 weeks in some level of lockdown in April-June 2020. Since then Melbourne (and at times the rest of Vic) has had two extended lockdowns. The first one successfully got rid of the first variant but certainly hasn't gotten rid of delta. Sydney/NSW just had its second long lockdown but life is getting back to normal for the vaxxed and kids. The rest of Australia has essentially been leading pretty normal lives since June 2020. The economy had one of the best recoveries in the world after the first variant; delta is possibly having a more sustained effect, we'll see.

But at this point it's pretty much full steam ahead. Soon overseas entrants will no longer have to quarantine and Aussies can tavel overseas. All kids back to school. It will be a while yet before borders are open to non-citizens/permanent residents but I won't be surprised if there's at least some accommodation for the return of international uni students before the next uni term starts in March. The main government contentious issue at this point is those internal borders -- it's all "well and good" that NSW and Vic have decided they can live with the expcted thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths with a mostly vaxxed population; it's of course something else if your state has successfully kept it out and is now being asked to let NSW and Vic travellers to bring it into your state so you too can "live with Covid."

Will you honor it by teaching Netherland

I have mostly stepped away from doing sport literature, Mayor – never taught Netherland, though it is an interesting book. Or any cricket fiction. I did read CLR James' Beyond a Boundary with a class once.

I thought Paul Wheeler's novel Bodyline was very interesting, historical fiction about the 1932-33 Test and the use of Don Bradman as a human target. But it is somewhat terse and technical and might be inexplicable to American students.

Though the definition of "American students" is changing. I never see pickup baseball or softball games here, but I see lots of parking-lot cricket, and I live a few minutes walk from our intramural cricket pitch, which is busy every weekend.

It's interesting, the whole idea of shutting state borders only came up briefly here, and was abandoned pretty quickly as impractical. Population density is the main thing, I suppose, but the biggest problem in a lot of places were the numbers of metro areas that covered parts of two or more states: not just NY, Boston, Philly, but also Chicago, Charlotte, Omaha, and Portland, just to name a few. I think it would be just completely impossible to enforce state-by-state lockdowns outside of maybe the mountain west -- which is also the area where you're most likely to get shot for trying to tell people what to do.

The rest of Australia has essentially been leading pretty normal lives since June 2020.

Geez, it seems every story I read about Australia concerns COVID lockdowns, protests, riots and the police arresting people for eating a sandwich in public.

If only Australia had access to Ivermectin like India. If only . . .