London Restrictions Set To Ease July 19th..Meanwhile Down Under

 It is hard to understand the correlation. With the UK experiencing more than 100,000 new Covid cases in the last week, a peak since the last wave, and restrictions set to ease, Sydney, on the other side of the planet, enters a hard lockdown with only 18 cases reported yesterday.

I happened to be able to report to you live, from ground zero as it were, in Randwick, part of Sydney's Eastern Suburbs. This is what I saw:

Streets are unusually empty, even near University.

Even the road up to the Children's Hospital are almost completely devoid of activity.

The empty feel even extended to the Covid testing clinic, with little or no activity observable.

Public transport, such as the Sydney light rail, which connects the area to the CBD is completely changed, with face mask, social distancing, and other measures heavily impacting numbers of commuters.

How Do The Numbers Compare To The UK

With more than 100,000 cases last week in the UK, and no more than a couple of hundred in Australia, it would be easy to conclude that the two situations don't correlate at all. Whilst, on the surface, there seems to be some merit in this thought, the reality is that the two situations do bear an important similarity.

The criteria that joins the two situations is control. Australia, with one of the lowest vaccine take-ups in the Western World, fears developing a situation such as what happened, when the UK health system was overrun.

As such, the really quite low numbers of infections are aiming to remain such...low. The authorities have responded to this concern by introducing relatively hard lockdowns throughout the country, whilst the UK is set to ease restrictions from just after mid July 2021.

Whilst it is not helpful when news media speak of Australian cases as 'exploding', the reasoning behind a strategy that, numerically bears no similarities to the situation that the UK has experienced, is sound, well coordinated, and hopefully....effective.