вЂњAnd now weвЂ™re going right back into the same kind of economic distress that the rest of the world is now experiencing.вЂќ вЂњWhat we basically did was delay the wave of deaths that we could have had, and gotten over with, in 2020,вЂќ Foster said. But this is essentially starting on the path of withholding yourself from the rest of the world and letting the rest of the world pay the price of developing herd immunity and doing the technological innovations to fight the virus, she explained. It is true that during the lockdowns and the border closures in Australia, deaths and even infections due to COVID-19 were reasonably low compared to the rest of the world, and the economic performance was also reasonably good for a couple of years, Foster said.ДЄs an island nation, Australia has the capacity to close its borders, and seriously decrease the amount of virus that comes in, the professor said. However, in Australia there are quite a lot of people dying from COVID-19 right now, she noted. вЂњAfter tabulating and calculating, trying to quantify all the various dimensions of costs that lockdowns policies actually cause people to pay, we calculated that lockdowns are about 30 or 35 times more costly than what they could possibly have delivered in benefits,вЂќ Foster asserted.ДЄn argument is often made that lockdowns will save the population until a vaccine is developed and that when people get the vaccine, in theory, fewer of them will die, Foster said. In August 2020, Foster and Sanjeev Sabhlok, then-economist with the government of Victoria in Australia, performed a cost-benefit analysis of lockdown policies ( pdf) for consideration by the Victorian parliament. This was not done for lockdowns either in Australia or in the United States, she added.

The standard approach in implementing public policies is to perform cost-benefit analysis to evaluate each policy, Foster said. The world has still not acknowledged that the human costs of lockdowns are gargantuan relative to the benefits that they could possibly deliver, even in an island nation like Australia, said Gigi Foster, a professor at the University of New South WalesвЂ™ School of Economics in Australia.Д«efore 2020, lockdowns of the healthy population were not part of the pandemic management plan in Australia because they were considered too costly, Foster told EpochTVвЂ™s вЂњ American Thought LeadersвЂќ program in a June 9 interview. After weighing the various costs and benefits of the lockdowns imposed on Australian people during the COVID-19 pandemic, two Australian researchers found that financial and human costs incurred due to lockdowns exceeded the benefits 30 to 35 times.

Australia lockdown