mopgoblin on 19/2/2021 at 21:40

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The 102 days was a span last year with no known community transmission, and community transmission is the thing I'm talking about. There were still cases at the border that were acquired overseas during that time, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying because the existence of border cases is about the circumstances/behaviour/competence of other countries. There were also a few cases in isolation hotels at the tail-end of the previous outbreak, but that's not community transmission either.

Like, since we got rid of the first outbreak, people coming into the country spend 14 days in one of a set of hotels that the government has arranged to use for that purpose. There are new cases related to that on the regular - most are people who caught the virus overseas, and occasionally someone catches it during those 14 days or while working there as a cleaner or the like. These are border cases and border-related cases*, and it doesn't make sense to consider them when looking at the efficacy of a strategy for eradicating the virus in the community because their existence is determined by other nations' efforts, not ours.

Those cases in June and July that you're talking about? They were all confirmed to be border-related. Every known case during the 102 day gap was either border-related or already in isolation; for the start of the August outbreak no definitive link was established either way. The point I'm making is that the source of the August outbreak was most likely border-related, not a sequence of local cases that had gone undetected since the previous outbreak, because the conditions needed for the latter are relatively implausible.

If you really want to count the last transmission in an isolation hotel as the start of the gap between outbreaks, that would still be 86 days, and using the high estimates from studies of the serial interval for the variants around at the time, that still means it takes an average of 14 undetected hops for a chain of transmission to span that period under normal conditions; you'd have to posit something fairly esoteric for it to be much shorter than that, and there's still the question of getting such a tall and narrow transmission tree.

* When there are new cases, we do contact tracing and testing and genetic sequencing of virus samples to try to determine the source and the chain of transmission (and especially whether it's linked to the border), and to stop the spread. Sometimes there's an overlooked contact, sometimes there's not enough material in a sample to sequence the entire genome, sometimes there might be esoteric transmission methods that complicate matters, but generally it works pretty well to identify the source.

nickie on 27/2/2021 at 15:08

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I got a phone call on Thursday and had my first dose of Astrazenica vaccine yesterday. Side effects: not a lot, a bit sleepy but there's definitely an unexpected one. 12 weeks till the 2nd dose so there'll be no changes to my lifestyle at all at the moment but I feel really different, much lighter in spirit and kind of happy which isn't like me at all. 'Course that could be because it isn't raining, the sun is shining and my fig twig isn't dead after all.