You are making my very point for me. If you read all my posts on...

You are making my very point for me.

If you read all my posts on this subject, it is because Australia seems to be such an outlier to other countries that has led to the logical question of whether or not the figures we see presented in terms of global infection and mortality rates are at all meaningful.

And I don't think governments in Australia were necessarily doing such a great job - they only shut down incoming flights some 12 days ago we were all still happily going to pubs and restaurants and coffee shops 10 days ago; and the real social distancing discipline only kicked in about a week ago. That's a really tardy response, if you think about it.

But where we have, and are doing, done a truly world-leading job is in terms of testing for the virus; as of the last figure I saw, we had conducted 270,000 tests (more than 1.1% of the population).

Unlike the European countries, where testing has been a fraction of 1% of the population, and has been heavily weighted to people already heavily symptomatic, here in Australia our testing has been a more randomly conducted - nowhere near 100% random, mind, because there is still a symptomatic testing skew - but certainly far more random.

The point being made is that we haven't had a clear sense of how many cases of the virus there have actually been and whether the number of cases we are observing is only the tip that we can see, with an iceberg of asymptomatic - or mildly symptomatic - cases beneath the surface.

Which is why the Australian situation - with its most advanced (but still not totally unbiased) testing regime - is important to monitor....because it is a leading indicator of the true rate of infection

Of the 270,000 tests conducted, at total of ~5,500 cases has been diagnosed (a 2% infection rate [*])... and remember, the current rates of infection reflect that social circumstances 10-14 days ago, which is when we were all still behaving in a decidedly complacent manner.


[*] Of course, people could still get the virus subsequent to being tested for it, but the fact is that the Australian experience - which encompasses a far more representative data set than other countries - suggests that the virus is not as contagious than the cases in European countries, where testing has been less widespread and systematically skewed, suggest.