This is true. But don't they already have stuff that they've been testing, at any rate?
As I understand it, the usual vaccine development process is measured in years. This is already fast. There are multiple rounds of testing, testing things like is it safe, does it actually provide immunity, does it have unexpected side effects, etc. Typically these things would be done in serial - we're trying to do them more in parallel, but there are still limits to how fast you can go.
Why can't we just do hard lockdown - as in, no one sees anyone else for two weeks, no contact at all, and then test everyone? Then the people who come in positive can be kept home (by force if needed) and everyone else can go about their merry way. Or three weeks to be safe.
What's the false positive rate on those tests? And the false negative rate? Who's administering them? And processing them? How long does it take to test everyone? (took multiple days for a few towers, remember) Are any of the people administering them sick? How do you know there's no-one tested who has contracted it but are not quite infectious yet? Are the people keeping other people home by force not sick? Can they ensure the integrity of their protective equipment while also restraining someone?
During this hard lockdown, who's taking care of people in hospitals? Aged care homes? People feeling suicidal from the enforced isolation? People in quarantine hotels? Who's delivering babies? Who's stopping the people who inevitably break that lockdown? What's the correct response to domestic violence in lockdown? Who's keeping electricity running? Water? Other essential services?
And that's just off the top of my head. The four reasons aren't just government being too nice: There are good reasons for each of them. We can certainly debate whether we should have a harder lockdown than we have now - I'm not convinced that the benefits would outweigh the personal and community costs of going too much harder, and I think you'd get outright rebellion if you presented it as the plan that solved everything and it turned out not to. But to say we can 100% stop society for 2 weeks - we just can't.
That said, I do find it odd that this situation in Melbourne is more serious than it was in April, and yet the restrictions are slightly less restrictive. I suspect part of that is that the authorities are (correctly) wary of lockdown fatigue. The best rules in the world don't help if you can't convince enough of your population to follow them.
Like turinturambar stated, distribution also isn't easy, and poses the question of who gets vaccinated first and if those in poverty will even have access to the vaccine.
In a country like Australia, we likely have the resources to give it to everyone, poverty or not, and doing so is likely to reduce the risk for everyone in Australia (particularly if the early vaccines are more like 60 - 70% effective). We will probably rely on the fact that we can largely keep out unvaccinated people, and so people in poverty stricken
countries without the vaccine will not be as significant a risk to Australians. Not saying this is a good thing, just that I've been profoundly disappointed by how much Covid-19 has shown off our human insularity, pitting country against country, state against state, return travellers against people already in the country, community against community, etc.
I think this is because hard lockdown for any period of time will significantly worsen the already damaged economy, and the government cares about the economy a lot.
This has been Fed vs State the entire time. The Feds have more responsibility for the economy, the states more responsibility for health. They've worked together better than in some countries, but Victoria and NSW in particular have throughout been stricter than national or the other states.
Retrospectively it looks like we should've gone with the elimination strategy from the start. Given Australia has no borders with other countries and at the beginning only had minimal community transmission it becomes an ideal country to go for the elimination strategy. However, looking back I don't think a lot of the general public would've accepted this and would've said it is an overreaction. Even with the initial lockdown it was quite possible to be done once we got to low levels in Victoria but everyone was complaining about the need to open up quickly.
I still don't get how this squares with Covid-19 jumping out of quarantine hotels. Maybe that happened before we eased lockdown - I'm not 100% sure any more - but while there remains the possibility of errors, there remains the possibility of errors with serious consequences after we've declared it eliminated. NZ, poster child of elimination, have had people get out of quarantine on multiple occasions, at least one where someone was positive. They haven't had spikes as a result (that I know of), but is that 100% good management, or is there some luck as well? We had people going through quarantine hotels in Melbourne then testing positive in NT and NSW, and I don't think we know whether they caught it in hotspot suburbs once out of quarantine, or whether it was still dormant somewhere inside them (we do know people can be ill for months after catching it while testing negative - does that manifest in any other strange ways that end up contagious?)
I have long felt we should drive it as close to zero as we can get it and try to keep it there, including border control as one of our most effective measures, but I'm not sure I believe in complete elimination with absolutely zero human error (though one of the advantages of driving it towards zero is that you can make more mistakes without consequences - because I still believe other states and other individuals within other states have made mistakes, but got away with those mistakes because they had a low virus load and maybe got a bit lucky).
The economy vs health argument is interesting. We have already seen some countries that have prioritised the economy but they are still getting destroyed regardless. Australia has done ok to somewhat artificially prop up the economy via stimulus payments but once this is all over the real impact of the pandemic is likely to be seen.
Part of the problem is that governments cannot by fiat declare that their citizens will not be scared of Covid-19 or of unemployment. Many people were reducing their economic activity before official lockdowns, and that hits the economy. Then of course businesses close and companies lay off workers (less here with JobKeeper, but it's still an issue). Then people feel less certain about the security of their jobs and are more worried about spending, and the cycle continues. I largely agreed with Scott Morrison's "once you start re-opening you should try not to close again", because it shatters confidence re-closing and that will have long-term consequences - but we always knew that there could be situations serious enough to have to go backwards. Without the quarantine hotels here, maybe Victoria would have avoided spikes too. No idea. Rightly or wrongly, I did feel fairly safe in Melbourne in June, though I didn't go out of my way to join gatherings of people (other than family) or to eat in (or even to get my hair cut
).
When I compare us with, say, the US, the US has many states which reopened against the health advice because of the economy, and quite a few are now re-closing. We re-opened following health advice, and, as I said, I at least thought it was tracking fairly well for the first month...
Finally, I can see in retrospect that a number of times during this pandemic my opinion has been wrong - so don't trust my judgement in public health matters