It’s a violation of various privacy acts to disclose personal medical information.
No more than is already disclosed about covid+ people. Obviously if you talk about small numbers and specific places, then people can figure things out. "A 49yo trainer who works at ACE gym in Clayton South -" yeah there's only one of us so... :)
I don't really believe in QALY and similar measures. Obviously I feel differently personally, but across a whole state or country, I believe the life of my healthy 9yo son should be given neither more nor less weight than the life of 92yo diabetic demented corpulent Gladys in the nursing home. So I'm interested in weighing it up: action A causes X deaths, action B causes Y deaths, whether A>B or A<B determines whether we pursue action A or B.
It's certainly worth doing something which might kill 1,000 people if it saves another 2,000 lives, but reverse the numbers and we come to a different conclusion. For this we need numbers.
I'd be content to keep statistics statewide and weekly, even monthly, and in fact I'd be happy if we just reported "excess deaths from any cause". For example, we
know that March and April saw 815 excess deaths in Victoria. Voluntary behaviours changed starting about March 1st, and government lockdowns March 23rd, with all of April having some sort of lockdown statewide. We know that covid deaths were 19 in March and April, and so 796 extra deaths occurred because of lockdown measures, both voluntary and state-imposed.
Thus, if lockdown measures saved 796 people from dying from covid in March and April, we're better off. At time of this writing, Australia has suffered 379 deaths and 23,035 cases overall; we have extensive testing and even in May it was assumed this led to capturing 85% of the infections, we've really taken off on testing then especially in Victoria so it'd be higher still now. Anyway this leads to a death rate of 1.64% in Australia. To get 796 more deaths from covid in Victoria in March and April we would have had to have 796/0.0164 = 48,000 infections, more or less. 800 infections a day, basically.
Is it reasonable to assume that some or all of the voluntary lockdown measures in the first part of March, and the mandated lockdown measures in the second part of March and all of April, prevented 800 infections a day? I think yes, it is. Note: this does not mean all the measures were necessary, it may be that some of them did nothing. If I have a cut and put on a bandaid and a tinfoil hat and stop bleeding, I should not necessarily conclude that tinfoil hats are useful -
one or both of the two are useful, we need more than that single piece of data to decide. But we do know that something that was done in March and April made a difference.
For more recent months we don't have the data. As the linked article notes, Australia is unusually bad and slow at reporting and collating this data at a national level. We need to get better at that, because decisions must be informed decisions.
But we already have some other data. For example, other states did not have the same excess deaths we did. Victoria with one-quarter the country's population had one-half the excess deaths. What is different about Victoria? Well, we had the harshest lockdowns, and for the longest. And we've also since had the strongest resurgence of cases.
What else do we know? Well, until the second surge of cases, NZ and Victoria had very similar case and fatality rates. So the March-June data is that stage 4 (NZ version) vs stage 3 (Vic version) doesn't do much. Closing takeaways and Bunnings etc makes no difference. Thus, we can argue about stage 3 in Victoria, but the stage 4 we've been subjected to is punitive merely. Stage 4 is the tinfoil hat stage.
We also know that NZ has had another little bump in cases. Elimination appears to be impossible even for a relatively isolated island nation, so it'll certainly be impossible for the rest of us.
We also have data from Sweden, which has not had excess deaths since the start of July. I would note too that many of the deaths they had were avoidable. They deliberately denied medical care to the elderly because they wanted to keep hospitals free for an expected wave of younger patients who never came. Anticipatory triage. Indeed, they are even
engaging in "active euthanasia", killing people against their will.
I would hope that if Australia adopted a Swedish approach to this, we would take some parts, but not others. We would not deny medical care to anyone if we had free hospital beds, and we certainly should not deliberately kill them against their will.
Like the young woman who is thinking about sex with a married man and really deserves to know he's married before she decides, our choices should be
informed choices.