Hello Ronald, I thought you might be interested in the current stats from my part of the world. Here in Western Australia, we had really hard border closures and quarantine requirements and with those, managed not to have community transmission of COVID for two years - every time a case escaped from quarantine leaks etc, we jumped on it with snap lockdowns, region locking and contact tracing.
This meant life went on pretty normally in our state, aside from social distancing and some other precautions, and having few interstate or overseas visitors. We spent very little time locked down and most of the time working as normal, and no health disruptions. No recession here. We only opened our borders again very recently, when our 16+ population was 95% double vaccinated and everyone who wanted a booster shot had had one.
Community transmission then set in two months back and we are currently approaching our predicted caseload peak.
We are having a very soft landing compared to other places - very few hospitalisations / ICU cases, very few deaths. We also didn't get an exponential curve once we hit community transmission, but a series of plateaus.
116,423 Coronavirus Cases and 42,988 Active in WA - COVID Live
Very interesting watching the numbers here at the moment. The site updates daily. The 7 deaths reported for today actually weren't all from today, it was just one and the others were historical ones they wanted to add into the tally that for some reason didn't get tallied when they happened.
Just a really good contrast to what happens when you got community transmission in places pre-vaccine, or in populations with a lower vaccination rate. Between vaccination and mandatory indoor mask wearing in public places since we got community transmission, it's really held spread and serious illness at bay.