At the moment..I remember your earlier projection Australia was in big trouble..have done well.. Would you say?
Definitely. We got in early and slowed it right down.
There's 3 main ways to attack this virus. Eahc one has a turning point that when cases get too many, you need to move to the next strategy:
1) stop the spread early through contact tracing
2) stop the spread early through lockdowns
3) herd immunity
The 3rd option leads to the most amount of deaths but when it gets too far then it's generally at that stage for places like New York and Spain that have too many cases to shut it down. Australia is at strategy 2 and it has worked well enough that we can now use strategy 1 to stop it. Places like Taiwan got in early on strategy 1 and didn't need to go to another strategy.
There's downsides that we will face. While many will die in NYC and Spain now, a second wave won't do as much damage. A second wave in Australia could be devastating because we don't have that herd immunity. Unless a vaccine arrives before then.
BTW, herd immunity is a calculation based on infection rate. Generally from what we've seen of this virus R0 rate, we would need 80-90% of the population to be infected for herd immunity.
If Australia gets to the stage where we need to take the herd immunity approach, we're looking at anywhere from 50,000 - 200,000 deaths. So we don't want to take that approach.