Message to the young and immortal
A fully fit 28 year old who ran marathons tells what it was like for him to get Coronavirus. He ended up spending 13 days in ICU. His ongoing liver problems and weakness will take a month or two to get better.
His message to young people out at parties or on the beach: ” You might survive, but the old person that didn’t get that ventilator might not…”
But the spread of stories like this rule out some future paths.
Forget all the pussy-foot weak quarantines
This shows that the “Let it RIP” approach and the “Herd Immunity” approach were never even worth discussing. The community would not tolerate the risk or inhumanity of either. But this also shows that the Slow Bleed approach of weak Social Distancing for six months will be dumped like a hot rock asap (it’ll be rebadged and quietly wrapped in stronger stuff). As Italy found (and now Spain) weak quarantine doesn’t work very well. Only serious quarantine can solve this.
Speaking of solving this: Good to hear that cases are possibly slowing in Italy. Looks promising. What did Italy do 12 days ago — On March 12th, as the death toll hit 827, and infections topped 12,000, they locked down all shops bar the essential ones. They clamped down on public gatherings. Non-essential travel was stopped. Sadly in the last twelve days the totals have climbed to 64,000 Italians infected, and 6,000 dead and more presumably will die, though it already appears to be leveling (could be an illusion). How many lives would have been saved if Italy had acted a day sooner? (Or a week?). Some countries have the gift of time to act faster.
Have new daily cases in Italy finally peaked? Source: Worldometer, Italy
As stories like these spread (below of the 28 year old) a quite reasonable fear will grow and people will choose to quarantine, indeed some will refuse to go to work. There is no way the economy can keep running along with business as usual while the threat of this ticks in the background. This is not something we can live with for six months — the fear will take over a healthy economy and make it unhealthy without any government intervention anyway. The only option is some variation of short sharp and hard quarantine, or crushing the curve as I’ve been saying. It’s where we are all headed.
If we do the quarantine properly the infection will peak and fall much sooner. If we get enough testing kits, we can pursue this virus and search and destroy every last copy. Then as I said — we reopen the clean zones one by one, keep borders and barriers tight and gradually reduce the infected zone. As each clean zone reopens (sooner than people think) small parts of the economy will spring back to life.
….
Right now, the path out of this is clear:
1. Start “stay at home” quarantine asap. Close schools (apart from essential services families).Lock all borders. The more the better. Even regions.
2. Order mass supplies of Chloroquine (or all other potentially useful anti-virals.)
3. Build factories to make test kits and ventilators en masse.
4. Use the test kits to identify who has immunity and who does and doesn’t need protective gear or isolation.
5. After two weeks of quarantine we can identify regions with no infections. Build from there.
I have sometimes wondered if there’s a Big difference between avoiding a specific threat like CV19, and creating an immune system that has so much experience at dealing with many low level threats that it can respond to new unique challenges that come along periodically?
What happens in each case when the next challenge arrives.
Vaccinations are essential and give specific immunity.
A highly challenged immune system may cope better with new viruses and bacteria.
Bacteriology and virology are outside my area of expertise, but as a kid my immune system was regularly “challenged”.
KK
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There seems to be a contradiction in your post, KK.
Are you suggesting that vaccines make for a lazy immune system? That’s the impression I get from what you have posted. Surely you don’t hold that view?
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Hi Sam,
You always seem to add stuff that wasn’t specifically said.
Vaccines are essential for the one in a million threat but what about the everyday challenges that can’t be avoided.
In Australia we have now many people who have rarely been in touch with dirt and their bodies react badly to things.
Is the peanut disease a result of us becoming too clean for our own good.
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BTW, Heathrow appears to be still allowing flights in.
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Thanks KK.
I tend to look between the lines. It’s probably because I’m a sceptic. Not everything is as it seems on the surface, unfortunately.
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Well, I’d heard that the US Fed apparently has now had laws changed so it can buy stuff, and has been spending up big on big corporations like Lockheed etc.
The US Fed is actually a private bank, with shareholders, presumably many globalists.
Apparently the global financial system had been pillaged to the point where it was going to collapse ( and the list of crimes may be huge ), now we have a managed “reset” whereby all that badness is conveniently washed away in the chaos…..
https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2018-12-31/COUNTDOWN-HAS-BEGUN-A-Full-Financial-RESET-U-S-Screwed-Up-On-So-Many-Fronts.html
So while everyone is looking the other way, locked down by obedient govts against what appears to be a “designer” bug, the banksters are off scott free buying everything…..
Evil is as evil does….
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Predicting a global “reset”
https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2016overview_en.pdf
“The upshot is that continuing weak demand in developed economies is stifling growth in the global economy. The expected positive impacts of
lower commodity prices, particularly oil, have not materialized. Higher levels of public debt are failing to stimulate demand and boost growth,
largely because these are a consequence of balance sheet adjustments in other parts of the economy. The persistent drag on growth in most
developed countries is due to a falling wage share and insufficient household demand that have not been offset by higher investment
spending.
“Neither financial bubbles nor export surges offer a sustainable solution to the tepid growth and weak labour market conditions.
Financial bubbles can provide a temporary boost, at best, but they tend to aggravate the deflationary gap by increasing inequality, and
create supply-side distortions that impede productivity growth. Export surpluses can certainly benefit countries that achieve them, but are
ultimately a beggar-thy-neighbour response in a world of insufficient global demand.
“In the absence of concerted recoveries in the developed economies, international trade is in the doldrums for the fifth straight year. To date,
protectionist tendencies have been kept in check, but risk surfacing if the real causes of this slowdown are not tackled effectively. The major
problem is weak global demand due largely to stagnant real wages.
“The slowdown of trade has stalled growth in many developing countries, particularly commodity exporters, and recent growth spurts
have relied largely on capital inflows. As capital begins to flow out, there is now a real danger of entering a third phase of the financial crisis
which began in the United States housing market in late 2007 before spreading to the European sovereign bond market
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The only problem with all that nonsense is it’s fake news.
Especially this bit:
Evidence please OS. Evidence.
Here’s mine:
1. USA
“Wages in the United States increased 3.66 percent in January of 2020 over the same month in the previous year.”
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth
“As the following chart shows, today’s wages in the United States are at a historically high level.”
https://www.statista.com/chart/17679/real-wages-in-the-united-states/
2. Australia
Wage Price Index, Australia, Dec 2019 “rose 2.2% over the twelve months to the December quarter 2019.”
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6345.0/
Now, compare that to the CPI over the same period.
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Sam says,
“Evidence please OS. Evidence.
Here’s mine:”
Have I misinterpreted Steve’s post?
It seems to be saying that the quotes he put up are Economic Waffle put out to confuse the public while the Elites reorganise their giant skimming machine.
The quotes seem to be the evidence.
KK
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Funny you should mention vaccinations, as the latest Medcram suggests the tuberculosis vaccines may assist in boosting the immune system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqKwAIIy-Mo&t=0s
As for isolation … What isolation? It is early now but check all the flights still operating later in the day (yes, I tend to sleep 9pm till 3-4ish, which is why I post at odd times sometimes for a Perthite):
https://flightaware.com/live/airport/YPPH
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Any additional challenge to the immune system is a positive in dealing with the next Big one?
Vaccinations are artificially induced challenges that go beyond helping with specific diseases?
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Interesting article about dealing with this epidemic which also contains a link to an interactive tool where you can play about with Covid-19 statistics.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
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I read the executive summary. Well written.
00
Vaccines prevent the disease; however, there appears to be a cure for people who have the problem.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/stunning-ny-doctor-vladimir-zelenko-finds-100-success-rate-in-350-patients-using-hydroxychloroquine-with-z-paks-video/
“ The New York doctor also posted a video explaining his success with hydroxychloroquine and Zinc . His treatment resulted in the shortness of breath issue being resolved in 4 to 6 hours. Dr. Zelenko in his study had zero deaths, zero hospitalizations and zero intubations!”
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Cool…that explains why the stocks of the stuff is drying up.
And if it doesn’t make it to hospitals, all hell will break loose I suspect….
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OriginalSteve, have replied on this in response to post 17.
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And a very good response too.
Thank you, Sunni Bakchat.
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/young-and-fit-brought-down-means-hard-sharp-quarantine-coming-everywhere/#comment-2297632
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Yeah … check a few threads ago where Jo talked about it. The latest hypothesis is that Tuberculosis vaccines may also boost the immune system against this virus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqKwAIIy-Mo&t=13s
I told our local pharmacist almost two weeks ago that chloroquine variants might be sought after.
BTW in the US there was a Darwin award for someone who killed themselves drinking fish tank cleaner because it contained chloroquine phosphate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/24/coronavirus-chloroquine-poisoning-death/
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Check a few threads further back where i raised it for the first time on this blog. The point i’m making that seems to be lost is that you don’t need to go to your doctor for a prescription to obtain a prophylactic dose. Its freely available over the counter and in your local supermarket.
I wouldn’t say the TB vaccine’s immune boost is theoretical. Dr Seheult in Medcram shows very clearly the scientific research results. He also demonstrates very clearly the cellular effect of Chloroquine and Zinc. Which of course is being repeated successfully in many experimental hospital treatments.
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The only hope of a lockdown that we have is if kids get X-Boxes nation wide. 🙂
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Global X-Boxes?
The question remains.
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This thread is essentially about beating challenges to the immune system and getting it in the best state possible to resist such challenges.
In Moderation.
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I don’t think the example of a marathon runner is necessarily a good one. It is well known that people who train seriously for such events are stressing their body greatly, & are more prone to things like the common cold.
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“The number of cases of coronavirus in Italy is probably 10 times higher than the official tally of almost 64,000, the head of the agency that is collating the data said on Tuesday.
Latest figures show 6,077 people have died from the infection in barely a month, making Italy the worst-affected country in the world, with close to double the number of fatalities in China, where the virus emerged last year.
However, testing for the disease has often been limited to people seeking hospital care, meaning that thousands of cases have certainly gone undetected.
“A ratio of one certified case out of every 10 is credible,” Angelo Borrelli, the head of the Civil Protection Agency, told La Repubblica newspaper, indicating he believed as many as 640,000 people could have been infected in the country.”
If correct, the above would suggest that the case fatality rate for Italy is misleadingly high.
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China? You mean figures issued by the Chinese Communist Party? The totalitarian state that puts its medicos in gaol for speaking the truth. No clear thinking person should ever accept figures issued by the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, nor should they accept figures issued by the Chinese Communist Party’s running dog – the WHO.
Secondly, we seem to be increasingly subjected to those who seek to diminish the death rate of this disease. What is their agenda?
Even you suggest that perhaps the case fatality rate for Italy is “misleadingly high”.
So what?
Tell that to the 6,077 Italians who have died from COVID-19, the Chinese virus, so far.
The deaths are what counts. The overloaded hospitals are what counts. The collapsing economies are what counts. The lack of Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine is what counts. The lack of ventilators and ICU beds is what counts. Doctors and nurses and other hospital staff, exhausted and probably infectious, is what counts.
Do you think that a precisely accurate death rate is going to make any difference to those figures?
What’s the agenda?
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The case fatality can also be misleadingly low. Those in retirement/nursing homes arent tested, They arent tested when they die either. The death notices in Italy have exploded to 10 times that of an entire year
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I am waiting for information to determine the real CFR. I have not seen any statistics from any Nations on the number of chest x-rays that match the COV 19 pathology, which is 98% accurate for determining COV 19 infection. This has been known for two months. But our media never ask these questions. Our media is very uninformed. ( Being polite)
Would appreciate a link to the information on nursing home death notices with no testing done for Cov19 infection.
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Listening to the PM tonight …I cant believe they are “tippy toeing” around the infection risks with this virus….! For heavens sake the restrictions are NOT severe enough
New Zealand has Level 4 restrictions from 12pm Wednesday…NO unnecessary travel unless essential ,with police checking…NO Retail stores… Supermarket numbers restricted ……Payment of petrol is by card only …people lining up in low temperatures OUTSIDE servos. Cash cannot be used….
All schools closed except for children of essential workers…….
The PM tonight is doing nothing but ..bloody confusing everyone ..
List the things we CANT do first…….not ALL the exceptions in between
I found the PM’s speech ..very confusing and not at all very “clear” and straightforward…!
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SLOMO’s approach resembles the way of wombat infested with lice..
Confused and confusing.
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I don’t agree Bill.
He’s the man trying to herd cats. Feral cats in some cases.
And, their propaganda arm, their ABC, spends time on trying to find “confusion” where none exists. Schools, for example. They’re open. You don’t have to send your kids if you don’t want to, but you can if you need to. That, according to their ABC is “confusion”.
You’d prefer Albo and his unions comrades?
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Skeptical Sam . . . . replied to your reply yesterday . . . .
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No !
No to Albo !
But Slomo MUST put his skates on !
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Not only confusing but also contradictory and misleading. The impression I had a few days ago was that we had our international borders closed for non-Australians only and so people were still being allowed into the country by ship and plane without any checks at all. What does it mater whether one is an Australian citizen or not? ALL incoming people, Australian or not MUST be tested first before being allowed into our country. Is this a national emergency or not? If it is then treat it that way. State and Federal leaders have been very careless.
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I agree with that.
However, isn’t that a slightly different thing to the assertions of Bill’s about PM Morrison?
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PM Morrison is like anyone else – only human. So mistakes will be made. Given the over bureaucratic nature of our system the wheels have been slow to spin up. So let’s don’t apportion too much blame on the PM for now. What is needed now is a war room situation where specific leaders are assigned to manage the two crisis we now face; biological and economic. I hear PM Morrison is now turning to that style by assigning roles to various “captains of industry”. Good move. One person can’t do it all. We still lack a “Churchill” to manage the whole thing and execute critical actions but I think the PM is slowly being trained on the job to becoming one. Time will tell. He ought to scrap the emissions reduction nonsense. Now is the perfect time to do so to help business and workers get back on their feet ASAP. It would be a big fail if he doesn’t.
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I agree ..Morrison was very confusing tonight.
I wonder how many people went to bed tonight thinking they no longer had a job…when…halfway through the press conference the PM said…
‘food courts and shopping centres will not be allowed to continue’…
the ‘and’..not ‘in’…. being recorded in the strip at the bottom of the screen…and in the subtitles.
He corrected it but too late.
He makes too many asides and lengthy qualifications that blur the message…and thinks that so long as he maintains radio silence on the Ruby Princess catastrophe we’ll all forget about it and have confidence in the dills who put the whole country onto a new plateau of risk.
He pretends too that if schools are closed for regular operations…there’ll be nowhere for the children of health and essential workers to be looked after…pretending not to know that States have offered skeleton-staffed schools as a solution….when we all know they have.
The claim that it’s because children will miss out on their education’s a sham as well…as if the whole country doesn’t know that the education Australian kids are getting now is one of the world’s most ineffective…that they’ll probable get much better outcomes with the pared-down version minus the indoctrination and climate change rubbish [hopefully]…or just with parental supervision of computer programs.
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I thought Kim Beasley was the master of circumlocution until I heard the PM last night. Boring and stumbling that we switched to something else. Paul Murray wasted his show in this clear as mud nonsense. This will do Morrison no good in my opinion.
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Shannon said:
Bit of an oops there Shannon: 12pm is Midday. Midnight is 12:00AM — usu. next day.
To avoid that sort of confusing confusion
– midnight can be written as 24:00 hrs meaning Midnight that day
– or it can be written as 00:00 meaning start of Next Day.
Still Confused?
It’s not Midday. The country goes into Level 4 (lockdown) just before midnight at 11.59pm.
(ref: https://covid19.govt.nz/ — mainly so that silly mistake couldn’t be made.) Even (un)civil Civil Servants could make mistakes so it was made mistake-proof. You could say it shows supreme confidence in NZ’s education system 😀
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Which is why the British military use(d) 2359 for midnight and always the 24 hour clock for time generally, no confusion. I just can’t believe someone started the nonsense of something like 06.00pm, for example. What?! They should say 6.00pm or 1800. 0600 is in the morning, otherwise 6.00am.
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Sophocles….Its “nit picking” people like you that has driven the pathetic response to anyone trying to inform or help fellow Aussies….particularly in the situation we now find ourselves in……..
Why not do something useful and apply to help out people to response to this catastrophy….ie maybe volunteer at C/Link if you are experienced in IT …Medical field needs people for positions as well…….Ask your elderly neighbours if you can do some urgent shopping for them…..People need to become “responsible”…step up and START considering others instead of themselves.!
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New Zealand is under Level 4 because New Zealand is run by a tyrant.
This is not because they need to, it is because they can.
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Update: as of 1221 Wed 25 March
we are under a declared State of Emergency
for the next 7 days minimum.
Meet the new boss, Sarah Stuart-Black – who?
Go to rnz dot co dot nz (before they switch off the intertubes).
Zee plan eez verkink poyfictly! Ba’a’a’a . . .
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The government is on a hiding to nothing with this.
If the efforts are successful in curbing the virus, & our infection is small, they will be accused of over reacting.
If they are not successful, & the infection goes up like Italy they will be accused of not acting quickly enough.
With a disgusting organisation like their ABC what else can you expect?
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In NZ we told all non-essential workers to go home and stay there , with restriction on movement and consumer activity.
All non-essential business to close.
Amazing how much is non-essential.More than half I reckon.
Essential business to carry on but must answer two questions.
1)workers on site (including owner) number 5 or less? Yes. Proceed to question 2) can the workers maintain “social distancing? Yes
Carry on Comrade.
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Shannon
Do not be fooled by the pronouncements coming out of NZ. Yes schools are now closed but school holidays were coming anyway and they have now moved them to a week earlier, to ensure they are covered by the lock down period.
We can still go to the supermarkets , pharmacies, doctors , vets , petrol stations etc. Just have wait to get into the supermarkets as they limit the number of people in at any one time. Similarly with other places.
Borders were meant to closed by apparently by the end of the close down time 20,000 would have arrived this week. No screening at the airports –not even a temp check. Just have to fill a card to so say where you will self isolate.
I could go but hopefully you get the idea —a lot of smoke and mirrors.
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‘Young and fit’ does not necessarily properly describe a younger person who runs their body ragged in races and training, and in addition is likely to follow a weird diet. Super-stressed bodies like that are probably not a useful benchmark.
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Often those super fitness junkies die quite young too.
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Do athletes normally nearly die of double-pneumonia?
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The only social medium I use is sport-oriented Strava which is essentially a place where you boast about your training. The mindset of many people there is to get together and socialise but the virus has thrown a spanner in their works. Not to be outdone the Brits have organised a COVID19 Club where the idea is to still achieve 19km of training a week somehow as long as you socially distance, in your backyard if necessary. So far over 50,000 people worldwide have joined up. I personally find this in very poor taste but runners and cyclists tend to be rather selfish and insensitive.
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good point. add to that the fact that for the last 2 decades it has been insisted that everything is super clean and so immunity to common or garden bugs hasn’t been built up. As you say, some of these diets are extreme and add in that an increasing number are vegans who may be missing some vital nutrients.
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Well the PM has just announced a whole lot more businesses which will have to closed.
But to be frank he has not yet realised the extent of the shut down needed urgently.
Here in SA we’ve gone from 7 people infected on Saturday the 7th to 170 today the 24th.
In 17 days !
SA needed to close the borders on the 7th. to prevent further infected arrivals
instead it happened today.
On the exponential increase that has happened since the 7th is maintained
We will have ~ 5000 in another 17 days.
Our SA premier Steve Marshall is boasting about how he values health above the economy.
But the figures show that he is a liar
From the 7th till the 22nd he put the economy well before the health of South Australians.
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The PM has announced with the Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer at his side, announced the decisions taken yesterday evening by the Council Of Australian Governments leaders cabinet consisting of State Premiers, Territories Chief Ministers and Prime Minister who is the chairman and spokesman.
State Health Departments and State Public Hospitals are the front line and most of the actions taken are the areas of responsibility of State and Territory governments.
As the PM said in reply to a journalist’s question recently, he said he is a medical professional and the leaders rely on advice from medical professionals.
Posting “he has not realised” and similar is inaccurate.
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He is NOT a medical professional.
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And please bear in mind that the Commonwealth of Australia was formed by the Federation of States, the former colonies that were self governing before Federation.
The Federal Government looks after external affairs, defence, territories, higher education, federal police and border force, immigration etc. And as the major collector of taxes provides funding in part to States and Territory governments as applied for and/or otherwise agreed.
Council Of Australian Governments (COAG) consists of all the State and Territory leaders and the Prime Minister, other cabinet ministers also attend from time to time.
The Commonwealth does not control the States they are sovereign states and have constitutional laws protecting state powers and rights. I understand this is much the same as in the United States of America and Federal Government.
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Given the demise of Australian history as a subject in Australia’s schools, you and I must be two of the few who understand that, Dennis.
Their ABC and most of the Millennial media writers clearly have no idea.
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Jo, I used some of the graphs and stats in your posts to base my own writing upon,, and I also note that Boris in the UK has almost instituted the total lockdown needed to hard stop this infection.
As I implored, we need that shock, that attempt to shock a slightly insulated audience that the ONLY way to bring this terrible disease into a manageable phase.
I hope that the effort works, for my Daughter and my two sons, as well as my four Grandchildren, because that is the history and future of our Nation, in miniature.
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RE Point 1: To the young and immortal, Stay home. Don’t socialise. This can be beaten if people take this seriously and self isolate even if you have no symptoms.
lets squash this.
Our music legends lecture us from afar.
It was strange to see Madonna sat in a bath with petals preaching death.
I believe she should have done what Chris Mann did in singing one of her songs “vogue” that he recorded and released on march 19 as “stay home”.
This is the song the young, immortal and ignorant need to view and heed. It should be on high rotation.
It is “stay home” which addresses point 1 above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xt58OVnmXU
Stay well all.
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And, if you estimate 6 million undetected, mortality will be even lower. How many do you need ? Maybe use a model to estimate 60 million, then almost no one will die and few need ICU’s. Back to business as usual ?
How about count what may be verified ? How about use the temperature that actually was measured and not fiddle with the record ?
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Doesnt matter what the undetected penetration of the virus might be.It is known to be quite lethal and those high ratio fatalities will reveal themselves when old age homes become compromised
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Will put it another way. Once the virus attack (penetration) reaches 5-10% you can be confident that most old age facilities will be compromised. It wil produce a lot of fatalities in that environment. it will be hard to ignore
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This is the UK’s plan to isolate all seniors in a tight lockdown now and then build up societies herd immunity in the overall population to protect the seniors when they emerge from isolation several months hence.
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No, it totally matters what the undetected penetration is because it drives the lethality calculations.
Example – Someone dies and the post mortem discovers a previously unknown virus. World wide there is one known case and that person is dead from it. 100% lethal.
Then, since you know what you are looking for, you test and discover a million people also has this virus. Since the virus is 100% lethal they are all now dead now, right? Well fortunately not. All of these people are completely healthy and when you test again down the track they have all recovered.
So the evidence now indicates that rather than 100%, it is only fatal in one out of a million and one cases.
See how this works?
The other take away from this is that the more you test the more likely you are to find more cases. The simple act of looking allows for more chance of discovery and, if taken out of context, this can lead to the conclusion that the virus (or whatever it is you are actually looking for) is significantly more infectious than first reported.
Instead what you may – again, context is everything – actually be seeing is that the virus is actually a lot more non threatening than first assumed.
Context.
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“Status of cases in Ontario
This web page will be updated with the most up-to-date information on the status of cases in Ontario, every day, seven days a week, at 10:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. ET.
Negative1 21795
Currently under investigation2 10074
Confirmed positive3 572
Resolved4 8
Deceased 8
Total number of patients approved for COVID-19 testing to date 32457”
https://www.ontario.ca/page/2019-novel-coronavirus#section-0
10,074tests have been taken but not yet analyzed. That is 1/3 pf all tasts made sincecthe start
Priority was first given to those who had a high probabability of contact from being abroad or known cases. Now testing priority is for health careand aged care workers to reduce transmission to the most vulnerable..
So what is the real infection rate in Ontario? !
10
Even been exposed to the pea and thimble game Mudcrab?
The 6,077 dead Italians and the failing Italian hospital system tells you where the pea is in this game.
It doesn’t matter what the death rate is. It’s the real numbers that count here.
It doesn’t matter what your “lethality calculations” show.
Why? Because it’s obvious that the medical and hospital systems can’t cope with the numbers. A lower rate won’t fix that.
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“60% of known infections come from asymptomatic people ” !
Norman Swann !
Bugger that blows the whole testing process out of the water !
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This was what the Chinese repeatedly warned about in January.
We knew the kidneys and small intestine had high expression of the ACE2 receptor, yet our testing continued to focus only on the respiratory tract.
We need to do far more thorough and widespread testing to get the benefit from lockdown.
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A total lockdown for 4 weeks will deliver a huge benefit regardless of testing.
You only need greater testing volume to measure the benefit of the lockdown. We need wider testing now for mainly political purposes to defend against later accusations of “we dun a lockdown all fer nuthin!”
There is some research saying that people are most infectious between 3 and 8 days after infection. Probably that is because they shed virus before they start feeling symptoms and self-isolating. There is also preliminary evidence (Figure 2) the virus sheds contagiously for over 10 days after symptoms have subsided. But in most cases it drops to undetectable levels 21 days after symptom onset. So 28 days is plenty, though anyone getting sick in the final week should have their isolation timer reset for another 21 days. All this nonsense about 6 months of partial restrictions is going to incur way more than the cost of a total lockdown and yet be far less effective at halting asymptomatic spread.
Anyone who wants value for money is going to switch on to the lockdown idea soon enough. It’s also for a rather pragmatic reason that we simply do not have any technology available here to stop this virus yet, we have only our own behaviour. The only button on our contagion control panel is the “PAUSE” button.
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Over the past few weeks here, I have read words from bloggers questioning whether Jo is presenting an extremist view that is not welcomed and even not correct.
I am writing in her complete defence.
There are experienced scientists used to looking at numbers and their meanings. Such people tend to form tentative hypotheses well before the herd. They can be spectacularly right or wrong, but more often right comes with experience and confidence.
I suspect that Jo had no personal gain from taking a clear, early position. It is what such people do, get to the crux of the matter quickly.
There is another consideration. I have had the misfortune to need deep conversations with a number of medical specialists, as well as many non-medical scientists. The groups have evolved different logic paths over many decades, because the nature of their numbers is different. It should not surprise that from the start of Corona virus, different strong actions floated around.
Right from the start I was on the same wavelength as
Jo, quite independently. Because I am in the rather high risk population, I felt deserted by the policy makers as they fiddled about with stopping the spread, some under the thrall of money loss or gain. Like, what were they thinking as they kept playing sport, left Casinos open, schools open while unloading thousands of at-risk passengers from cruise liners.
From me (who apologises when wrong) to Jo – you called it right based on good science. Don’t be swayed, unless new science gives new data that makes a change appropriate.
Geoff S
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Totally agree Geoff !
Big pandemic risks need to be spotted early
Because of the health risks !
jo spotted those risk in early February
And I am personally grateful to her
Because her early warnings gave me & my lady weeks
To get prepared.
Thanks Jo !
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We are both at risk of developing Covid-19 life threatening conditions especially my wife, I’ve had a fully collapsed lung from pneumonia and influenza A and B in recent years and Mrs Yonnie has a life long history of respiratory problems.
Apart from a poorly done song parody a few weeks back I’ve listened to Jo and others following this new virus and take any potential threat to our lives seriously.
Stay safe and well Geoff.
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You too, Yonniestone and Mrs Yonniestone.
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From: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/24/the-italian-connection/
” The Italian Connection [My bolding]
“Willis Eschenbach / 5 hours ago March 24, 2020
“Figure 4. Other diseases (comorbidities) of a sample of 355 of the 2,003 Italians who had COVID-19 at the time of their death.
“For me, this was the most surprising finding of the entire study. Of all 355 people who died, only three did not have any of the diseases listed above. Three!
“Looking at all of this as a whole picture, I had a curious thought about who they were representing. I thought … consider the characteristics of the people who died:”……..
More of the patients were over 90 than were under 60.
The average age was 79 years.
All but three of them had at least one other disease, so basically all of them were already sick.
Three-quarters of them had two other diseases, and half of them had three or more other diseases. Half!
51
Worst article from Will I have ever read.
He needs to go back to disputing climate science
Fast !
32
Don’t close your mind Bill or even Jo.
I will read the comments on the recent post by Will to see what you have to say there.
00
I did read the comments
See below my post with Steve Mosher’s comment. He lives in Seoul South Korea
And sates what the South Koreans are doing to kill this RNA !
It completely undermines Will’s post !
20
Why is it the worse article, Bill?
I have also read the article in question. He takes the statistics from Italy and discusses.
Do you disagree with his source data? He analysis? Both?
Personally, In My Opinion, the hard pragmatic truth is that Wuhan is a “Harvester”.
60
Surely the figures might be squewed because the Italians were triaging, having to leave those with little hope out in the corridors, to die. The overall totals might not be different, but it might change the age group, and multi illness figures?
20
Like, you mean, when they’ve killed off all the vulnerable ones as a result of the systems capacity constraints, we can all start going out again to the footy and the pub?
30
Well said Geoff and I agree wrt the pandemic. However, you imply the economy comes second at best. I’m sure it’s not your intention. The economy is just as important as the pandameic. With an economy we are all dead in the not too distant future. I find that’s where state and federal leaders have been even more careless. As Alan Jones has been saying if the economy is to be put into a coma then treat the patient appropriately. That means a much bigger stimulus package than what they have been suggesting. In the US they are to release a $2trillion package. Ours so far has been puny even after taking into account the relative sizes, etc.. Our approach has also been useless. The queues at CentreLink is one example of a complete failure in the way our politicians have been handling the situation.
51
Meant to say “Without an economy we are all dead…”
60
Peter S,
While I said nothing about the economy, you could infer from my support of Jo that I endorsed something like disregard for economic consequences.
I have no such disregard. Indeed, I am cynically reviewing in my mind such factors as the economic worth of different economic pursuits.
Some decades ago I raised a newspaper storm by suggesting that Australia could do without Qantas. We do not manufacture aircraft, we do not produce much aviation fuel, in short we have no natural advantage to make Australia an envy location for an airline HQ. Airlines do not manufacture anything of lasting value. There might be an advantage to have a big airline if some types of war happened, but in the main it is how I said it years ago “Horribly expensive machines with red skippies on their tails and contributing not much to the economy.” There are other Australian industries contributing bugger all of tangible value, like sport with AFL & NRL and so on. I mention these because they tend to be the first to lay off staff in an emergency, because they are not tangibly productive. They also tend to hold out hands for gubmint money as if they were indispensable. Then, perhaps beyond their pay grade to understand, they are major, undisciplined honey pots for spreading a virus like Corona.
So, there are some industries that do produce tangibles in time of need, like the engineers tooling up to make ventilators. At a future review date, we have to ask whether we have our national spending priorities right. As Geoffrey Blainey wrote recently in Quadrant, our manufacturing industry has become brittle.
Maybe it takes a medical emergency like this to highlight the “bread and circuses” divide. Geoff S
30
Around $100 billion is puny for a 25 million population compared to over 300 million in the US?
How should the financial assistance have been handled? Centrelink is geared to a certain average number of inquiries a day and the Health crisis has sent the numbers way over normal, the Minister said that the computer system had been subjected to a cyber attack and since the explanation is that the computer system crashed because the demand well exceeded normal and overloaded the system, that event was registered by the system as a cyber attack.
Centrelink is recruiting casuals to assist with the unprecedented demand level of inquires and applications. I understand operating hours have been extended.
There are too many armchair critics at this time.
40
I am not privy to how the whole system works. If I did I might be able to offer some suggestions. I understand some of the limitations, such as the 55,000 limit of on-line connections but that has been rectified a little. Other procedures have been implemented in an attempt to handle the avalanche of claims. Let’s hope they all work for the sake of those who are desperately seeking financial assistance.
20
There are so many people who just can’t do sums, Dennis. Or don’t want to.
You’re right. Too many arm-chair critics with hidden agendas.
The ALP and the Greens know that their parliamentary representatives can’t say too much because the Australian voter will nail them for what they are.
So, what to do?
Get your activist running dogs to do the dirty work for you.
GetUp, the greenies, the union activist all start coming out of the woodwork like the cockroaches they are. They start blogging and infiltrating others’ blogs where they’ve never appeared before, sniping away on social media, sowing their noxious seeds.
It’s a good strategy. One that the socialists, Communists and environmentalists use on a daily basis. They’re in clover at the minute.
41
Yes we are one step closer to socialism but that’s unavoidable now. The alternative is to let the economy crash completely and have a reset via a depression. Take your pick.
31
For once I have to agree with what Albanese is saying about the chaos over supporting the new unemployed. It’s a total failure. Throwing money to small businesses is simply not working. They are sacking workers by the 100s of thousands and by some accounts is heading for over a million if not already. What is needed is direct financial assistance to all those people who used to have jobs who lost them through no fault of their own. If that means direct payments to their bank accounts then so be it. The government already knows their bank details. All is required is to somehow find out who has lost their job and the system to start depositing support payments direct now not in the days or weeks ahead. No need to go to CentreLink. It’s a bottleneck anyway at the best of times. Now it’s a complete disaster.
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Albo and Labor are involved in a cunning political manoeuvre of presenting as being supportive but constructive critics of the federal Government while cunningly and subtly attacking the PM and Federal Government, evidenced by what you have outlined Peter S.
How can anybody claim the financial support arrangements have failed when they are just being rolled out?
The retrenched employees are also on a support system that is just being rolled out.
The plan follows the 2005 pandemic action plan created when Tony Abbott was Minister for Health in the Howard Coalition Government, Tony recently pointed out.
No it’s not a complete disaster, but the usual negative news sources are making that claim. The fact is that the roll out requires people to register, the computer system at Centrelink crashed day one when overwhelmed with a flood of inquiries far higher level than ever before. The IT system is being upgraded, employees at Centrelink are now working longer hours and new on line registration is operating, register your details and be given a client number and the payments will commence immediately into your bank account.
To claim complete disaster 24-48 hours from the announcement is to be blunt pathetic.
The leaders cabinet spokesman, the PM, has repeatedly stated that the economy is being put into an induced coma with life support aimed at recovery in future months, and in between times businesses that can remain open for business are encouraged to do so as long as they are not in breach of the numbers rules.
It frustrates and amazes me how many armchair experts there are now. No access to the leaders cabinet and advisors, no knowledge of the pandemic action plan, most with no relevant expertise in a relevant field, eg; finance and economics in this example, sketchy often fake news reports based opinions.
Albo Union Labor’s game plan has so far been;
* Bushfire Season 2019-2020 criticism of the PM for State Emergency Services responsibilities.
* Coronavirus developing situation and handling by the leaders cabinet, PM chairman and spokesman, targeting the PM and,
* Claiming that the economy was winding down before the Health crisis, ignoring the now balanced federal Budget (surplus no longer possible), ignoring that in November 2007 GDP growth was 4.2% and then downhill right through the Labor 6 years in government and handed over to the Coalition in September 2013. That at circa 2% GDP growth here now that is average for the OECD, USA slightly better and Germany in recession during 2019 predicting 0.5% GDP growth for 2020 before the Health crisis.
I have observed the relentless negativity that dogged the Abbott years as Opposition Leader and then Prime Minister and now the same old suspects are at it again to get Morrison.
They trade on people’s political naivety and lack of knowledge of political history, as in Commonwealth of Australia a Federation of sovereign States.
41
All that is true and is not new. Neither side of politics at the moment have a clue as to how much damage they have caused to our economy ever since Rudd became PM, with the exception of Abbott who happened to have been ejected by his own party in spite of the fact he did at least some good. He did get rid of the carbon tax only to be replaced by something just as sinister by others and still being promoted by PM Morrison; emission targets. Go figure. I used to wonder what will it take for voters to wake up to what is being done to our nation. I’ve come to the conclusion some time ago a crash and burn will be necessary. I would like to think this current dual crisis of the virus and the economy would do the trick but I doubt it.
40
It is good practice for leaders to listen to the people and try and sort out the good ideas from the bad ones. The people are the armchair critics. Ignore them at your peril. Too often the so called “experts” don’t have all the answers. The climate change “experts” for example have all the bad answers.
40
Yes but, most people are unqualified to have informed opinions and are fed media lies in spades.
10
The best and worst ideas come from both the “experts” and the public. Why? Because they all have a wide range of experiences, knowledge and skills. The “experts” do not have a monopoly on the truth.
20
It’s very difficult to get a serious quarantine happening when we have such weak and inept leaders. It was only a few days ago that the NSW government let shiploads of infected people loose in Sydney Harbour.
Even the UK’s BBC wants to know, Coronavirus: How did Australia’s Ruby Princess cruise debacle happen?
*Facepalm* doesn’t even come close to describing how I’m feeling about all this… but it’s the only word which I could think of that isn’t overly offensive.
151
Too busy being dopey wombats !
41
Bill, it would be good if you could make a post without using insult.
40
Mate, it’s still a free country.
I happen to like some of Bill’s insults – especially when they’re not directed at me.
When I disagree with them I say so, and generally try to give my reason why.
“Dopey wombats” sounds about right when it comes to what happened in NSW with “Ruby Princess”.
So what’s your counter-point to “dopey wombats”?
Do you think NSW “done good”?
20
Polarising any issue at all is not
in my opinon so far. Staying away from left/right polarisation is fine by me.
00
People in Western Australia have a different view.
The numbers jumped here today because of the NSW negligence.
Sack the NSW Health Minister for a start.
00
I agree Bill, but you are too reserved.
It should be ” Dopey idiot Wombats”.
There are Idiots everywhere as we both know.
Some of them are even animals.
KK
30
Dear Jo
I would look for infection here, Cruise Ship ports, Vancouver with major Chinese population as a neighbour.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/5100/420-100-FluUpdate.pdf
Paul Murray drawing attention to 8 deaths and 11 ‘potentially at risk’. Many more will be found dead in their once happy family businesses, especially after the Politician’s Uni classmates have finished feeding on their carcasses.
60
Australia’s cases have been exponentially growing since the 1st of March. We’ve been making a total botch of this growth rate,
We just hit 15th most infected country.
We were #21 about 4 days back.
I predicted 9 days ago we would get to 3,000 to 4,000 by next Sunday. It’s only Tuesday, and we already have 2,040, and it was 1,100 on Sunday. We will have 5,000 to 6,000 by Sunday evening, nearly 20,000 by the following Sunday. I thought 9 days back it would be about 12,000 by then. I believed I was being quite pessimistic. But not enough
The schools have to be closed, one way or another they will close this week. Don’t take your kids to school, it’s a huge mistake. It’s time to vote with our feet. The political decisions are quick, but they’re invested in poor choices, and way too far behind this curve.
Preserve your family now.
180
Hand wash $250 for 100ml.
Let us know how many you need mate.
I also have a little bridge for sale seeing as no one needs to use it according to you. Looks like a coat hanger
018
Shutup idiot.
161
Happy for your insight.
Deal with real figures if you want respect.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/5100/420-100-FluUpdate.pdf
I am attempting to get ahead of a curve on a wave of panic.
PS
I’ll give you 50% off on the bridge but only seven days till it goes to auction.
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You are contaminating this blog
So I’m putting you in isolation for two weeks
No reading your comments
Red thumbs all the way !
Bye Broadie !
have a happy infectious Corona 19 season
71
Thanks Bill,
I have done extremely well out of this panic.
I went capital stable on my super last year.
Bought Capital equipment on near 0% interest in Aussie Pesos.
Stocked up on items essential to my community when competitors in my industry were de-stocking. We are now distributing these on need at the same price we would have charged prior to this insanity.
We are still employing our wonderful staff and I am trying to focus on the insanity of responding to increasing detection when you do increased tests and publicity. The panic is destroying good hard-working people and their businesses.
Still waiting for the figures supporting your statement about SA. The sound of Ambulances around you must be deafening.
29
Washington State “Flu”
00
Oops!
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/3614241b1c2b4e519ae1cf52e2c3d560
00
Tattoo parlors are closing too. Bugger! I was just about to get a love heart with “Jo Nova” across it done on me bum.
43
Nice, it’ll match the W, W and dot you already have there.
50
No – I’ve also got “It’s the Hottest Year on Record Again” tattooed on the other cheek.
00
Jo I’ve been looking at these pie charts for a while watching something quite unusual
https://www.covid19data.com.au/transmission-sources.
The pie charts for the three Labor governed states, Victoria, WA & Qld
All have a huge “Undisclosed” component for how the disease was acquired.
The three non labor states by contrast have a very low component which is non disclosed
I think the Labor states are trying to conceal information which is needed by all Australias.
101
Is there any local state info about this issue
To give us all some idea what is happening
While state labor governments try to conceal things ?
50
HydroxyChloroquine – 200mg 2x per day for 5 days
– Azithromycin – 500mg 1x per day for 5 days
– Zinc Sulphate – 220mg 1x per day for 5 days
Doctor and team treated 500 patients in various NY areas with above regimen
Results
0 Deaths
0 Hospitalisations
0 Intubations
How this would work. (If it does.)
HydroxyChloroquine affect the cell membrane in people, allowing more Zinc to go into cells. In white blood cells, this stimulates them to more activity, increasing the immune response. This is not a “targeted” response to a particular virus, but a general response to all pathogens.
The Zinc Sulfate allows more Zinc to be in the bloodstream, to be picked up by those immune cells. (Note, pre-pandemic notes on Zinc as a supplement states that surveys show that around 40% of Americans are deficient in ZInc, under normal conditions.
The antibiotic (Azithromycin) is to prevent secondary bacteria infection while the immune system is attacking the COVID-19 virus.
The cases treated were not far advanced, i.e., not already hospitalized.
Supposedly, Trump has already ordered the FDA to allow off-label use for these drugs for COVID-19. The next few weeks should see a lot of results of doctors trying this regimen. After all, there is no other regimen to try. . .
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Red Edward,
Thanks for the increased detail on New York City trials. Great to see doctors cutting through the bureaucracy and saving lives. Anecdotal video interviews with NYC doctors support your comments.
There was a report overnight of an individual in the US dying from Chloroquine poisoning. He and his wife re-tasked an aquarium cleaning product for oral consumption. Will be interesting to see the report on dosage and chemical composition.
The effective prophylactic dose of Chloroquine with various synergistics still lacks research. Certainly the regular adult anti-malarial dose of Chloroquine is far lower than you’ve documented (https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/drugs/Chloroquine.pdf), at 300mg taken once weekly. Interestingly, this equates to about 43mg per day, which is approximately the same as one would receive from a 400ml glass of Indian Tonic Water consumed daily.
Zinc gluconate is used solely as an oral anti-viral in small dosages. Most notably in the product Cold-eeze, which contains 13.3mg Zn per lozenge with a recommended maximum adult dose of 6 lozenges per day in 2-4 hour intervals (about 80mg per day). Research shows Zn effectiveness against Rhinovirus (https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/20/6/893/692279). Cold eeze advertise benefits on their website (https://www.coldeeze.com/en/our-proven-clinical-studies). Consensus long term safe use of Zn as a dietary supplement is about 40mg per day.
There’s a good possibility a daily glass of tonic water and Zinc <40mg per day would have a significant prophylactic effect against Covid-19. We can wait for the studies but we don't have the luxury of time. Both substances are widely researched and generally well tolerated.
110
So much so that Wikipedia has just recently updated its page to that effect.
I know, I know. Wiki. But it reflects things as they stand at the moment – notwithstanding the Fauci quibble.
00
Didn’t get my info from wiki but that is funny!
10
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_toxicity
“Zinc toxicity is a medical condition involving an overdose on, or toxic overexposure to, zinc. Such toxicity levels have been seen to occur at ingestion of greater than 50 mg of zinc.[1]”
As far as i can tell, Zinc is a trace element in normal human consumption.
There is always more.For example, the bold finding….
”
The medisphere is replete with studies such as this.
From: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.01676/full
”
“Mini Review ARTICLE
“Front. Microbiol., 07 August 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.01676
“Infectious Threats, the Intestinal Barrier, and Its Trojan Horse: Dysbiosis
“Simona Iacob1,2 and Diana Gabriela Iacob1*
“1Infectious Diseases Department, “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania
“2National Institute of Infectious Diseases “Prof. Dr. Matei Balş”, Bucharest, Romania”
Says in part for example with respect to Avian flu….
“2. Avian Influenza Virus
Avian influenza virus (AIV) subtype H9N2 has tropism for many tissues, including tissues of GIT and the upper respiratory tract of chicken. AIV enters the body through the mucosa of the respiratory tract and GIT [74]. Recent studies have revealed that commensal gut microbiota play a decisive role in viral pathogenesis to regulate the immune response against influenza virus [28,45]. In contrast, dysbiosis of gut microbiota in chicken elicit the severity of disease [39]. The health and diversity of gut microbiota are key factors to diminish the influenza virus infection [28].”
00
Environmental skeptic,
In terms of Zinc; recommended daily dose is broadly documented as less than 50mg per day. Doctors experimenting with synergistic treatment of Covid-19 generally seem to be dosing at about three times RDD for short periods (Circa 150mg daily over seven day period.).
For those who missed earlier posts. Medcram provides a good understanding of Zinc pathways in relation to Covid-19. (https://youtu.be/U7F1cnWup9M). Very small doses of chloroquine open the intracellular pathway for Zinc to step in to deactivate virus replication.
10
Given the reactions of our politicians and bureaucrats in the past few weeks I think we in Australia can rule out getting any supplies of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as these will be sold out while our mob hold a meeting about holding a press conference.
Typical is Gladys *rsecoverer, reputedly Premier of NSW, who is blaiming Border Protection. IF she was so worried why wasn’t the disembarking passengers at least subjected to a temperature scan?
And, by the way, tonic water doesn’t contain chloroquine, only quinine which has a minor effect. That hasn’t stopped a rush on Schweppes tonic water at the local supermarket. Bang goes the thought of washing zinc supplement down with a glass of Schweppes.
20
Graeme No.3, Where did you obtain your information with regard to Quinine versus Chloroquine? Chloroquine is a synthesized compound of Quinine with a slightly different molecular structure (a couple of molecules less) Both are subject to different side effects. Quinine has the least amount of side effects and is still considered the most effective and thus most desirable for use against numerous strains of malaria. There are literally dozens of studies going back decades proving this.
31
Sunni Bakchat:
Not according to the chemical structures I’ve seen. There is a real difference in stereochemistry. And, by the way, they are both single molecules. Perhaps you meant atoms?
Yes, quinine is considered effective against malaria, and has been known to be so for at least 200 years. Tonic water was developed in British India in the nineteenth century as a prophylactic against various fevers. With sugar added to disguise the bitterness of the alkaloid (quinine) and gin to make it palatable. Chloroquine and hydroxychloquine were developed to overcome a shortage of quinine in WW2 and have continued in use (and for other reasons) because they are more effective. But against virii?
I haven’t heard of a drink of gin & chloroquine.
However the rush on Schweppes Tonic Water at the local supermarket seems to have stopped. Plentiful supplies there this afternoon (I prefer the non sugar version as I am not a big gin drinker; see literature about its benefits for preventing leg cramps at night).
10
Graeme No.3, Thanks for the correction on atomic structure. Should have written that. Links to chemical structures and pharmacology are below. Agree the stereochemical (three dimensional) representations are different but do not see the relevance of this in terms of drug efficacy given most peer reviewed studies point to the original (parent) molecular structure still being comparable if not superior. Disagree on the history and thus relevance to my point.
Chloroquine first synthesized by Bayer in 1934. Hydroxychloroquine first synthesized early 1946. Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine could be mass produced. Hence popularity of Chloroquine during second world war. As to Chloroquine or Hydroxychloroquine being more effective, the research clearly points to Quinine still being as effective, if not more effective in some settings. Attached are several research links showing greater or same efficacy of Quinine against Malaria.
Still not clear on why you believe Quinine to be ineffective in comparison with Chloroquine or Hydroxychlroquine when taken at same dosage over seven day period. Especially given the treatment is against new strain of disease unrelated to malaria.
Why wouldn’t people avail themselves of quinine from the supermarket shelf and zinc from their pharmacy for prophylaxis if it is safe and shown to be effective in experimental use on infected patients? Does the upside not outweigh the downside when a pandemic is on foot?
https://academic.oup.com/trstmh/article-abstract/100/5/410/1901545
https://europepmc.org/article/med/9522846
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2958.2003.03627.x
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Chloroquine
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/3034034
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-0597-3_2
00
Graeme no . 3 , Border Force threw the NSW health minister under a bus this morning over exactly who was to blame for the Ruby Princess fiasco , Border Force has nothing to answer for but the NSW health minister who has been a disaster himself has just added another stuff up to his list .
10
Thanks. I was going to post a link.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/coronavirus-ruby-princess-cruise-ship-fiasco-not-our-fault-abf-chief/news-story/c7999e4bb2a2844846520f5ec3035bff
At least the NSW Health Minister won’t be alone (or shouldn’t be) under the bus. From the Federal Minister downwards it upholds the old question
“What do we do about X?’ Answer “Make him/her Minister for Health”.
And I have just had a message from Telstra (a poor supplier of service) saying “Stay at home etc.” I deleted it as soon as I read it.
10
The federal minister for health is a failure but I don’t see what action he had in the Ruby Princess , seems to be NSW stuff up entirely.
11
Miss hit. See green
00
Red Cedar
Do you have reference (link) for that good news?
00
Cedar = Edward.
Apologies, Red.
00
To add to the previous posts on Chloroquine efficacy and availability;
Chloroquine acts as a Zinc ionophore i.e. it allows intracellular transportation of Zinc. There are several chemicals already approved for human consumption that are easily obtained that function as Zinc ionophores. They are used for various clinical purposes in treatment of different diseases.
It may well be that another of the Zinc ionophores in conjunction with Zinc, works even more effectively against Covid-19. Has anyone seen research trialling alternate Zinc ionophores from Chloroquine?
00
I don’t like “stay at home” as a policy, “avoid contact” would be better, but it requires people to think. There are so many activities that could continue under “avoid contact”, pretty much all outdoor activities, such as farming, gardening, window and street cleaning, waste disposal, dog walking, construction and outdoor maintenance. All those things are being shut down, casting many into poverty.
81
Where are you Mikky ?
Here is Oz the government has announced special payments for those who have lost employment or who’s businesses have had to shut down.
60
Here is Hannity, reading the NY doctor’s letter to Vice President Pence:
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-reads-mike-pence-letter-unidentified-doctor-detailing-drug-regimen-doctor
30
This was in reply to Red Edward’s comment #17, above.
20
Either it works or it doesn’t. Who was the mouthpiece doesn’t really matter.
30
There have been good results (on a very small scale) in France and China, with similar regimens (usually without the Zinc).
40
I am given to understand that a Chinese bio-lab lost control of some weapons-grade virus and covered it up like Chernobyl’s socialized energy mishap. Then under Chinese control the GAFI/FATF in Paris fiddled with asset-forfeiture rules to confiscate pothead bank accounts and caused a Crash Feb 20. The Communavirus instantly became front page news and has ever since camouflaged the spark that caused the crash. Both the crash and the plague appear to result from dictatorship dereliction.
When monarchic-socialist Germany wrecked the world economy 1914-1919, reparations were demanded. Today these could take the form of asset-forfeiture (a popular communist measure) or cancellation of Treasury bills issued by other dissolute looter governments such as that of the USA. If this hastens the final collapse of communi-fascist variants of socialism, so be it. Hong Kong and Taiwan will doubtless helo install something more closely resembling a post-mercantilist mixed economy–or even freedom.
64
“While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other.”
Douglas Rushkoff
50
Jo, good reinforcing post for the young and immortal as you say. Perhaps we ought to cast our minds forward (and back) to the characteristics of and response to the Spanish Flu. We are now beginning to read of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and China beating back the virus. South Korea reports limited further outbreaks they say they are containing. The Spanish Flu came in three distinct waves. The second wave being the most deadly.
The epidemiological response at a macro governmental level has in many societies been one of incremental denial breakdown. Whilst at a micro level the response in many of the same societies has been described as “reckless covidiocy”. These seem to me to be one and the same phenomenon. Governments seem to have the measure of their population’s belief systems in gradually implementing restrictions on liberty. Politics is ultimately the art of the possible. But the longer term issue is not just whether to follow the “shelter-in-place” strategy or the “wuhan lockdown” strategy; it seems to be more a case of how we get the epidemiological response correct to pre-emptively protect against the potential second, third, etc. wave this virus might produce.
70
As reported on Brietbart “after ten deaths India puts 1.3 billion citizens into lockdown for 21 days”. It was always obvious. Kill the virus. It’s exponential growth or death in three weeks. This isn’t just buying time and saving millions of lives, it is a sensible strategy.
Despite the howling about the ‘economy’, what is the real cost of those deaths? The world can be put on hold for that long without major and permanent loss. All people really need is food and water. For most it is just total nuisance. Life is the question, not a thing called the economy. It will be the same.
If everyone went on a rent holiday and an interest and taxation holiday for the three weeks, there is no great cost in life! And food is not so expensive and thanks to increased CO2, in most places plentiful.
I am pleased to see landlords giving tenants a rent holiday. Governments are giving people their taxation money back or a tax holiday. And it really does not cost utilities anything to produce electricity. Governments need to proceed to this payments holiday idea so that the need to cope with a pandemic is not an economic crisis, simply an economic holiday. And just shut the stock exchange for a month. Unfortunately it’s all too simple and logical for most politicians.
130
If we are to have a complete lock down then let’s do it in toto. Shut all businesses including supermarkets and other related outlets and keep everyone at home for 21 days. Instigate martial law. Use the armed forces and others to support a mass distribution process whereby essential items only are delivered from distribution centres and delivered only those people who need them. Many can survive with what they already have for 21 days but many can’t so those that can’t need to be supported. If anyone is found to be telling lies and have sufficient essentials when a delivery is made then they are fined heavily. They would have been warned beforehand. Anything short of all this is not a real complete lock down but still a partial lock down.
18
I think, within reason and without declaring Martial law, that is what is happening. In England the police are in the streets. In Italy you need a certificate to be driving a car anywhere or even walking. The police will do. The army is an unnecesssary step.
Most people agree it is a necessary sacrifice to make for a few weeks if only to prevent mass deaths. It is a war where people are dying in their thousands without a bullet fired. Doing nothing and staying at home for a few weeks seems a cheap deal all things considered. And governments are doing their best to keep the place going. Australia has a million guest workers who need support without casual jobs. There are a lot of loose ends like feeding people and health workers and essential services and these are not solved by martial law.
And a ‘partial’ lock down is what has to happen to keep the hospitals and the police and the army going and fed. They have families too. I think India has done early what should have been done in every country. Walls up. How we stuffed up with 2700 people off the Ruby Princess is beyond my belief. Such stup*dity kills thousands.
50
And those people who think it’s party time are beneath contempt or completely ignorant. As with Spring Break in the US. It shows that education does not make people clever.
40
Or..The Italian death rate from the virus is possible climate sciency…
They are having trouble with the $ and time to test people that are alive.
Yet they are amazingly spending time and $ testing every person in the process of dying..
Or has died.
I will wager they are lumping ALL deaths as virus due to the system being over loaded.
And, other than outliers..the majority of deaths are still within the high risk groups..
61
Must be some mysterious event as there are already 10 times more obituaries than an ordinary year and its still March. 9 more months to go
30
Where Raving ?
30
Saw it somewhere else but here is an example
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-latest-obituary-newspaper-lombardy-death-toll-a9403016.html
30
Thanks for that !
20
Our political “masters” are still not taking things seriously enough given they are claiming they are taking the pandemic seriously. Either we have a complete lock down NOW or we do nothing. No point taking half measures (no pun intended). Half measure during major pandemics do very little good.
42
Do we ultimately need to get to a point of herd immunity? Via flat curve?
If we smash the curve down and release restrictions after only a few percent of people have had it wont it just surge again?
51
what is needed to flatten the curve is a treatment.
and there is one.
when will it start being used en masse, prior to hospitalization (the drugs are known and completely safe).
81
Not is the vile bit of RNA chemistry is eliminated
Because it has not been able to replicate in human cells
Because the viral particles on surfaces have been dissolved with cleaning agents.
20
Over the weekend Dr. Vladimir Zelenko from New York state announced he has found a treatment against the coronavirus with a 100% success rate on 350 patients.
The New York doctor also posted a video explaining his success with hydroxychloroquine and Zinc . His treatment resulted in the shortness of breath issue being resolved in 4 to 6 hours. Dr. Zelenko in his study had zero deaths, zero hospitalizations and zero intubations!
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/stunning-ny-doctor-vladimir-zelenko-finds-100-success-rate-in-350-patients-using-hydroxychloroquine-with-z-paks-video/
60
DLK, have replied on this in response to post 17.
30
Yesterday, I mentioned that the TAFE fashion course my ire teaches is now online only. However none of the other courses at our TAFE are.
Why does this matter?
Well, the pattern making and dressmaking components have a practical requirement, which is mailed in. So now Karen has to visit the unlocked down campus twice a week to pick up the mailed in samples, and to mail back the ones she has assessed. It is still operating as normal, and therefore a major infection vector.
To me, this mean that TAFE (and by extension, the government) still are not taking this seriously
70
Opps – ‘ire’ = ‘wife’ – although…
50
Peter:
She’s getting a bit annoyed?
Glad she is OK. At least her potential exposure is much more reduced than those still at the TAFE.
20
Online courses are twice the workload for the same pay: so it is irksome. But we are healthy, and that is the main thing
40
Good.
20
“1. Start “stay at home” quarantine asap. Close schools (apart from essential services families).Lock all borders. The more the better. Even regions.
2. Order mass supplies of Chloroquine (or all other potentially useful anti-virals.)
3. Build factories to make test kits and ventilators en masse.
4. Use the test kits to identify who has immunity and who does and doesn’t need protective gear or isolation.
5. After two weeks of quarantine we can identify regions with no infections. Build from there.”
The perfect program Jo, and precisely what our Chief Medical Officer, and therefore the PM will not recommend or enforce.
51
A good question is how many people would have excluded from hard lockdown? All people involved in onsite uilities management and garbage management would have to excluded. Some people couldnt cope indoors. Domestic violence would go up a lot. Biomedical factory worker excluded. We ae going to need door to door doctors and pretests to avoid hypercondriacs.
30
Would drug users and traffickers need to be excluded too?
30
Most know what flattening the curve means and involves. What’s not so well known is the more we flatten the curve the longer partial lock downs will remain. That will be catastrophic to our economy unless governments assist and stimulate the economy big time, much more than an previous crisis including the GFC. So we are witnessing the last few remnants of conservative fiscal attitude by the West being thrown out the window. We are now one step closer to a form of outright socialism in the West.
41
Yes if the lock downs are partial.
30
Yes it’s partial as I stated but it might end up being a total lock down in the weeks ahead if the curve is not being flattened. PM Morrison implied that’s the case if the situation doesn’t improve. We all are hoping the curve will start to turn down sooner rather than later due to the partial lock downs being rolled out. I hate to think what life will be if we have to go all the way to a full lock down. As I stated before a full lock down might require martial law. That might sound extreme but think about it. Chaos will soon reign if a full lock down is implemented for a long enough period. Looting is already being reported in the US and people have been arrested. Let’s hope we don’t need to go to a full lock down at all.
50
We all knew right back in January…or anyone who was taking this threat seriously did…that our government was dangerously timid…political risk-averse ….too PR-prone and MSM-whipped…when one too many regular flights was allowed back from Wuhan…and the government smugly declared that possible Corona cases were being asked to self-isolate with no monitoring…did we not?
Everyone we knew greeted that with eye-rolling and head-shaking….so we all know which sector is actually running this show….same mob that decided when Tony Abbott was elected in a landslide …that he would never be allowed to govern…same piranhas who ran the 24/7 vulture watch over Tony Abbott…duchessed the Paris candidate and facilitated his coup.
The ramifications roll on.
70
Note that back in 2005 Abbott warned a pandemic was inevitable and that we should prepare for it. Too bad he was removed from office by his own party after 2 years as PM. He was shafted big time by his disloyal “colleagues”. He has his faults (such as the disgraceful actions over Pauline Hanson but at least he has said sorry to her more recently) but compared to most of them including PM Morrison he was a far better leader. Too bad his own party didn’t support him to the hilt. The nation would have been far better off if he were still leader.
61
“What’s not so well known is the more we flatten the curve the longer partial lock downs will remain. ”
Not so. The more we flatten the curve the shorter the lock downs.
The weaker and leakier the lockdowns — the longer it lasts, and the more people and businesses we kill.
40
Seems BBC News is reporting against the drug chloroquine quoting that it killed a couple in the USA.
No doubt trying to infer Trump does know what he is talking about. There is a concerted effort by the left politicians and media to turn this into a political battle rather than one of health and survival
See link https://www.bbc.com/news/52012242
90
Trump didn’t tell anyone to drink fish tank cleaner.
170
Unbelievably, Nevada’s governor on Tuesday banned the use of anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus patients.
30
He’s a Democrat, right?
20
5. After two weeks of quarantine we can identify regions with no infections. Build from there.
Why aren’t we being told now which suburbs have the most infections?
No of cases March 10, 15, 20, 25: 100; 300; 850; 2500
32
NSW has the worst rate of infections of Australia States. The NSW Government provide this information:
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/diseases/Pages/covid-19-latest.aspx
The maps give reasonable detail on the location of cases. Southeastern Sydney so far has the highest number. Probably all those beach goers mixing with overseas visitors on the eastern beaches and in local watering holes.
Still more than half of the 818 confirmed cases came from overseas. 72 of the locally acquired cases do not have an identified source; that’s concerning.
Have not found infection maps for other States. A high risk person my wife knows said the nearest identified case to her in Melbourne was more than 10km away. That suggests the information is out there.
Australia so far has the lowest rate of positives tests per number of tests. Might mean we are hypochondriacs.
The simple rule is to assume everyone is a carrier – keep your distance.
50
And assume each of us many be infected but without symptoms yet !
So wear a mask
To prevent others being infected by us !
30
> ” Southeastern Sydney so far has the highest number”
Followed by the North Shore. At first I thought this is because the two wealthiest areas would have the highest overseas travel ratios. Might still be true – but the Hunter region ?
21
When government intervenes to purposely disrupt the free market, it needs a good reason.
We could talk about what our leader means when he says “on the other side of this …”
50
Good point. Our “leaders” are clueless at the best of times, such as during the climate change and emissions reduction nonsense over the past few years. Now that we have a real crisis they are found wanting to an even greater extent. I’m sure they mean well but that’s not enough. We need true leaders with nerves of steel, much like Winston Churchill. Even Trump falls short of that. We are skating on thin ice and we are overweight.
71
New York state is also running a clinical trial beginning Tuesday of a treatment regimen of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, two drugs that doctors in Africa and elsewhere say they’ve seen anecdotal evidence it may help fight the virus. The state health department will also be running a clinical trial using the blood plasma of recovered patients to treat new infections, he said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/troubling-and-astronomical-coronavirus-cases-increase-urgency-for-hospital-beds-new-york-gov-cuomo-says.html
40
The antibiotic is to protect against sepsis.
40
One of the most puzzling aspects of the response to this CV19 concerns the relative absence of response to similar and perhaps worse epidemics from the past.
The details are framed in the statement and response by Geoff Sherrington and TdeF on a previous thread:
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/doc-talks-about-his-holy-s-moment-horrible-lung-failure-even-in-young-patients/#comment-2296428
Geoff’s experience is horrifying but presumably didn’t warrant longer term government action because it was just the flu?
TdeF indicates that better flu eradication measures are possible and should be implemented and if this was done it seems obvious that people like Yonnie and his wife might rest a little bit easier than now.
This current situation is a terrible mix of disease, open borders, politics, too much media grandstanding and perhaps deliberately induced confusion.
Governments may pay token attention to saving the population but their actions are a poorly presented mess that has created confusion and doubt everywhere.
Decades of open health borders in Europe, China and the United States may have finally brought us to the day of judgement where the government sponsored offloading of commercial cruise ships in Australia is seen as the last straw.
Back to reality?
90
KK,
My case was not flu.
It makes me wonder if low grade strains of Corona virus were in our population weeks before an emergency was declared.
They did not do a specific test for this virus, possibly because they had no way to test back then, possibly because they were cautious and with only a few kits.
But, these surmised are of no help for future tactics.
We have to be better at locating infected cells of people and tracing their contacts to isolate them. The emphasis must be on medical workers if it is not already. Geoff S
40
Thanks for the update Geoff.
30
Fully agree. Mine, two years meant I could not breathe, terrifying. It behaved like pneumonia but was not. And it has not really left. That is why the idea that young people, anyone gets sick, get better and everything is fine is rubbish. This corona virus does permanent lung damage, heart, testes, lower bowel damage wherever the receptors are found and this in turn in a knock on effect damages the rest. No one walks away from serious illness and these diseases are getting worse. Plus this is just end of a spectrum of corona viruses, rhinoviruses and more. What we did not need was the Chinese creating this one and accidentally releasing it and then covering it up.
20
And so many friends have gone on Cruises and spent the trip in the infirmary, the last with a collapsed lung and endless problems. That’s not a holiday. It’s a near death sentence.
All down to hygiene, regulation cleaning, even isolation where needed.
What I hope is that our tolerance of all these rampant flus stops, that it is not our fault that we do not have the latest innoculation. We want these things stopped at the border, stopped with better hygiene, social pressure and the end of dogged acceptance of a rolling disaster which is the killer flus which come across the world in the appalling ‘flu season’.
I must admit though on the four Cunard cruises, I have not been sick. They are more expensive but I notice they clean incessantly, every touchable surface.
Hand washing is mandatory outside any food area. And sick people are isolated. This started I think with norovirus but applies to all these viruses.
20
TdeF,
Until 2 years ago, when I was sick I would prepare to make my recovery to normal health short, by doing all the right things.
After these 2 episodes affecting my lungs, I have now resigned myself to the unexpected outcome that I will never return to normal.
These ailments produced permanent effects, particularly shortness of breath and lassitude. I can only suggest that all people do what is recommended and practically possible, to avoid getting sick with these viral devils. Geoff S
10
Geoff:
australia has had 4
‘outbreaks” of Corona virus in the last 9 years. All have not attracted any official attention, but I point out the variation in severity of ‘flu year by year.
20
Sorry your great on AGW but completely stupid on cornovaris have you looked at normal flu deaths? YOU ARE FEEDING INTO STUPIDITY MY LAST lOOK UP trump aUSTRALIA LIKE bRITAIN HAVE BECOME THE MOST IGNORANT COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD THANK CHRIST i LEFT aUSTRALIA YEARS AGO
[So where are you that is sooo much better? ]ED
05
Hope you didn’t let the door slam you on the butt on the way out !
10
I would respond but I am following medical advice about irrigating my throat regularly (with a rather nice McLaren Vale Grenache**) so I can’t be bothered to reply.
**Little Giant Grenache 2018 for any interested. I got mine (and a second lot from Different Drop, but Just Wines & Cloud Wine seem to be slightly cheaper and Qantas Wine and BWS more expensive, esp. the latter).
20
Dan Brown sells a beautiful red Cabernet Merlot for $3.18 and an average Semillion Sauvignon for the same.
For special occasions there’s the Len Evans inspired French champagne that has a low CoNa19 to CO2 ratio and tastes fantastic. Unfortunately it starts at about Aud$60 so is mainly a Christmas/New Year item.
KK
KK
10
This is Jo’s actual expertise area, molecular biology. And you are right ‘regulation’ flu deaths must be stopped too. 60,000 people in the US alone last year including children. Zero tolerance from now on. Viruses are waging war on humans and we must fight back. Sometimes that just takes hygeine and testing.
30
Then, why not?, lets have more posts to discuss molecular virology papers we can peruse? For example, most healthy people are asymptomatic when exposed to a corona virus?
What is the biological molecular science behind that? Would love to hear about it!
20
We need to know and hear more blog posts about molecular virology, so that the ordinary layman molecular virologist can understand it or raise questions.
10
Oh, while i think of it,….and so that we perhaps can forever understand why young people are so immune….except for the exception young male, the subject of Jo’s post.
10
Some Xtra food for thought.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality.
01
oops….this recent post was supposed to be at the bottom of Jo’s new post.//
00
Germany continues the interesting pattern of many more deaths occurring than serious/critical cases are listed, indicating a large proportion of people who die are become serious/critical at home and die without treatment within a hospital. They just go directly to the died list after their body is found and tested.
Cases 32,986
New cases 3,930
Serious/Critical 23
New deaths 34
Total Deaths 157
The listed German cases also can’t be asymptomatic or mild, as only 3,243 are listed as recovered, after ~2.5 months of illness cases building up with the country to a total of 29,586 active cases.
Germany % Died = 0.48
Germany % Critical = 0.07
Australia % Died = 0.37
Australia % Critical = 0.51
In Australia the worsening cases do go to a hospital earlier and then develop into serious critical cases before they subsequently die. But otherwise our data is quite similar to Germany’s. They’re just another order of magnitude further along. We’ll catch up to their situation in about a week and a half.
Our % Died=0.37 suggests hospitalization does help but the improvement that great.
But why do so many Germans apparently strongly avoid going to hospital even at the cost of their life?
80
Our demographics show that so far the sick here are younger. Peak age group is 30s. So far we have kept this out of the 80s and 90s age groups.
60
Australia is sooo stupid that they have probably forbbiden hydroxicloroquin to cure coronavirus Ive been there and will never go back what a s*** country you deserve what you get with your greenie politicians
[So where are you that is sooo much better? ]ED
05
I know Australia has a lot of dimwits but is there a better country?
30
I’ll agree about the pollies being greenies but what drives the hate ?
10
They’re probably not “Green” enough for the likes of Eliza.
She sounds like one of those ones I’ve been railing against recently. They’re frustrated angry greeny activists coming out of the woodwork, camouflaged in mock-virtue and vitriol directed at all those who ever resisted their ideology.
In this case she hates Australia because it abandoned the Carbon tax and its citizens laugh at the Paris Accord stupidity and those who support it.
That sort of hate runs deep. She probably hates all of humanity, as only a green extremist can.
30
For those who missed it here is the link to the Jones and Credlin show with the interview with Tony Abbott, yesterday. Aboott was onto to this in 2005 when he was Health minister.
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6144293964001
Turnbull and the haters in the Aussie MSM have a lot to answer for.
60
Amazing how many people do not realise the decisions being made by those in power, those who will be least affected.
Ie. How many politicians and government workers will lose their jobs due to this forced shutdown.
“stimulus” printing money, will probably still be used to repair roads, along with the lollipop man on $150KPa…twice the rate of teacher or nurse.
Strange country we live in.
The next shutdown will be due to a lesser alarm.
52
Which country do you live in & which state Macha ?
23
I agree, he’s another Idiot.
So many.
31
$180,000 in Qld. I am told (Union Rules).
10
X-Box nerds are the new elite..a 2 week lockdown will shift attention away from even football and cricket, and the X-Box stay-at-home athletes and X-Box sporting unions will reign supreme for the next foreseeable future 🙂 .
10
And even Stranger Things we live in.
No stimulus intended 🙂
00
Since no young and immortals read this it is imperative that you send the url to your grandchildren
60
Greta says it’s extremely likely she has had corona virus, hasn’t been tested but the symptoms suggest she has had the virus. A bit like climate change really
https://au.yahoo.com/lifestyle/greta-thunberg-coronavirus-221825034.html
60
Does she see the virus too ?
110
:0
10
She thinks she may have the virus:
https://www.watoday.com.au/world/europe/greta-thunberg-says-she-probably-had-coronavirus-20200325-p54dlg.html#comments
Oh wait, let me elaborate, she thinks she is getting less of the limelight and thinks she may have had the virus. The comments are absolutely slamming her, and rightly so for trying to bring climate change into it.
Funny how climate change becomes a non-starter when real problems arise. Climate change is only something you can worry about when all your other needs are largely met.
80
The Ultimate #MeToo. Greta has had coronavirus. Probably. How dare she!
10
In ‘What’s Up With That’, Will E continues his dopey policy of denying that this pandemic is a major problem
But then he includes this comment from Steve Mosher in South Korea which completely obliterates his argument.
“The key is changing the criteria for testing. Here [in Korea] we test and track.
An employee of a call center in Seoul, was infected.
Office had 207 people.
March 8th. he tested positive.
EVERY person in that office was tested. today 152 have tested positive, they tested floors above and below his floor. Today 3 more from the 11th floor were found and 1 contact.
They are now tracing the contact, and the contact’s contacts. All will be tested. The business was in a residential building. 553 of the people in that building were tested. floors 13-18
This little beastie lives on surfaces for up to 3 days. See that elevator button? the hand rail on the stairs? the bathroom door handle? the coffee cup that pretty girl behind the counter handed you? it’s there. Now in my building we have hand sanitizer by the elevator buttons. you get in the habit of not touching public pretty quickly. Trust me I am not a germ phobe, but the changes have been simple when they are reinforced.
Let me give you a little taste of the highly detailed info we get.
Info that is shared daily in one spot, I will include some of the earlier call center case snippits
“In Daegu, every person at high-risk facilities is being tested. 87 percent completed testing and 192 (0.8 percent) out of 25,493 were confirmed positive. From Daesil Covalescent Hospital in Dalseong-gun, 54 additional cases were confirmed, which brings the current total to 64. In-patients on 6th and 7th floors are under cohort-quarantine.”
“From Guro-gu call center in Seoul, 7 additional cases (11th floor = 2; contacts = 5) were confirmed. The current total is 146 confirmed cases since 8 March. (11th floor = 89; 10th floor = 1; 9th floor = 1; contacts = 54)”
“From Bundang Jesaeng Hospital in Gyeonggi Province, 4 additional cases were confirmed. The current total of 35 confirmed cases since 5 March (20 staff, 5 patients in inpatient care, 2 discharged patients, 4 guardians of patients, 4 contacts outside the hospital). The 144 staff members who were found to have visited the hospital’s Wing no. 81 (where many confirmed cases emerged) were tested, 3 of whom tested positive.”
“Five additional confirmed cases have been reported from the call center located in Guro-gu, Seoul, amounting to a current total of 129 confirmed cases from the call center since 8 March. As of now, 14 confirmed cases in Gyeonggi Province has been traced to have come in contact with a confirmed patient who is a worker at the 11th floor call center at a religious gathering. Further investigation and tracing are underway.”
Test, Trace, Test more.
A random test in Iceland found 1% infected. 50% asymptomatic.
If the US persists in only testing the symptomatic you won’t squash this bug.
Our cases are going up in Seoul. So we will have 15 days of voluntary social distancing.
…..
stay away from crowds
wash your hands
wear a mask
don’t touch your face ”
South nKorea locked down those regions where it found infected persons weeks ago !
61
Bill, why would anyone read beyond the first sentence of your insulting, defamatory comment?
45
🙂 🙂
41
Blunt ? Yes !
Insulting ? No !
Defamatory ? No ! Just honest truth.
As for folks not reading the comment that is their choice.
To be informed or to be ignorant !
22
I defend your right to tell the truth how you see it.
‘Who’ exactly is ignorant, and of what in particular??
What happens if ‘co-morbidity’ and the corona is questioned/looked at?
It might explain why some of us are still around?
00
As you can see, some of us have not reached a conclusion to our thoughts or opinions.
00
Mate, I don’t know where you come from but “dopey” is term of endearment compared to the rest of the Australian vernacular insults.
You wouldn’t be a snowflake would you?
00
Four Australian engineering firms have Federal Government orders to produce 1,000 ventilators with provision at present for another 2,000 to be produced.
Test kits are also being produced to order.
Tony Abbott has revealed that when he was Minister for Health in the Howard Coalition Government a pandemic action plan was created in 2005 and the COAG based leaders cabinet consisting of the Premiers, Chief Ministers and Prime Minister are using that plan now with changes to meet the COVID-19 circumstances.
From 2GB
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott says a complete shutdown is needed to tackle the spread of coronavirus.
The government was one of the first in the world to declare COVID-19 a pandemic and has introduced strict measures to contain it.
In 2005, then Health Minister Tony Abbott said a pandemic could be the “worldwide biological version of the Indian Ocean tsunami”.
He tells Alan Jones Australian officials have been planning a pandemic response for decades.
“No response will ever be perfect but I think our response has been better.
“I think that Scott Morrison is doing very well in this unprecedented crisis.
“We need to have a very, very complete shutdown now to do everything we humanly can to prevent the spread of the disease.
“You can only put the economy into a coma for so long, it can’t be indefinite… but the more complete it is now the more likely it is to be shortlived.”
70
My lady is a carer in an aged care home.
Sh came home this morning after a night shift and told me that she had to help an elderly resident
Who was under investigation because she had been visited by her daughter
Who had just got home after a voyage on a cruise ship.
So once again we ask….
Why weren’t all those cruise ship folk kept on board and tested ?
Why has the Aged care home allowed someone just back from a cruise ship voyage on the premises ?
And will we be told if this resident is infected so that all staff & their families
Know to take decontamination measures ?
100
It makes you wonder doesn’t it Bill?
The highest risk groups overseas travellers should be a priority but no!
A workmate had a similar story, his wife visited an elderly patient at home and was told at the end they had contact with a friend returned from overseas and had flu type symptoms, why didn’t they warn the care worker BEFORE they came?!
50
The daughter should have been in 14 day isolation. I suspect a law has been broken.
60
Absolutely GA
Not in self isolation
Just spreading it around !
Bloody idiot daughter !
31
SlowMo and Brendan-wait-til-they-die-before-acting-Murphy delivered a complicated inadequate and messy message last night.
SlowMo is overly concerned kids might lose a year of education but apparently not as urgently concerned they may lose their parents or grandparents.
The message needs to be shorter sharper and more brutal.
Stay home now, immediately, unless you are involved in saving lives or in our essential food supply chain.
Even if you are involved in essential services, if you have travelled overseas in the last two weeks, go home immediately, stay home, do not leave home. We will find a way to deliver your food and pharmaceuticals. Call this XXX number. Register on this … website. We will look after you.
People who have been overseas or on a cruise ship who go out in the community may cause the deaths of potentially hundreds of people. There is no excuse. Exposing people to this kind of risk is the equivalent of manslaughter.
100
Someone has hung a home-made banner on a bridge in Adelaide “STAY HOME”. Good on them.
For those who know Adelaide, it’s on the Goodwood Rd railway underpass bridge as you drive towards the city.
40
It seems Scott Morrison thinks schools are factories manufacturing educated people on an assembly line. Miss some calendar weeks and your education is ruined. Rubbish.
Education is not a manufacturing exercise. In my opinion, most of school up to about year 10 is more child minding and social skills and sport and even bullying and survival than education. After that, with a little guidance, children teach themselves. At University that is all you get. From kinder to university, it is up to the individual, even as a child. What motivates some and not others is a puzzle.
But as Oscar Wilde said, nothing which needs to be learned can be taught. Teachers can only guide. Once children have mastered the basics, it is up to them, as with the rest of their lives. For most years a few weeks out of school with home study could do a world of good. Maintaining a virus exchange centre for the sake of a few weeks of home study is just appalling.
10
I did chase this up with one of the management.
The home went into lock down since Monday
Immediately that the management knew this had happened.
No visitors since then
No ex-cruise ship folk welcome at all !
All that is good !
This aged care home is excellent generally and I have a lot of time for them
Unlike some others.
But if this kind of stuff up can happen at an excellent one
I wonder how things are going in the not so good.
50
Oh really! What happened to the stockpiles of masks and protective gowns, respirators etc?
Why did they not implement their plan earlier?
72
Answer: The provision I understand was $600 million in 2005 set aside to purchase pandemic response equipment etc if and when needed, that was 2005/06 and no doubt in the Forward Estimates of that Budget.
In November 2007 in the 2007/08 financial year the Rudd led Labor Government was formed.
Since that time zero debt became over $400 billion of federal debt including the 2013/14 Labor Budget major expenditure items of Gonski education grants to the States and NDIS that Labor failed to make provisions to pay for and accordingly estimated a considerably lower budget deficit than there was.
From 20013/14 financial year there have been multiple issues including the measures for budget repair contained in the Abbott led Coalition Government’s first Budget, for financial year 2014/15.
The PM and the Treasurer have several times indicated that with the current Budget in balance, forecast surplus now not possible to achieve because of the Health crisis, the asssistance financial package is affordable, but adds to the debt.
No doubt the pandemic provision was abandoned during the Labor Government terms 2007 to 2013, and with pandemic known abandoned and forgotten.
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“Why did they not implement their plan earlier?”
pink bats and school halls!
60
They did.
20
PeterC they have been planning an influenza pandemic apparently, which the current response is suited too, but which is not the right response for this disease.
60
NSW government defends it’s major stuff up last week on the Cruise liner passengers being allowed off the ship !
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-25/coronavirus-nsw-government-grilled-over-ruby-princess-arrival/12087784
UTTER bloody lengthy waffle by pollies & bureaucrats
41
Yeah, it’s totally ridiculous, with Gladys BuryUnclean continuing to insist, Megafire style, that everything is still under “some” control.
The complete change in precaution and behaviour needed to keep this thing from spreading is still being conceived of as a movie plot that doesn’t really need to affect what an actual person does in their day job.
There has been a sluggish response of both ordinary people and their governments all around the world, with many knock-on effects.
My idea for using an on-schedule Olympics to motivate a lockdown has fallen by the wayside, with the IOC on 24 March postponing the event until summer 2021. Forget the “faster, higher, stronger”, they’re down to “later, pricier, weaker”.
Have I complained enough already? No? You’re still reading so you want more?
It is clear since NSW alone had a 211 jump in case count yesterday that after smoothing there has been no deceleration in the Australian cumulative cases at all since the 14th March. I was initially hopeful some good was being done, then in the last 2 days that has been “BTFO” (as the youth say). I’m trying to ignore that as a Ruby Princess outlier and hoping there will be a slowdown in the next 2 weeks anyway. But even if that happens we’re on track for overflowing ICUs by 23 May. Sooner if there really has been no slowdown.
Do a lock down starting 4 April, this whole thing goes away by 4 May.
50
The Ruby Princess debacle was blamed on Border Force. The Border Force laid out the correspondence received from the NSW Health
and the final communique stated Health was unconcerned and the boat could dock and unload. The final green tick! Border Force has no
medical decision making powers, it is totally non medical, and relies on Health to give its clearance. That was a very dirty game played
by someone fearful for the error of their ways, and their job in NSW Health, I would suggest.
60
How dare you.
It’s Berys Gladachickliken.
00
Your probably right. She was on the news this evening. She took no responsibility when
confronted by the refusal of Border Force to take the fall and placed NSW Health as
the problem. ‘Your Glad’s response was BF was wrong, that they all had to take responsibility
in a sort of collegiate manner. What a tosser!
00
You need to homogenize it again Andrew. There’ve been no cases in Marble Bar, Widgiemooltha, Carroll (NSW) or even in Cumbooglecumbang (NSW).
That’ll decelerate the mongrel. Ask BoM to help out.
10
Just noting that after adding yesterday’s data the new trend was lower than 2 days ago.
So it is looking more likely a slowdown will happen over the rest of this week and yesterday’s exhortations were another Ruby ruse.
10
Ping
40
Pong
50
🙂 :-).
GoFundJo
10
I manually fit a curve to the global data for Total Cases, and Total Deaths, to see how different they are. It shows total deaths have always risen faster than total cases–a larger proportion of deaths with time. We may be testing and reporting much more now and detecting far more of the total that’s actually present but the proportion of deaths continues to grow much faster than new cases get detected.
Date | Cases curve | Deaths Curve
03-Feb-20 | 1.118 | 1.120
17-Feb-20 | 1.018 | 1.042
01-Mar-20 | 1.032 | 1.042
11-Mar-20 | 1.072 | 1.110
16-Mar-20 | 1.088 | 1.180
19-Mar-20 | 1.114 | 1.204
22-Mar-20 | 1.117 | 1.128
Our current testing approaches are not good enough to detect and control the spread. We need better real soon. So only isolation will work (for now). Deaths rise faster with time because the hospitals can’t provide effective treatment when overwhelmed.
For residual tedious boneheads who want to pretend the current curve isn’t a problem:
March 25th = 2,380 die/day
April 1st = 6,240 die/day
April 7th = 12,850 die/day
April 14th = 26,470 die/day
April 21st = 60,400 die/day
April 28th = 142,900 die/day
1.58 million people have died globally by the last day of April, if nothing else changed, and only isolation currently works.
Plus the global death curve will keep rising from hospitals losing the battle, and those numbers do not include this further continuous rise in the curve. So real death would be considerably worse. That is a foreseeable conservative projection of the current curve trends.
Countries either beat the curve during March and early April via strong isolation or millions die in April and May.
Most people are not so selfish or foolish as to suggest nothing much needs to be done because a bloated debt-propelled GDP bubble is so much more important than others lives. The community will instead use their brain and act responsibly to isolate their families (and will insist on prosecuting recalcitrant deluded idiots who don’t) and the resulting deaths will be way lower by the end of April. We will see nothing like that, we’ll have adjusted and will know how to beat it while economic demand, links and activity resume.
No time for fools saying do nothing.
80
3. Build factories to make test kits and ventilators en masse.
In the context of your suggestions that is not actually how Engineering works, Jo.
40
Yes, as a retired from manufacturing industry I immediately thought about logistical issues not least being sourcing of raw materials, rescheduling production machinery and skilled operators, obtaining technical drawings etc.
Not that simple to achieve.
However four engineering firms have accepted the challenge and are producing the first 1,000 ventilators between them.
61
One thing in Australia’s favour here is the large number of CNC machines. Everything from profile cutting using routing, laser and water jet to 5 axis 3D milling.
Production of circuit boards in now flexible as well, with CNC placement of roll-fed surface mount components and continuous wave soldering.
With plastic components, we have a large number of 3D printers in the country. Both FDM and laser sintering in a wide range of engineering plastics.
For elastomerics like bellows, the set up time for blow molding is longer, but could be reduced to days if people pulled finger.
Technical drawings? We are all using 3D CAD systems these days. I use KeyCreator, which can generate files for all the above processes. Almost all systems can effectively exchange files now, and getting a component into manufacture in a remote factory takes just one email with a CAD file attached.
The real problem is trained operators for ventilators and safe intubation. We can’t 3D print or laser cut those.
This is why I would suggest the use of Hydroxychloroquine, zinc supplements and the use of CPAP sleep apnea machines. We have thousands of those machines in the country and even a local manufacturer. Novartis AG have announced they are donating all their stock of 50 million 200mg doses of Hydroxchloroquine to the global fight. (I am keeping a watch on the weather updates from Hades to see when Dr let-them-die Murphy puts in Australia’s request …)
50
Another question that occurred to me is how we are going to build factories, test kits or anything else needed whilst stay at home quarantine and regional borders are in place? We cannot both cower in fear and fight this thing.
70
Lightning Camel, who is staying home in Australia? Hardly anyone as far as I can tell — not teachers, not docs, not driving insturctors, hair dressers, bus drivers, only cafes, waitresses and gym owners.
SlowMo said: if you have a job, it is essential.
I presume a few accountants and lawyers are at home.
70
The local 250 car park & ride here
was only 30 per cnet full this morning at 8.30 am
Usually it is almost full.
So a lot of folk here are staying and home or working from home.
But it would be better of the number working was pared back to the essential services.
20
Jo people are going to work but are being very cautious, receptions are closed to visitors/customers and I’ve often been instructed to drop mail/parcels at the door for businesses and residential, people are out but generally keeping their distances I’ve even been thanked for wearing a mask while working and wear it when going into potentially crowded areas mostly the supermarket.
50
Well, go out to town or on the highway and it is clear that there are a lot of people not travelling.
What I was actually referring to was one of several of the inherent contradictions in your multipoint plan in your main post.
00
In response to Jo above. Sorry, should have put a name in the post.
00
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/australia/
I draw your attention to the graph labelled “New Cases vs New Recoveries” and the orange/brown “New Cases” line.
The point I find curious is that we get a spike then a dip every 6 days. March 04, 10, 16 and 22.
This suggests some sort of 6 day reporting cycle which I can’t really understand. A 7 day cycle would make sense as all of Sunday afternoon’s numbers get rolled into Monday and/or tomorrow’s data being brought forward.
Curious.
40
Changing rest days may vary due to delayed delivery of lab materials needed to run stored tests.
50
I don’t have an answer but the pattern is not just in Aistralia, you can also see it in Italy’ new cases and probably in other countries. A similar pattern shows up in deaths in Italy.
Italy has had two days of reduced growth and a third midway between those. The timing is about when the first effects of social distancing should be seen. Is this a real effect or part of the pattern you have identified? I suspect lots of people watching.
20
Not sure that countries have enough spare tests to retest people who have already tested positive. Here in Ontario, they don’t even seem interested in positive tests for certain people.The advice is to selfisolate regardless.
Testing needs to be ramped up quickly
50
SKY
25/03/2020|9min
Dozens of passengers infected with the coronavirus were let into Sydney by NSW Health before they were even tested for the deadly virus in an extraordinary development of the catastrophic health bungle which left more than 100 people infected. The revelations by ABF Commissioner Michael Outram outlined with great detail how NSW Health gave passengers on the cruise ship permission to disembark without conducting a single test. Almost a week later one passenger has died from coronavirus and the infected passengers who were released have infected more than 100 people. Mr Outram read out sections of the email from NSW dated March 18 which cleared the cruise ship for disembarking. “NSW health (told the Ruby Princess) the ‘NSW health expert panel has assessed the Ruby Princess as not requiring onboard assessment in Sydney’,” he said. “NSW health stated to the Ruby Princess, and I quote again, ‘You are free to disembark tomorrow however according the Australian government guidance all passengers must go into self-isolation for 14 days’.” The revelations show that NSW Health cleared the passengers without heading on board and testing each passenger, a decision Mr Outram said would have stopped the passengers from entering Sydney. “What broke down in this case was health officers, trained doctors or nurses didn’t get on board the vessel, swab passengers and take their swabs for results,” he said, “Had that occurred in this case, what happened wouldn’t have happened.”
90
That’s not very cruisey.
72
That seems a little strange. I’ve had a couple of cruises with Princess line in recent years.
The first one probably 5 years ago now was with a couple of older people, both of whom had problems,
one from pre-existing cardiac problems and the other with an asthma type shortness of breath.
The medical people were ICU trained and handled the problems superbly, including contacting the patient’s
cardiologist at sea.
Were we lucky that we had great medical staff on that particular boat, and the rest of the boats are poor?
Or are the captains over-riding the medical people on their boats – which they have the power to do – and
lying as to the condition of people on board. We seem to have had a couple of cases of the latter in the
last week or so, where the story has been changed just prior to getting into a berth and the communications
have been reported as from the captain. Company policy to dump its problems????
50
Breaking: New York announces IV vitamin C approach to treatment.
I was amazed at the PM last night on tv with the new list of business closures.
Barre was one of them but he told the whole nation live that he didn’t even know what it was!!!
I would have spent 5 seconds looking it up. I’m ordering their closure but I don’t know what they actually do.
Just amazing…
40
G’day Rod,
Any link for vitamin C trial please?
Cheers
Dave B
20
Is that the best rocket you’ve got Rod?
What is Barre anyway?
00
Update from N.Z. No deaths . Nobody in ICU .
Infection of rest homes etc . now underway.
Fingers Crossed.
farmerbraun now at Day 12, and feeling better by the day.Total medication to date (not counting the single malt gargle) is 3 paracetamol and two ibuprofen.
40
Whoops .Forgot the data , for what it’s worth :-
https://thebfd.co.nz/2020/03/covid-19-update-25-march-2020/
20
The entrepreneurial spirit gets to work ! Just maximising all their assets.Lemons to lemon aid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=xQZdL_uV-GQ&feature=emb_logo
10
Apparently Nevada’s Democrat Governor Steve Sisolak has issued an emergency order banning the use of anti-malaria drugs such as chloroquine for Coronavirus patients.
The anti-trumpers have gone completely insane. These are drugs that have been used safely for 7 decades. The studies showing their efficacy against coronaviruses targeting the ACE2 receptor date back to 2005.
80
Meanwhile India has banned the export of Hydroxychloroquine.
60
A bit surprised that Trump being Trump, anxious to get the economy moving, hasn’t arm twisted the medical
fraternity into using NYC COVID-19 patients as a big clinical trial and test the hydroxychloroquine as a
therapy.
That would require weeding out those with potential problems from the drug, although a medical
interviewee today said there had been few if any side effects and the subjective assessments were encouraging.
Surely now, with many units around the States trialling the drug and apparently at least finding it benign,
and with nobody apparently coming up with adverse side effects – or stating they found no response,
the situation is made for getting on with utilising the medication. The world would know inside a week whether
the drug was effective or not and cease all the conjecture. Time is of the essence.
If this is war, then let the good guys take the hand from from behind their backs. A positive response and it’s a
game changer extraordinaire.
50
doc:
Trump isn’t a dictator, despite what the Democrats think. He faces resistance and attempts to sabotage him (see Democrats https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/bongino-exposes-the-dimocrat-dirt-in-rescue-bill/) and has to deal with State Administrations not necessarily willing to work with him (or efficiently).
60
Graeme No3. I’m actually a fan of the Trump Presidency.
Perhaps I should have put it a little less strongly, like ‘…win the advising Doctors on the panel over to his way
of thinking..’ . However, it doesn’t matter which of the ‘non East Asian four'(now add India) nations that one thinks of,
I believe, without a shred of proof but judging on actions against the virus, most of the medical panels around the world
have been confronted one way or another by national leaders fearing for their economies when presented with the full suite
of required actions that should be taken. I believe their results have been uniformly poor initially, necessitating rapid and
more austere changes but peoples paying a health penalty as the price.
Never mind. All good. I agree about Trump generally. I think he is being a bit precipitate at the moment about lifting
US restrictions by Easter, but he may have drugs proving their worth by then. He does seem a bit blessed in his judgements, has
a rub of the Irish as they say. Outcomes so far, on most matters, have been good. He adapts so smoothly if he errs that he leaves
his critics with nowhere to get at him.
30
any biochemists round here?
enriching for variants that would infect humans. So it doesn’t have to even be engineering
2-27-20 (at 16:45 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlplnH3VYyc) “It’s more likely hat what they did was alter the virus. So they found it in the wild and then they grew it in an animal host, say ferrets. The reason why Dan asserts that it might be ferrets is because ferrets have an ACE2 receptor very homologous to humans. So if you grew the virus in ferrets and then screened the viral titers* in those ferrets for novel viruses and you found one that infected these ferrets very well (17:29), you might also be enriching for variants that would infect humans. So it doesn’t have to even be engineering, it could just as easily be that in the laboratory with lots of animals and lots of time and lots of technicians
they just screened viruses from the wild and screened viruses from generational culturing in other animal hosts—and they could have a whole cabinet full of viruses that they’re studying, a whole cabinet full of novel coronaviruses with interesting properties. Why would they do this, that’s the big question. Well, Dan’s even nailed that part. You can find patent applications filed in Germany for coronavirus vaccines already a year ago. (18:16) …
they’ve been doing gain-of-function research** in the US, Canada, Australia and China for about 10-15 years now (27:19). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlplnH3VYyc
* Viral load, also known as viral burden, viral titre or viral titer, is a numerical expression of the quantity of virus in a given volume. It is often expressed as viral particles, or infectious particles per mL depending on the type of assay.
** Gain-of-function (GOF) studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease
40
If China did this, the worry would be that after all that time they hadn’t managed to find a vaccine. Or, if they had
they aren’t willing to expose the fact. People are expendable in China; weaponry is not. Another alternative would be,
they have used a vaccine and the timing of claiming ‘no new cases’ would about fit the time taken for the vaccine to
become effective. Could make a good conspiracy theory! There would have to be a leak from within to expose such a
clandestine planning; doubt they could hide it this long.
I’m not doubting rob’s sources. Just building on the possibilities and waiting for the attacks of ‘Conspiracy theorist’ to begin.
20
Time taken also fits with quarantine measures.
Also fits with fake news made “to fit”.
30
Spoke to an acquaintance in Perth who is a sole trader doing driving instruction with his dual control car. He is continuing with instructing mostly kids and new arrivals despite the 1.5m separation and 4 square metre rules. Doesn’t believe the rules apply to him! (His car would be a confined space, no?) He could infect his pupils who then infect their parents or vice versa. Government should close down this type of business ASAP. 1.5m Distance to Save Existence
20
Convert to truck tuition, if you can afford to lease a modern unit.
30
Virus Grows to $6,000,000,000,000 (plus tax) Kudlow said $2 trillion would be appropriated by Congress, and the rest would come from the Federal Reserve. https://weather.com/health/coronavirus/news/2020-03-24-coronavirus-updates-covid-19-cases-updates-olympics
30
The FDA has just released Hydroxychloroquin for medical use in NYC. (Sky 12:45, Mike Pence interview)
50
Sorry if old news. Missed the segment this am and Fox replays its daytime (our time) program about 3 times during the day. BTW, my time is WST.
Whatever, it’s hopefully bringing the big guns to the war with the virus. Fingers crossed.
40
COVID-19: India bans export of Hydroxychloroquine
https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/covid-19-india-bans-export-of-hydroxychloroquine-120032500092_1.html
Hope it’s worth it for India
20
For a positive aspect to this issue, this article in American Thinker provokes positive ideas.
10
For those who watch TV for Corona virus updates have you noticed the disconnect between the stark life and death reality of the measures we are required to implement in dealing this disease to the fantasy land presented in sponsor advertising? No social distancing, no consternated news anchors and on the scene reporters, no masks or gloves no gurnies, no shutdowns. Pure bliss! It’s like there’s no Corona virus.
40
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, and I guess that there aren’t too many contributors from Queensland.
That Palaszczuk woman, Premier of Queensland, and currently running the State, has said that the Council elections across the whole State of Queensland will go ahead as scheduled this Saturday.
She has confirmed it a number of times. A State representative has even released a press release for every news bulletin, warning people of the $130+ fine if they don’t vote. She has even said that Democracy must go on, and that she needs those Mayors to fight this COVID-19 Pandemic in the State. She’s warning people NOT to go out at all in fact, but that the election must go ahead. There are also two State Government by-elections as well, running in conjunction with the Council Polls.
I wonder how social distancing goes at all those schools, keeping in mind that thousands upon thousands queue up at every State School with lines out the gates for all hours, you know, schools that will still be open for students on Monday.
Just how do they expect to work things out as per pandemic rules and regulations with the total voting populace of Queensland expected to be in klarge groups in the one place.
Absolute sheer and utter madness.
She’s been running around like a headless chook wherever there is a camera, squawking at every little bullet point, and then in the same breath saying that this election is okay.
She even said that her senior medical officer has said that all will be okay. I guess that means the premier’s fundament is covered eh!
The hypocrisy, how it burns.
Tony.
140
Our parliment attempted to enact legislation to give the government unlimited taxing and spending abilities for the next 21 months. The opposition balked and they are sorting it out now
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/parliament-covid19-emergency-funds-legislation-1.5507797
50
Another example where politicians speak with forked tongue. Sort of like the Jews being told not to worry as they are sent to the “showers”. If only the people all decided to refuse to attend the polling sites. It would be a great sign of the people winning over the politicians to show who has the real power. Sadly it won’t happen that way. Instead people will go to the polls like sheep. What happens if some of the workers at the booths don’t realise they have the virus and infects everyone there when handling the papers?
70
Thanks for the update Tony, did not even hear about it here so far.
https://www.health.qld.gov.au/news-events/doh-media-releases
Most people will take one look at the polling booth area and walk away. A council election for such types is not worth losing 20% lung capacity and 30% of a liver over.
60
I just read an ABC article on the election. Not one word about the virus, the risk people face or social distancing. It’s as if COVID19 has agreed to go on hold for the day. Expect a huge surge of cases in a fortnight. Someone will say “with the benefit of hindsight”. Unbelievable.
20
Chloroquine increases the effectiveness of zinc anti-viral activity, and the antibiotic protects against additional bacterial infection. Plasma from people who have antibodies can be very effective. The virus is not transmitted through blood.
70
Lockdowns may take on Orwellian dimensions.
‘The indisputable health costs of isolation should force us to ask some difficult questions. How long can social distancing be maintained before the toll becomes unbearable for many? What structures can and will be put into place to help individuals through the inevitable mental health crisis that will accompany prolonged isolation?’
The Week
30
As each crisis passes our rights and freedoms are whittled away. The obvious next step or two is to become a cashless society using digital currency. It gives governments the power to track us so much more. It also allow them to control us in ways even George Orwell didn’t dream about.
61
That may be orwellianly so, however, how does one control children? My street was full of kids today all playing and having fun oblivious to a lock-down.
From:https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_best_laid_plans_of_mice_and_men_often_go_awry
“the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry
No matter how a project is planned, accidents or misfortune can still happen with it.
1785, To a Mouse, Robert Burns
But mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
Synonyms
man plans and God laughs”
…seems to be the case if the children in my street today are anything to go by.
21
Not disagreeing with your sentiments el gordo but as the decades pass I’ve seen less and less people outside at anytime of the day or night in their neighbourhoods, to be honest I don’t think most tech addicted socially distanced house bound Australians will think this is anything terrible, well apart from those that loose their jobs then their house then their car then their partner and……..ok
40
Captured the idea very well Stone Stone.
🙂
KK
10
It’s not to bad, you can still go out and enjoy the day while self-isolating. I did a ~12 km walk around Tville today, over the hill also in bush. Lots of people out doing the same, we all just put as much distance between as we could when we passed and said “hi”, etc. No problem, almost everyone knows the score now and has adopted that habit. I had one lady apologize for almost walking into me as she turned. I realized I should have let her know I was coming up behind her. Only one person walked at me, but she was playing with the gadget and earphones. I took note to do the avoiding of them next time. If they’re out walking about to get some sun it’s because they also don’t want to catch it, so are touching no one and nothing. I spent the time thinking about how to avoid having to touch routine stuff, like pedestrian buttons for instance. And how to wash off properly once back home. I washed my wallet with sugar-soap as I had to use my card in an EFTPOS and press buttons for one last time.
I think the banks will need to raise the limit on card transactions without using a pin for the duration, so that we don’t have to touch terminal buttons. They better cut the fees out while they’re at it, for the interim, people will want them nailed up if they don’t.
70
How many funnies am I aloud to show!!
🙂 🙂 🙂
KK.
30
As many as you like, as long as they don’t make too much of a noise.
🙂
10
The problem with lock-downs is they are only effective while the lock-down is in place.
Back to square one after the lockdown is relaxed in my opinion. That’s my gut feeling on all this hysteria. We need a diversity of opinion and data, and most of all, a respect for all kinds of opinions. We need them all.
40
It’ll be interesting to see the birthrates nine months after this lock down ends, the Corona Generation perhaps?
50
Cat’s out of the bag on that one Yonniestone, lockdown or indeed no lockdown.
10
IMO (in my opinion)
10
The kids who are at home with an X-Box are the only guaranteed lockdown we have lol
10
An interesting report here:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-half-uk-population-oxford-university-study-finds-a4396721.html
which would help to explain the Chinese figures, especially if the disease does not flare up again after the Chinese loosen their restrictions.
One can only hope.
30
I have been suggesting this for some time – even perhaps that the mystery flu the England cricket team had in South Africa might have been CV caught in transit from NZ. I also know a French doctor who came down with a bone-aching flu in early January. I had a couple of swollen lymph nodes in January but nothing much else than a sneeze (in London). I think its even possible it has been circu8fir much longer than January.
40
Very interesting question! I think i get what you are saying Phoenix44.
20
If not, well then, i am still perusing/thinking/gathering data about it 🙂
Great question/observation.
Thanks! and ‘thanks’ to Stephen Wilde too.
10
Some more detail on Stephen’s link..
From: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-half-uk-population-oxford-university-study-finds-a4396721.html
“
. ” …..if anyone can shed more light, please feel free to do so…
20
Yes. A retirement home is the end point / stopping / maxing out feature for an infection. Once it gets in the door of an old aged home, it spreads easily has cause greater deaths with finality which reduce the population of an old age home.
Look at the huge jump of obituaries in Italy. The hogh death rate for older people is very real. If the virus was widespread in the overall popularion, most old age homes would be effected and the obituaries/cemetaries would be overflowing
00
…..that the Chinese Communist Party has changed it’s entrenched behaviour and is now telling the truth.
Forlorn hope.
10
????
Because they were the only government in the world which systematically lied to its people?
Pull the other one.
Or was it that there are just too many others to mention?
10
Ir the virus had a 50% attack it would be seen in the old age homes with a lot more deaths.
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“END THE AMERICAN LOCKDOWN!!”
https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/end-the-american-lockdown/
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Accidentally posted this quoted text to a previous comment when it should have been an entirely new response comment by me.
“Some Xtra food for thought.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality.”
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But there are many things that continue to make no sense. Japan for example has done virtually nothing yet appears almost untouched. Italy had said it is probably significantly overstating its deaths and the intense cluster in Lombardy is unexplained. Italy versus Germany versus France versus Spain makes no sense.
And the cardiac mafia continue to insist that ACE inhibitors are not an issue.
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ACE Inhibitors are fine. There is a problem with the kidneys and fluid retention if ‘some’
patients are given a combination of a diuretic, an anti-inflammatory and an ACE inhibitor.
‘Old anaesthetic proverb!’
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I suggest that masks have made a difference in Japan
Almost everybody wears a mask to prevent their infected breath
Infecting other people.
This is a deep cultural norm that goes back to the 1940’s.
Foreigners who are sick with something
Get accosted by strangers if not wearing a mask
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‘Chloroquine increases the effectiveness of zinc anti-viral activity, and the antibiotic protects against additional bacterial infection. Plasma from people who have antibodies can be very effective. The virus is not transmitted through blood.’
Ireneusz Palmowski /Climate Etc
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Whatever South Korea is doing, WORKS !
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52001837
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Jo – normally I pretty much agree with everything you say, but on this one I think you are wrong. Its not that your intent is wrong or your theoretical reasoning is wrong. It isn’t. But you are missing a key piece in your argument. For your idea to work it’s not going to take 2 weeks, or even 2 months. It’s going to take months and months and months of very strict quarantine. And that is just not practical from a social or economic point of view. And it would have to be global, which is not practical and very probably impossible. We will all run out of food long before we eliminate any virus risk.
Whilst there are cases of younger people becoming very ill, the vast majority of infections do not require hospitalisation. So what this situation will naturally move to is a risk based tolerance approach – the same as every other aspect of life. People will just start to get on with their lives again. Older and ‘at risk’ folks will be more cautious and we will build health logistical capacity at the same time to mitigate the problem. Yes, a lot of older people will die but we all also have to live.
People die on the roads but we tolerate speed limits of 70 MPH. Many many people die from and cancers and CVD yet smoking is still legal. 70,000 European pensioners died in 2003 during a 2-3 week heatwave. Yet we don’t ban folks from going on summer holidays without them.
In a month or 2 this will all have become normalised and life will return. It has to.
63
🙂 :-).
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Interesting slant/comment.
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Disagree.
Every rekindling of a ‘hot zone’ in a country represents another multi-month long exponential growth process that starts off very slowly and gathers pace only after 2 months. It can be detected and nipped in the bud very early.
Remember all those cases popping up in far flung cities all over China? Where are those now? They all got isolated before the numbers could build, and the isolation and testing ended them. There’s no victory that way, but there is pandemic either, the disease becomes manageable and isolated again.
And there will be functioning and very experienced hospital staff at that point, and treatments which are actually effective. It’s much too pessimistic to say it will last indefinitely as we know it won’t, but it will try to come back again and we limit and slow it it via social distancing, and good habits, plus effective testing and awareness of temps, gastro, coughs and sneezes.
If deaths are a small fraction of total cases then all you have to do is keep the incidence and transmission low via limited isolation where it is detected. That approach is hardly new either, it has been used for most of the last century as it worked, and allowed most of the economy to function normally.
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Don’t think it’s as simple as that.
This is another ‘new’ disease. There is no known history of how it will end. Don’t even know how
how much immunity is gained , for how long if one gets hit. The Italian tale is scary and
seemingly in a run away state. The victims seem to be currently coming from wider age groups.
We don’t know once we get control if we can keep control, or what mutations develop and what
virulence they might develop. Remember, everyone gets older in this life. We don’t have a vaccine
for at least a year . If those drugs don’t work, or the bug develops it’s way around them, we don’t have any means of control until there is a vaccine OR we do as we do now and bowl over our way of life
and economy repeatedly.
With influenza we are lucky enough to have a vaccine which requires us to redevelop annually
a new version to keep up with the dominant version of the mutated virus. Yes, we get a lot of deaths a year which go unnoticed to an extent except when we are reminded to ‘get our shot’ – and that shot only
lasts 3 or 4 months, just long enough to cover the peak season of influenza which is able to be
Forecast with precision.
Perhaps we are just lucky with the nature of the influenza virus. I don’t see currently that we know
COVID-19 well enough to presume it will just be another virus we can grow comfortable with. We don’t have the controls yet. Maybe next week we will have. It wasn’t much fun living with the polio virus until
the vaccines rolled up. The rationale used for influenza for some reason doesn’t comfort us much
when Haem. Meningitis .a bacterium I know, rolls up unannounced, yet it kills few!
Humans are peculiepar beings.
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Doctors in NZ believe that the current level 4 lockdown will last at least for a year.
We may revert to level 3 at times , but any new clusters will go back to level 4 , and this may continue for at least two years.
With only 5 million people , and food for about 20-30 million, NZ has a huge economic problem which may yet dwarf the virus problem.
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I would agree with you except for some crucial provisos:
1) Social distancing / agressive contacttracing has been demonstrated to be effective with this disease. To do this requires ample testing and manpower. This agressibpve monitoring and isolation can be ramped up in shortish time
2) Effective antiviral treatmens will come onstream in months. Vaccinations afters that
3) over time there will bea buildup of hospital beds and equipment to treat those who can benefit from it
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Who.
Funds this great blog.
We do.
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/young-and-fit-brought-down-means-hard-sharp-quarantine-coming-everywhere/#comment-2297805
http://joannenova.com.au/about/donations/
Ping. Go fund it.
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Silly America, you’re supposed to be flattening the curve.
This was so good I had to share.
https://i.imgur.com/tawtxFC.jpg
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What’s the cost difference between an unchecked departure from the boat and a thoroughly screened one.
I’d suspect a couple of hundred thousand.
What’s that split two ways.
Would a cruise company stoop that low. Would a state government department stoop that low?
KK
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Just ban real cruise companies and create virtual cruise companies so people can virtually go on a cruise in the safety of their own virtual homes and cost differences as well as the pesky unchecked departures can be monitored and screened on the virtual boat thoroughly.
Our young ones are taking to X-Boxes and so while they are doing that, the grown ups can go on virtual boat/ship/sail boat/canoe cruises to exotic far away virtual locations.
That should keep them state government departments honest lol
🙂
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We are facing a (possible) societal doomsday scenario alright. Up to 13% of infections are acquired by the medical staff treating affected patients in some areas. These are the people most trained to deal with it. We are facing the possibility of having to release all prisoners in the first world where human rights trump everything else. Public facing staff in service sectors are abandoning their positions in fear, Police and Military getting hit too. The good news is that chloroquine testing began yesterday in the USA, let’s hope for quick and positive results.
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Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.
Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. All healthcare workers managing possible and confirmed cases should follow the updated national infection and prevention (IPC) guidance for COVID-19, which supersedes all previous IPC guidance for COVID-19. This guidance includes instructions about different personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles that are appropriate for different clinical scenarios.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid?fbclid=IwAR0qpn_FP0xIdLUOjFLZS5hXFpfnWYyeoX6dykdgc0PaR5E4d1fOk2BTFGw
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What sacred principle are we sacrificing for the greater good again?
Can’t see Scomo putting that one across in a resounding upbraiding speech on the steps of Parliament.
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60,000 Australians died in the first world war, we could have confined them to their homes and not let them go, but we didn’t we focused on the greater good.
10,000 Australians die from Spanish flu, we could have forced self isolation but we didn’t, we focused on the greater good.
40,000 Australians died in the second world war, we could have capitulated and avoided deaths, but we didn’t we focused on the greater good.
Tens of thousands of Australians are going to die from Corona virus no matter what we do, we could cower in our homes like scared children or we could accept the inevitable, suck it up and get on with it, soldiering on focusing on the greater good.
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Having worked extensively in infectious diseases, Dr Spencer’s past work experience saw him contract the deadly Ebola virus. In 2015, after treating patients in West Africa, he was diagnosed and treated in New York City for the viral hemorrhagic fever, which on average kills 50 percent of those infected.
Despite having survived such a deadly illness, Dr Spencer states that he’s worried about COVID-19 and is making a direct plea to anyone who is still under the impression that it’s tantamount to “just another” strain of flu to take physical distancing seriously.
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/doctor-gives-harrowing-account-of-life-on-the-frontline-for-clinicians-treating-covid19-in-new-york/
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46% of all COVID-19 cases in New York City are in the 18-44 demographic.
Source: New York City Dept. of Health, as of 5:00 PM (local) March 24.
(65 and over is 19%.)
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The number of fatalities in Spain is already greater than in China.
Spain
Coronavirus Cases:
47,610
Deaths:
3,434
Recovered:
5,367
Given the number of healed, the number of victims will be terrifying.
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I just received the following message from my local grocery store here in northern Ohio, USA:
I find the final point rather ironic give how hard the environmentalists have been working to eliminate single-use bags and getting us to use reusable bags.
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Went to the supermarket a couple of hours ago, I still had to buy the plastic bag (I stopped reusing them, they go straight to the bin now). But we now have to pack our own bags and the checkout operator uses plastic gloves to put it through the checkout. Presumably shelf packers use plastic gloves now too? Yet to see that
Saw an old guy picking up sausages in his hands and looking at them then putting them back again – nice.
My biggest issue with the supermarket today is the dirty trolley handles and baskets. These need to be spray-treated and hosed every time the trolleys are bought back for the next customer, and they’re not! Talk about super spreaders. They’re sticky and slimy, which then contaminates the handles of shopping bags which you then take into your kitchen. This needs addressing fast by Coles and Woolworths. other than that things are going better there.
But those shelves were really stripped bare this morning.
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“My biggest issue with the supermarket today is the dirty trolley handles and baskets…”
The last time I went to the local grocery store here in Ohio, USA, they had someone wearing gloves dedicated to wiping down the trolley handles and handing out the trolleys. They didn’t wipe down the trolley baskets, but at least you have the bags between the baskets and the food.
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