Do young adults learn anything that matters in school?
They’re protesting in the streets but can’t even answer the most baby-basic questions about energy or their pet molecule “CO2”.
It’s almost like carbon dioxide is totally irrelevant? Teachers don’t care. Kids don’t care. Media don’t care, and when they all grow up the adults won’t care either.
Only 26% of people aged 18-24 understand that nuclear power is a low carbon source of electricity, compared with 76% for renewables such as wind and solar, according to a new poll by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).
Older people are more likely to say that nuclear power is low carbon. The poll found the level of understanding rising from 47% among 35 to 44-year olds to 61% among 65 to 74-year olds, although it remains well below levels seen for renewables.
Good on the Mech Eng’s for asking. I call “fake” on the protesters that tell us the world is at stake but can’t be bothered learning the basics.
Wait til they find out they’ve been dragooned into being free advertising for conglomerate industrial capitalists.
Moving at sedimentary-rock speed, the Australian government has finally put a ban on flights from Italy effective at 6pm, and only ten days too late. On the 28th of February Italy had 1700 cases and infections were growing at 30% a day. At that point it was obvious where the numbers were headed. Today France, Spain and Germany are where Italy was then. How many infections will we fly in before we do the inevitable and ban them too?
All the cases are imported on planes, and all of the solutions include people getting sick. Are we missing something here?
Three more diagnosed cases of COVID-19 brings the total to nine in WA
WA has released a pandemic plan to keep delivering essential services
Dr Robertson said the three people had recently flown back from Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Health officials were working to identify the flights on which the three patients travelled and would contact the passengers who sat closest to them, Dr Robertson said.
The pandemic plan, which was last updated in 2014, provides all Government agencies with guidelines to continue to deliver essential services in the event of a widespread coronavirus outbreak.
It includes preparations for school, business and childcare centre closures, cancellations of major events and public transport, and even processes for cemeteries to implement quicker burials.
The plan also considers “special arrangements for shopping hours to avoid overcrowding”.
Some governments can say they were blindsided. Other governments know in advance their policies are killing people.
Keep sending those letters. Get radio talk back active.
Every plane has an increasing chance of bringing people who could unwittingly kill our citizens, and may themselves need precious ICU beds as well.
Rock and Hard place choices here:
We can do deaths and pain and then kill the local tourism and restaurant industry. Or we can demand a two week mandatory quarantine and skip the dying bit and possibly save those industries because we’ll all have the freedom to fly and drive inside our own state.
International quarantine is a bargain compared to domestic lock-downs.
Even then Australia already had a century-long rolling cycle of floods, fires and droughts. One natural disaster after another back when CO2 levels were perfect.
These go back to the earliest dates of European settlement. Wherever Captain Flinders landed in 1782 — 1792 he found “found traces of drought and bush fires invariably”. In 1839, the drought was so bad that fish “putrefied” in the big Murrumbidgee River even though there was not one coal fired power plant on Earth.
The author laments that the droughts “become forgotten in the flood intervals.”
In the modern Wifi era humans can forget even faster.
Below is my summary list of the events described in the story.
Below that, the full letter. From The Queenslander, Sept 19th, 1885.
*Since Captain Flinders was born in 1774 I assume those dates were wrong and he wasn’t commanding a ship when he was 8 years old. Any other suggestions welcome.(thanks Gee Aye, SteveD, James West and Peter Fitzroy)
(1795 onwards?)*
..
Droughts and fires
1788
Drought in Sydney
1797
Drought near “Melbourne”
1799-1806
Nearly every year “high flood” in NSW the Hawkesbury river rose 101ft
1810
Excessive rain ruled til 1810 then ended
1811-1826
More floods than droughts
1826-1829
Longest continuous recorded drought in Australia
1830
Great Flood. Windsor on the Hawkesbury became an island.
1831 – 1836
Moderately dry
1837 – 1839
A three year drought which almost exterminated the sheep and cattle of Australia, a dried up that great “father of waters” the big Murrumbidgee River itself, leaving the very fish to putrefy in the dry bed thereof…
1840-1841
More floods. In 1841 was the highest known flood in this part of the world. The Brisbane and Bremer rivers were both in flood at once, and the water rose 70ft at Ipswich.
1841-1849
“there was rather more rain than was wanted”
1849-1851
Severe drought and on Black Thursday, terrible fires: “boxed the scattered bushfires of of the colony of Victoria into one vast wild blaze, before a northerly hurricane, which blew coaches and men-of-wars rowing boats over like hats. Farms buildings fences, crops, and lives were lost”
1852
A flood so bad it swept away the town of Gundagai and drowned more than a score or two….
1857, 1863, 1864, 1870, 1873, 1875, 1879
Floods of the Brisbane River with “boats rowing in Mary-Street and Stanley-Street”
1869, 1877
Dry years
1882, 1883
Wet years, and the eruption of Krakatoa brought “the constant glow and iron drought that has scarcely been broken since”. “Since then cholera and floods in the Northern Hemisphere, droughts and disease in this hemisphere, have been rife.”
THE following letter by Mr. N. Bartley
appeared in Monday’s Courier:—
The present severe drought serves to remind
me of a paper which I read 5th
January, 1864, before the Queensland Philoso-
phical Society on ” Meteorology,” and which
led to the establishment in this colony of ob-
serving stations, till then unknown here ; and
as this paper, amongst other matter, contained
a list of droughts and floods in south-east
Australia since the year 1782, it may be of
some interest to repeat that part of it now. From 1782 to 1792, Captain Flinders landed at intervals in various places on the south and east coasts of our continent, and he found traces of drought and bush fires invariably.
Suddenly there are no more weddings for a quarter of all of Italy. No more movies, pubs, dance halls or trains to some parts of the country either. Italy is about to overtake South Korea for the number two spot on the list no country wants to lead, unless Iran beats Italy to it (which it almost certainly has already). Today 16 million Italians are not free to go about their business, or go to school.
On Feb 21st, Italy had three cases, now 366 people are dead, and 7353 are infected (at least). How life has changed in two weeks and three days. Suddenly France and Germany are about to reach the 1,000 mark. This is what exponential curves feel like.
The Frankfurt and London exchanges dropped by 8 percent in early Monday trading, while in Paris stocks were trading 4 percent lower. An index of Europe’s 50 biggest companies was down nearly 6 percent.
Oil prices lost nearly a quarter of their value in futures markets, as two major producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia, set off a price war while the world’s thirst for crude is already ebbing. While low oil prices can give consumers a boost, they can also disrupt countries that depend heavily on petroleum dollars to keep their economies running.
Stanford Uni and University of Washington have cancelled all classes and gone online. The first of many. One student started a petition and got 3700 signatures. Maybe that did it, or maybe the rulers there are smart and worried about catching it themselves.
This is all so predictable.
But we don’t have to sit back and wait for leaders to figure out the obvious. Send those messages. Start those petitions. Write to the editors. On the curve, every day matters. We know what we should do. We just need to get serious. Stop the flights, stop the crowds, stay home and get deliveries. Close the schools. Do it well fast and hard and then it’s over. Then open flights up to all the countries that did it properly too. Its not the end of the world. Then we can help others.
The good news: South Korea continues to get fewer new infections (only 272, down from 800 at the peak). Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan appear to be in control. There is a future where the West awakes, stops doing everything two weeks too late, playing catch up with a virus, and pretty soon we can flatten that curve.
The video’s pretty full on, but history books will be written about this week. Tucker Carlson’s not boring and there’s plenty to debate, like how fast can we start mass production of antibiotics. (UPDATE: Antibiotics won’t beat a virus, but we sure need them).
Does Greg Hunt have a plan, or is he hoping the US does and we can piggy back? Or thinking India will have medicine to spare? They banned pharmaceutical exports four days ago.
If Australians are a bit skittish it’s because Greg Hunt has said we’re “prepared” 400 different ways with an old influenza plan and no other details.
This is what’s coming (something like Italy), plus deaths. Or we can do it now and skip most of the deaths bit:
– Lombardy region (entire region, all provinces) – Piedmont (provinces of Alessandria, Asti, Novara, Verbano Cusio Ossola, and Vercelli)
– Veneto(provinces of Padua, Treviso, and Venice) – Emilia Romagna (provinces of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, and Rimini)
– Marche (province of Pesaro Urbino)
In the above areas:
Travel in and out of the area, as well as within the area, will only be possible in response to “duly verified professional requirements, emergency situations, or for health reasons”
People with symptoms of respiratory disease and fever of 37.5 Celsius or above are strongly encouraged to stay at home and limit social contact as much as possible, and contact their doctor
Avoid gathering
All schools and universities must be closed
All museums and places of culture will be closed
All cultural, religious or festive events are suspended
Cinemas, pubs, theaters, dance schools, game rooms, casinos, nightclubs and other similar places shall remain closed
All sporting events and competitions are suspended
Ski resorts are closed until further notice
Swimming pools, sports halls, thermal baths, cultural centers and wellness centers must suspend their activities
Bars and restaurants can remain open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. provided they respect the safety distance of at least 1 meter between customers – this provision also concerns other commercial activities
Shopping centers and department stores must remain closed on public holidays and the days preceding them
Places of worship remain open, provided that the safety distance of at least 1 meter is respected, but religious ceremonies (marriage, baptism) are prohibited until further notice
National restrictions
As in the north of the country, cinemas, theaters, museums, pubs, game rooms, dance schools, discos and other similar places will be closed
Sports competitions are suspended with some exceptions
Watching South Korea — it appears to have stopped the exponential spread of Coronavirus
Heartening. At its peaks last Saturday and Tuesday, South Korea acquired 800 new infections per day. Since then, whatever it is doing, South Korea has managed to keep the new daily cases between 300-800. That may not sound like much, but in exponential terms it could have been a lot worse. Is this the future for us in the West? Perhaps with aggressive action, and local or statewide lockdowns, wealthy western nations may get outbreaks under control. Will we spend the next year with periodic major lockdowns as outbreaks occur, but manage to keep the virus from en masse spread without hospitals being overwhelmed? But can poor countries achieve this? If not, we will have to close flights to stop repeated debilitating and deadly outbreaks, while doing our best to help them. The world will become divided into nations which have this controlled, and those who don’t. This is still the pandemonium I’ve been talking about for six weeks; we could have avoided it, but it’s better than other scenarios. It’s a middle-run scenario.
We are fortunate that this is not as airborne and infectious as measles, which might have made even this impossible. (Note that Coronaviurs is perhaps 500 or more times more deadly than measles, whose fatality rate is 1 per 100,000. Note the mass panic those outbreaks cause.) Keep the pantry stocked. Reduce your risk. Travel less. Avoid crowds. Wash hands. etc.
The death toll so far in South Korea is 48. Theoretically, even if they have passed the peak of new cases, the death toll will still double in coming weeks. In this one outbreak, 100 people may die, 10,000 plus people will have suffered a potentially debilitating disease, and tens of thousands will have been inconvenienced by quarantine and travel bans. There is also the financial cost of closing workplaces. Note also that there are major privacy issues with the South Korean approach to mapping and tracking victims and their movements by their phones.
When will the Australian Government stop telling people to keep going about their business as if nothing is happening? Presumably when there is an outbreak and it’s two weeks too late?
South Korea, new cases Coronavirus
South Korean cases of Coronavirus.
Extrapolating further than I should, if this is the peak and the decline starts soon and there are no new outbreaks, then in a month or so it may be safe to open flights again to South Korea. (Though if our outbreaks are not controlled, they won’t want our planes.)
The daily growth rate is shrinking — yesterday increasing by 7%. This is ideally a bell curve type rise and fall, and the huge spike on the 20th Feb is probably the discovery of all the cases that existed but weren’t detected in the days before. Is that what we are about to see in the US, which hasn’t been doing nearly enough testing?
Growth in Coronavirus cases in South Korea
Two weeks ago South Korea had only 200 cases, now it has 7,000. So the death toll of 48 (with a two week lag) is not a number we want to calculate, because it’s surely a wild overestimate. South Korea had more undetected cases then. Guess. Guess. Guess. O for data.
Deaths still rising following that “new cases” curve with a two (or three week) delay.
It will be at least another week before it levels off.
….
The first few cases in South Korea were very early (11 cases on Jan 31). It was doing well, but lost control.
Taiwan is worth watching:
How Taiwan managed to avoid a coronavirus outbreak
Taiwan is 81 miles off Mainland China. It is a highly urbanized state of 24 million people with an extremely high population density. It is also one of the first places where the new coronavirus epidemic manifested itself. All things considered, Taiwan was expected to have the highest number of cases outside China. Yet Taiwan successfully managed to avoid an uncontrolled outbreak and only has 44 confirmed cases.
Less than one year after the SARS outbreak, a National Health Command Center (NHCC) was established. The NHCC is meant to serve as a disaster management center command point…
Technology is a key ally when you’re fighting an outbreak, Taiwan realized. So they leveraged the national health insurance database to create a smart system to warn citizens and keep an eye on the situation.
The database was integrated with the customs information to generate a pool of big data. This data generated real-time alerts based on people’s travel patterns. It used QR code scanning and online reporting of travel history and documented health symptoms to classify passengers’ infectious risks. Then, Taiwanese authorities acted based on what the data suggested — and took some pretty draconic precaution measures.
People with the lowest risk were issued fast travel clearance, but people with higher risk were likely to be quarantined at home, whether they liked it or not.
Obviously, there is a lot of big government involvement. Again, we see hi tech tracking. Is that necessary? How much freedom will we have to trade in order to reduce the toll and curb the rising fear? Can we control this just with old fashioned quarantines and public information updates?
______________________________________________
Coronavirus Background: ☀ The Demographics: the young are spared, but the severity increases with age, and slightly more for men than women. ☀ The Ro is 2 – 3 and exponential curves are steep. See the importance of an ICU unit in treating ARDS (the severe respiratory disorder). ☀ Illness progression: Dry coughs and Fevers, Aches. In 15% of people, by day 5 breathing trouble starts. In 3% (?) by day 8 they may need an ICU (intensive care unit). ☀ The good case of Singapore but the ominous calculations of how fast the ICU beds may run out. ☀ The story of how American Samoa avoided Flu Deaths with quarantine in 1918. ☀
Who needs studies? CSIRO doesn’t need any evidence to tell Australians how things work
Senator Matt Canavan asks Dr Peter Mayfield of CSIRO why an explainer document they put out about the bushfires didn’t include a sentence he found in another CSIRO study.
“No studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed at this time.”
A record breaking ten long seconds of silence in Senate estimates this week.
Matt Canavan has recently given up his role as a Cabinet Minister to support a leadership challenge by Barnaby Joyce in the Nationals party. Unleashed!
Amazing what people can achieve from the back bench. Make this man PM!
The evidence is overwhelming but the names of 85 unconvinced experts threatens the Earth. Shield your eyes, sinner, lest ye faith be tested!
…
The Religion of Carbonoid-Weather-Control is so fragile, and Wikipedia so captured by philosophical fruit flies, that 35 editors voted down 19 other editors and now The List does not exist. Thus do 35 editors keep safe the minds of Wikipedia babes who might get confused when they see Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencers names and mistake them for actual climate scientists… oh.
Here’s the reasoning for the censorship given by one of the Wiki editors:
“The result was delete. This is because I see a consensus here that there is no value in having a list that combines the qualities of a) being a scientist, in the general sense of that word, and b) disagreeing with the scientific consensus on global warming.”
Wikipedia
I’d like to thank those 35 Wiki editors for telling the world how weak the consensus is and giving skeptics another excuse to highlight this dangerous list. Go Streisand Effect.
Cap Allon at Electroverse captured the Wikipedia list. So have Fandom. KEEP!KEEP!KEEP! Those listed are not noteworthy? “Any utility it ever had is long past?” It’s a list of cranks? Absolute rubbish. There are 4 explicit criteria for inclusion. 1) the individual must have published at least one peer-reviewed research article in the broad field of natural sciences; 2) he or she must have made a clear statement disagreeing with one or more of the IPCC Third Report’s three main conclusions, and 3) the scientists has to have been described in reliable sources as a climate skeptic, denier, or in disagreement with any of the three main conclusions. Additionally, to ensure notability, only individuals with a wikipedia article can be included. Someone advocating for deletion, if the article is a mishmash of miscreants . . . I DARE YOU TO STOP BEING INTELLECTUALLY LAZY!
Dr Roger Higgs notes:
By the way, note three BBC-style disingenuous omissions in the title alone: “List of scientists who disagree with the scientific consensus on global warming”:
(1) these are not just any scientists, but well-known and, in many cases, distinguished scientists (Happer, Soon, Lindzen, etc, etc; see below), in diverse fields of science;
(2) they disagree with the consensus on man-made global warming (no educated person denies global warming; Earth has always alternately warmed and cooled);
(3) the consensus is only among climate scientists (whose salaries, research grants, and reputations depend on public belief in man-made warming).
Time to share far and wide. If Wikipedia is serious they have to kick out the editors with political or religious bias.
This 25 year old British man caught the virus in Wuhan on November 25. He must have been one of the earliest cases, and it was only recognised belatedly that he had Coronavirus. Twice, he thought he was well, only to relapse. But he does recover. I suspect this is the rarer “severe” type case in an otherwise healthy young man. Theoretically 80% of people get the easier five day version and recover. Notably, for him it’s 24 days before he feels well properly. Can this disease affect pets, which is very ususual? If so, can it affect other mammals, like livestock?
Day 5: I’m over my cold. It really wasn’t anything.
Day 7: I spoke too soon. I feel dreadful. This is no longer just a cold. I ache all over, my head is thumping, my eyes are burning, my throat is constricted. The cold has travelled down to my chest and I have a hacking cough.
If solar power and batteries were a winner anywhere, we’d hope it would be in remote Australian communities. But a cyclone clouded over Central-Australia for a few days and the batteries ran out. People had no money, no phone and no landline either. To boot, the rain flooded the roads, so people were cut off in every sense.
Welcome to Renewable World:
Telstra says the stations that provide landline and mobile phone coverage to some remote communities in Central Australia are not robust enough to withstand several days of cloud cover.
The communities of Santa Teresa and Titjikala, south-east of Alice Springs, were without mobile and landline coverage for over thirty hours in a recent outage.
In the most recent outage, Santa Teresa was also cut off by road because of flooding.
Santa Teresa parish assistant Sister Liz Wiemers said being that isolated was alarming.
“We couldn’t use ATMs, couldn’t buy fuel, community members couldn’t buy power cards,” Sister Wiemers said, referring to the pre-paid electricity system used in remote communities.
Obviously they need diesel-gens as a back up. But because the roads were blocked Telstra couldn’t send any technicians out with one. They said they need to replace those batteries, but may not be able to for a while (busy repairing things in the fire-zones presumably).
This is what 100% renewable looks like. Hope no one needs a doctor.
[BBC] Travellers from countries with severe coronavirus outbreaks who arrive in some parts of China will have to undergo a 14-day quarantine, state media say.
Travellers from the virus hotspots of South Korea, Japan, Iran and Italy arriving in the capital will have to be isolated, a Beijing official has said.
Shanghai and Guangdong announced similar restrictions earlier.
Authorities are worried the virus might be imported back into the country.
Although most virus deaths have been in China, Monday saw nine times more new infections outside China than in.
Shanghai said it would require new arrivals from countries with “relatively serious virus conditions” to be isolated, without naming the countries.
Chinese official statistics suggest they are getting the outbreak under control, which is hard to believe, but they are acting like they do. If most of their population is still at risk of further outbreaks, then they would care about risky incoming flights.
Meanwhile our health ministers tell us it’s too late to stop the planes.
Cost of importing viruses *might* be more than cost of closing borders x 1000
Has the Prime Minister done the right cost-benefit calculations?
Forget the tens of thousands of deaths, pretend those lives are worthless, and add up the cost of shutting down schools, factories, public transport, sports events, conferences, concerts and everything else, because that’s not the cost of closing flights, its the cost of keeping them open. Factor in $5,000 a day for intensive care beds, plus workers staying home to look after kids, plus job losses. Include the costs of putting off most elective surgery for six months. Don’t forget people who will get sick of something else this year but will have to wait longer for help, so add some cancer patient deaths to the tally.
Ponder how much cheaper it is to live in a country free of this scourge? If Australian domestic tourists knew travel in NSW was safe, and if people in Sydney weren’t afraid to eat at Chinese restaurants, then Australian citizens could enjoy those holidays and dinners and thousands of tourist-related businesses might not go bust. If we let in risky flights then we earn two more weeks of tourism cash but maybe wipe out the small mum and dad businesses who can’t survive the cash crunch.
The Tasmanian Government has just announced they will be “200% renewable” by 2040 — a feat only possible because they have an umbilical cord to hostages in the mainland who have to pay for irrelevant surges in electricity that arrive when they don’t need it. The same hostages will send back fossil powered electricity every week to keep Tasmania running when the wind and sun stop and the water is worth more in the dam than out of it. Not to mention container-ships of GST cash to support the state with the second highest unemployment in the nation.
This is the same state that went 100% renewable for three months in 2015 and launched itself into an electricity crisis. They decommissioned the last fossil fuel power station, just in time to get islanded by a break in their umbilical cable and thence had to order flying squads of diesel generators to keep the lights on at a cost of at least $140m. They also had to restart the same plant they just closed. The state lost half a billion dollars in the crisis — nearly twice the cost of the newish gas plant which had only built in 2009.
All these quarters in the red below are ones where Tasmania needed to import up to 30 percent of its own electricity from the mainland. Not visible here are all the days during the blue “export” quarters where generators in Victoria kept the lights on in Hobart.
All the high export “blue” quarters in 2013 -2015 were during the carbon tax era. Tasmanian Hydro was running the dams down in El Nino conditions through carbon tax funded greed. The state got so desperately short of water in 2016 the intellectual giants in charge of Tas Hydro paid to do cloud seeding to fill the dams. Which would have been fine if they weren’t trying to do it in the face of a monster storm front that created flash flooding.
Too bad the Sun shines and the wind blows at the same time in Tasmania as it does in Victoria
Wind farms in both states are highly correlated so the extra energy will be pushed onto Victoria when it doesn’t need it. More unreliable power dumped on the National Grid just means that last reliable generators run less efficiently and have to raise their prices or go broke.
Droughts in both states are also “correlated”. The government hopes Tasmania will be the battery of the nation, but short of moving the island to Peru, when there’s a drought in Australia, the battery might be flat.
Money from the mothership is probably also coming for the Hydrogen Projects the state is planning, and possibly (who knows) to fund the unneeded second undersea interconnector which will benefit foreign companies like UPC Renewables who want to build the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a project so unpopular even the Greens in Tasmania don’t want it.
Interconnectors are always sold as “opening up potential” but they are hugely expensive, the potential they open isn’t economic in its own right, and the billion-dollar cables wouldn’t be needed if states were self-sufficient with baseload stable power like they all used to be, and could be again.
Preliminary findings from that study indicate that the benefits of a second interconnector could outweigh the costs by $500 million.
[ABC News] The Federal Government has expanded its coronavirus travel ban to include South Korea, and added additional precautions for travellers from Italy, amid fears about the spread of the disease.
The revised bans will be in place until Saturday, March 14 but the Government will review the situation within a week to determine if the travel restrictions need to be extended further.
Since the government was at least one week too late with the Iranian block, how will the medical experts stay ahead of the curve on other countries with no testing? Eg Indonesia? Or in this case, Europe and Dubai?
The woman in her 30s from Perth’s southern suburbs returned a positive result after holidaying in Iceland and the UK, and returning to WA via Dubai on Monday.
The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated.
Don’t look now: Big Numbers Coming. Assuming 60% of people catch it before some treatment appears, a death rate of 0.7% – 4% means bad news for some furry number from 100,000 to 600,000 Australians. Double that for the UK. And 1.4m – 8m in the United States. There is a wide range of mortality rates, which may reflect that there are two kinds of mortality rates here — one where people get great ICU care, and one where hospitals are overrun and they don’t. We’ll probably pin that to the low end if we keep cases limited, we eat well, don’t smoke, don’t have wild pollution, and hopefully we’ll get better and better at treating it. But even the low end numbers here are Not Nice. What this means is mass disruption to keep those numbers down — schools closing, factories stopping, no parties, delay the Olympics, etc etc.
The long lag is a bomb. It can be five weeks from infection to death and bureaucrats are weeks behind the virus.
Train meets hospitals
Let’s look at the Worldometer daily numbers, to get an idea of how many cases from 2 weeks ago have died, and how many cases from 8 days ago have got into breathing difficulty rates as “severe”. The data is starting to accumulate (unfortunately).
Hunting for good news, on the Diamond Princess, numbers are not so awful: based on 691 cases eight days ago, five percent are now classed as severe and the mortality rate of 454 patients two weeks later is only 1% (assuming all the deaths are correctly recorded there by Worldometer, and the severe cases stay on the “severe” list if they get well, which they might not). The Diamond Princess would be an older demographic too — so these numbers suggest that mortality is at the lower end of the WHO range. Maybe even “only 0.5%”. Clutch at good straws and hold on to that thought.
Looking across lots of countries (but not China, Korea, Italy or Iran) and based on 867 cases that were known just over two weeks ago, the mortality rate is a daunting 3.7%, and based on 1334 cases eight days ago, the rate of progression of all known cases to severe is 7%. If correct (and they may not be) these are the kind of numbers that would freak a hospital manager out. These don’t come from China, South Korea, Iran and Italy — all of which clearly have a lot more cases that they didn’t know about two weeks ago. So, see the table below, this is data from nations like Japan, USA, Hong Kong, Germany, France and the UK. They’re rough, not always taken at the same time of day, they may double-count Diamond Princess deaths (in national tally’s and boat tallies — any one know?) Feel free to point out mistakes.
These numbers are a train wreck for hospitals, even at the lower end. State Ministers in Australia got briefed recently and appear to understand that now as they they tend to be using the phrase “we may not have the resources”. Translated, that’s the code for “not enough hospital beds”. They’ve already warned people with symptoms to stay home. How fast we shift from chartered rescue flights and individual attention to “just call us, and stay in bed”. A few weeks is a long time in an unfolding pandemic.
Governments have been consistently two weeks behind this virus.
Everything they’ve done would have been so much more effective if they did it two weeks before they did. Now is the time to leap up and get ahead. Look at where South Korea and Italy are now, and just do it. We’re going to have to do it soon anyhow.
The curve we want to flatten. The Ro, Reproductive curves of infectious diseases. ResearchGate
It doesn’t have to be that way. No cases confirmed yet in WA (apart from the Diamond Princess cases). Thousands of deaths are coming, and don’t forget mass disruption to schools, uni, businesses, factories and elective surgery. All that in the offing and no one wants to cancel some holidays and flights to slow the train down? Are we so addicted to weekends in Bali and interstate footy trips that it’s unthinkable to just say “hang ten for a few weeks?”
WA’s chief medical officer Andrew Robertson said an outbreak in the state was now “probably inevitable”. “There are measures that could help delay it, certainly some of the border measures, [plus] self isolation and possibly quarantine if needed,” he said.
“And we will continue to try and contain this disease. But we accept that we have to prepare for the next stage and make sure that our systems are best prepared for the likely pandemic.” Many non-emergency elective surgeries are expected to be cancelled and doctors and nurses working desk jobs may be redeployed to treat patients on busy hospital wards. — ABC News
‘We may not have the resources’: Minister
If there are no nice wildcard surprises coming (new antiviral, lucky break, freak discovery) — the aim of the game is to flatten the curve, slow the exponential growth and keep as many people as possible uninfected and out of hospital. That means no more unnecessary flights, no mass events, close the schools, do church online, get people to work from home if they can and do mass hygiene lessons for our nations.
Everyone needs to know how to wash hands seriously well, and not touch the tap or the handle in a way that undoes the point of washing in the first place. Did you leave those germs on the doorknob on the way in, and collect them again on your way out?
The have-cake eat-cake experts. When will the media pin them down?
Meanwhile last night the experts were still saying there was no evidence of community transmission in Australia and simultaneously that there was no need to stop the flights to Italy or South Korea. Go figure. If there is no community transmission, it’s not too late to stop the flights. If there is community transmission– then stop telling people not to wear masks, keep shaking hands, going to parties and the football. It can’t be both ways.
When community transmission is obvious and undeniable they’ll say “we expected this”.
Don’t let them get away with their double-speak.
Scott Morrison is choosing to let the virus fly in, can someone tell him these are not the deaths we have to have?
Scott Morrison almost got a hard question on the ABC last night. But he weaseled out of it — just following the expert advice, he said. No, dear leader. Do your own research. Ask some different experts. Ask some different questions. People’s live depend on you. Please send him the message (and tell Boris, Jacinta, Justin, and DJT too).
Given the gravity, we should call a halt to all flights without a two week quarantine (not pretend quarantine loopholes through Dubai, Thailand and Bali). Do it just for a few weeks til we get more data. Winter is coming downunder. The best way to avoid this virus is to minimize trips, shopping and crowds. Start thinking about the long run.
Amazing: LA Times finds a WHO expert who makes sense:
Mike Ryan, who runs the agency’s [WHO] emergencies program, pushed back against officials who wanted to “wave the white flag” and surrender to the disease’s hold. China took drastic steps to fight the virus, he said, and case numbers are now on the decline there.
Countries such as China and South Korea “implemented very, very strong measures that have affected their own economies and their own societies,” Ryan said. “It’s really a duty of others to use the time that has been bought. “That is not a reverse you can achieve with influenza. If that is a failure, we’ll have slowed down the virus.”
There can be a big benefit in slowing the virus’ arrival in a country for a few months, Ryan said. Many countries, including the U.S, are in the middle of flu season, so large numbers of coronavirus cases would overwhelm the health system.
Too many in the deep state are waving the white flag.
A carrier’s 26% reduction across their entire operation in comparison to last year.
A hub carrier reporting bookings to Italy down 108% as bookings collapse to zero and refunds grow.
Many carriers reporting 50% no-shows across several markets.
Future bookings are softening and carriers are reacting with measures such as crew being given unpaid leave, freezing of pay increases, and plans for aircraft to be grounded.
It almost gives me hope that people are smart enough to outwit their governments and protect themselves despite the incompetence at the top. But it doesn’t get the governments off the hook — it just shows how easy it would have been to stop the flights. The problem is that while the people who are afraid of getting sick are staying home, the people who are surrounded by the sick would want to fly in if they could. Therefore countries that want to stop their hospitals being overrun still need to stop those flights.
With only two cases of Covid-19 here in Western Australia (both from the Diamond Princess) and no sign of community spread, the state government just declared that all international school camps are henceforth cancelled (including for private schools — see how “private” they really are?) So kids without the virus can’t fly out, but people with the virus are welcome to fly in.
Our chief medical officer says ” it was no longer possible to completely prevent people with the coronavirus from entering the country”. Ironically, because the sick people can come here, soon healthy ones won’t want too. Voluntarily, the people we do want as tourists will all stay home. The borders will semi-shut without government action anyway, but it’s the most useless kind of border control.
Let the pandemonium begin
Two weeks and two days ago South Korea had 30 cases. Now it has 5,186. Of those, twenty eight people have died, which sounds not-too-awful til you realize that it’s a two week lag to death (or even three), and 28 out of 30 is a 93% mortality rate. Except, of course, it isn’t. It means South Korea had far more cases two weeks ago than they realized. It’s the same for Italy and Iran. How many other places are about to leap forward…?
A Chinese man believed to have contracted the coronavirus during 14 days of supposed self-quarantine in Dubai has raised a red flag about the “back door” for fee-paying university students entering the country.
More than 11,000 Chinese university and high school students have used the third-country layover mechanism to sidestep the ban on Chinese nationals flying direct to Australia.
(CNN)Up to 1 million people could be tested for coronavirus by the end of week, the FDA said, as cases across the US rose to more than 100 and health officials warned the number will keep climbing.
People don’t believe the government when they say there’s no need to stock up on supplies either
It’s the first run on shop shelves I’ve ever seen.
For some reason Australians are buying lots of toilet paper and tissues, but leaving some tinned fish and soup in the stores. The Lucky Country is not well trained in the prepping culture. Anyone would think we ate toilet paper and tissues.
…
It’s too expensive to close borders, they say, but who can afford to import this virus?
Should we stop holidays and conferences, or most of the economy?
The monthly PMI figures show that in February about four fifths of China’s economy was shut down. Locking people in apartments and hospitals being not very productive. Strangely, all the economists watching the mainstream news and official Chinese figures did not expect this. They were shocked when the monthly PMI result was announced. The drop from 50 to 35 was more than twice as bad as the economists expected.
The market had expected a reading of around 46, according to a Reuters poll and this shocking data had analysts recalibrating their numbers.
The ANZ economists said this implied the utilization of only a fifth of the country’s full economic capacity, much lower than the high numbers claimed by authorities.
Satellites show nitrogen dioxide emission over China: NASA
Junk journalists copied junk news from China and they all fooled the economists
The February result came in far below the median forecast of 43 by economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal.
Saturday’s results show a “relatively large impact” from the epidemic, Zhao Qinghe, an analyst with the statistics bureau, said in a statement accompanying the data release, according to the Wall Street Journal. March’s readings should improve because of authorities’ efforts to help companies, especially manufacturing firms, resume production, he said.
“The situation on the ground [in China] is materially worse than what has come out in the media,” Leland Miller, CEO of the China Beige Book, a research firm that collects Chinese company viewpoints, told MarketWatch in an interview.
Xi wants to be emperor of the whole world and can see a path to achieving that. But he has kicked a couple of own goals…
Xi’s first own goal was to suppress privately owned business activity in favor of state-owned companies. Workers in state-owned companies have about a third of the productivity of those in businesses run by their private owners….
His [President Xi’s] second own goal was to delay the news of the coronavirus until after the trade deal was signed with the United States. Xi did not want to show any sign of weakness while the deal was being negotiated. China’s relative position had been deteriorating since 2015, when its share of world exports peaked at about 15%. Trump wanted a trade deal because he would like China to remain stable through the election cycle. The language of the trade deal included a lot of “China shall,” indicating that China needed the deal more than Trump did. We infer that the anti-China efforts will be ramped up again after the election.
The first coronavirus case was reported on December 1, 2019, and the trade deal was signed on January 15, 2020. Wuhan was put under quarantine lockdown eight days later on January 23. In the meantime, some five million people left Wuhan, as estimated by Wuhan’s mayor, a case of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. So, as a result of waiting for the trade deal to be signed before acting, Xi changed a controllable outbreak into an out-of-control epidemic.
The Chicoms are pathological liars, as they regard anyone who is not in a more powerful position in the Chinese Communist Party with contempt, thus they reported daily deaths as a percentage of cases as 2.1%, 2.1%, 2.1% until they gave up lying about it. But the hit to China’s economy is real and huge. Coal consumption is half of what it should be at this point after the end of the lunar new year holidays. Air pollution, as measured by satellites, is down 20% to 50%.
China’s ability to threaten its neighbors will be much weakened as its government revenues crater. There is a good case for nominating the coronavirus for the Nobel Peace Prize. The humble virus has certainly done far more for world peace than Greta Thunberg, the current frontrunner.
The PLA can’t attack anyone until there is a vaccine for the coronavirus. It’s been reported that the PLA pulled out of Wuhan after 3,000 of its troops became sick. Collecting dead bodies is now on a bounty system, similar to how bodies were collected in Europe during the plague.
Another beautiful outcome from the coronavirus is that it should, in a rational world, eliminate China from the world’s supply chains. It might be good for a couple of million jobs in the United States alone.
Reuters, meanwhile, are reporting that things are picking up in China
Apparently Chinese official data shows there are more lights and more people driving around and we all know the Chinese government would never make that sort of thing up.
BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Nearly 300 million people have gone back to work in China since the Lunar New Year break as more companies restart business and coronavirus travel restrictions ease, although many small firms are still struggling to find enough workers to run plants.
Coal consumption is making a slight recovery.
Chinese coal consumption data
We hope things are improving for the people, if not for President Xi.
On the news tonight various officials told us that now “we can no longer stop the virus coming into the country”. It was some kind of self-soothing abject nonsense to calm themselves down. What they meant to say was that we can no longer stop the virus running amok inside our country (because we didn’t stop flights from Iran a week ago).
Obviously we could still block flights tomorrow and stop the virus coming in. And given that we may run out of hospital beds in weeks, it still seems sensible to stop potential virus-shedding people from romping through our cafes and shops. The main aim now, surely, is to delay the peak til after winter. Adding random virus generators doesn’t seem like a good way to reduce the use of ICU beds, even though there will come a point where there will be so much virus in Australia that bringing in a few more won’t matter. But when a single superspreading tourist can double the national toll, we’re not there yet.
Right now, there may be people who live in Indonesia, Africa, or anywhere, noticing that people are getting sick all around them. While the Australian government is waiting for the WHO to tell them what to do, these same potential carriers are thinking of boarding a plane to come to Australia. (Same for the US and UK, NZ and Canada obviously).
Preparing is quite good advice,
With lentils, beans, nuts and rice,
But if COVID should spread,
Best take to your bed,
And hope that your stocks will suffice.
No seriously, this is matter-of-fact, youtube-at-its-best, concise, cartoony, and smart.
Think of doctors as Body-Engineers. The problem to solve today Engineer-readers — is how to keep blood supply oxygenated when lungs are highly inflamed, filling with fluid, and the delicate thin membranes of lung tissue can’t cope with the sheer forces of rapid collapse and expansion. As well, if oxygen levels drop, even unconscious patients will breathe involuntarily — out of synch with artificial ventilation machines. The sensation of suffocation creates the urge to breath faster and harder.
.
The great news is ICU staff are getting much better at keeping people alive when they get ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) which can happen with other diseases (like Influenza). Seems, the ICUs can keep 84% alive while they wait for the inflammation to subside and the damage to heal. Though the DIY version at home probably won’t be so effective.
Not enough beds
Obviously, this explains my obsessive interest in the percentage needing ICU care and also the Ro (rate of reproduction or spread). With a shortage of ICU beds, slowing the spread makes a life-and-death difference to state the bleeding obvious. To bore you again: in Australia we have about 1 ICU bed per 12000 people or 2,000 ICU beds nationally.
Check out the Ro epidemiology curve written here Jan 31st: Corona virus and those exponential curves. Note that current estimates of Ro are between 2 and 3, so higher than these (meaning the curve will hit harder, faster and peak higher unless we bring it down through draconian isolation measures). An Ro of 1.8 peaks in just 60 days. Sometime in the last few days a medico in Japan got this through to the guy in charge, which is why with only 200 patients he realized that closing schools was imperative across the whole country. The only way to reduce the R0 to zer0 is to “Stop The Flights”. The next best option (far distant second) are mass lockdowns, closure of factories, schools, offices, etc.
As a reader wrote to me yesterday: It’s not practical to close the borders. My reply: It’s not practical to kill 100,000 people either but one or the other may happen. Do the maths, WHO estimates 1% CFR (Case Fatality Rate. Let’s be optimistic, call it 0.5%. Deaths in the next six months: Australia, 125,000; Canada, 175,000; New Zealand, 25,000, USA, 1.6m; UK, 300,000. Geddit?
Ro, Reproductive curves of infectious diseases. ResearchGate
Next post: stock up at home. Panic buying is what happens when people wait for the government to tell them to prepare. Think of long lasting food that you will eat anyway, and don’t forget soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, disposable gloves, plastic bags, detergents, medicines (prescriptions). Mail order deliveries are a good option. The less physical shopping you need to do in the next few months, the better. Do it for your country. If you can stay out of the shops, and out of the hospital, that’s going to help the people who can’t.
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