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Scott Morrison says eliminating the virus is not viable, despite most states in Australia effectively managing to do that already. See the chart below. Instead he talks of suppression as if it’s viable to ride an exponential curve with a default position of “moonshot”.
At the start of June, Victoria was getting 20 new cases a week. In the last three weeks Victoria has added 3,000 cases.
State premiers are being urged to reject an elimination strategy for coronavirus, with Scott Morrison and leading business groups warning the move would double unemployment and wreck the economy.
The Prime Minister, who has conceded the lockdown of Greater Melbourne was necessary given the size of the outbreaks, warned that any pivot to an elimination strategy would double unemployment.
Suppression sounds like a management plan but means rolling waves of infection and isolation, with outbreaks of chaos and a constant higher level of fear and avoidance. This does not seem like a jobs creation machine.
Would we prefer one lockdown or three?
1. The hospitalization rate means hospitals will be overwhelmed within weeks (see Victoria). Therefore repeat lockdowns are inevitable.
2. It’s hard to protect […]
Border closures and Quarantine appear to be reducing all respiratory diseases
It’s a striking pattern all over the world. Measures taken to reduce the spread of Covid have, not surprisingly, reduced the spread of all respiratory diseases.
This years flu season is smaller than the last five years
Good news: due to the pandemic it’s likely many people are not catching Influenza and other respiratory diseases.This shows a rather predictable result that quarantine reduces the spread of respiratory diseases. It’s a banal and uncontroversial finding.
Chris Gillham is a part of the unofficial BOM audit team here, and below he looks at WHO data across 17 countries for Influenza. (The WHO Chief of course is a belt-n-debt-trap apologist for China, but this is not their modeled interpretation, just the data). Laboratory indicated influenza cases are down an astonishing 87% in 17 nations compared to the five year period.
Quarantine is textbook microbiology, and for most of history, the best way to reduce the spread of disease. In many countries 12 days after major isolation measures started, viral growth flattened off the dreaded exponential curve. Despite that, some commentators still wonder if the lockdowns achieve anything for Coronavirus. And so […]
Figure that UK residents can be fined for gathering in a group of three in the park across the road, but can legally travel to Tehran or Moscow if they reckon it’s essential (though the Russians might not let you in). Coronavirus is raging in Moscow but Russians can fly to Heathrow for a bargain next week.
For seven weeks of lockdown people have been flying straight in without even a temperature check. Though Healthrow just announced it will trial some thermometers and ask people to wear masks. Bravo, eh?
The idea of keeping people in their homes but letting planes come and go is so bizarrely strange it didn’t even occur to me.
The US appears largely the same
The good news is this explains why the UK is stuck in Viral-Neverland, with cases not declining, despite the lockdown. It’s something that can be fixed. The bad news is that Brits have been wasting weeks in lockdown running to stand still, instead of crushing the curve.
The awful news is that it says something dreadful about the health advice Boris is getting. The rot run deeps in the hallowed institutions.
In the UK, 18 million people arrived from […]
Soon after isolation began, Australian and New Zealand cases started to fall as fast as they rose
This is what Crushing the Curve looks like, and if works it will set the new standard, and change the way the rest of the world views this. It isn’t over yet, but still — something is working and the international press has just started to get excited.
Be aware the figures may jump next week, as testing in NSW has ramped up and everyone can now get a free test. But testing is already high per capita, with a very low positive test rates. (12,000 tests done in Australia yesterday and 99.8% were negative).
Australia has 25 million people and found just 18 new cases yesterday. New Zealand with 5 million people, got five new cases. Obviously these numbers look great from the US and UK where 700 people are dying every day.
The rise and fall of Australian Covid-19 cases, March and April 2020
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Worldometer
Daily Mail, UK:
Australia is steamrolling the curve!
[The] Nation records just 17 cases in one day – including three states with ZERO infections – as the country’s road to […]
Virus follows fixed mysterious pattern
An Israeli Prof is claiming to be “shocked” to find that tough lockdown quarantines made no difference. He claims the virus fades after 6 weeks in the “exact same way” everywhere — which it does if you wear a welding mask while looking at the data. When asked why this extraordinary text-book-breaking shift happens he says “I have no explanation” but that doesn’t stop him concluding that hard quarantines are unnecessary.
When asked, he apparently suggested the exponential growth of viruses ends because of “the climate” or maybe “the virus has its own life cycle”. (How does he think this works? Telepathy?)
Israeli Professor Shows Virus Follows Fixed Pattern
Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain.
The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all […]
Australia remains the star Lucky Country compared to overseas. Infections are low, deaths are even lower. It’s all so much better than the desperate situation in Europe and the US. These are enviable, fantastically small numbers. Politicians are afraid to say so, lest the population relax, and party too much this Easter and the “unknowns” increase. (Which might well happen).
At the moment, the trend that matters most is the daily new cases of unknown transmission and it is trending down. There is community spread, but social isolation is shrinking it. This is what “Crushing the Curve” looks like. Right now there are still asymptomatic spreaders out there, but they are infecting less than one other person each (Ro < 1), so the infection is on its way to extinguishing itself — assuming we keep up the distancing.
But these great figures are not a reason to let up on social isolation, they’re a reason to go harder. We want to achieve the Golden Holy Grail — no new infections, and business as usual with no lockdowns, no curfews and a zone of freedom.
Australia is the Lucky Country, and doing the right thing
Why is the situation so good […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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