COVID-19 Stuff Here

[Braveheart81]

I’d be interested to know the % of returning travellers with COVID-19. Seems everyone that comes back from overseas has it.

As of 11 June, NSW had quarantined 20,700 people in hotels after returning from overseas. It suggests that NSW gets 60% of the arrivals so that would put the number somewhere around 34,000.

The hotel quarantines started on arrivals from 29 March so that would make it over 450 people a day that are arriving and being quarantined.

Australia had 3,965 total cases on the 29th of March and 7,335 cases now. 62.1% of the total cases have been overseas acquired but I would guess that the percentage since the hotel quarantine started has increased as community transmissions have decreased.

You'd have to think that at least 2,000 of the people going into hotel quarantine have had COVID-19.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...ers-for-hotel-quarantine-20200611-p551nm.html

 

[waiopehu oldboy]

Give it a week before the cretinous ""journalists"" are back with the click-bait sob stories about how some expat can't see their vegetable state grandma, they've not seen since they were four years old, for a quick Instagram selfie.

Or a celeb, say a former Warrior currently playing in UKSL who's mum has just died in Tonga. As it stands Tonga will let him in if & only if he departs from NZ but NZ won't let him transit. Expecting plenty of media re: this in coming days.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/30003...onrad-hurrells-mother-his-biggest-inspiration

22 new cases in Vic over night. 15 were returned travellers, which gives the impression that everyone overseas has it. I imagine the truth is we'd all be surprised by how many people are coming into the country every day.

I hope your quarantine procedures are better than ours, multiple breaches coming to light in the fallout from the two women allowed out early to attend a funeral: 320 "close contacts" now have to be traced & tested. Jacinda ain't happy & has handed the whole thing over to the military to administer from now on.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/po...-ardern-sends-military-in-after-border-bungle

 

[The_Brown_Hornet]

Or a celeb, say a former Warrior currently playing in UKSL who's mum has just died in Tonga. As it stands Tonga will let him in if & only if he departs from NZ but NZ won't let him transit. Expecting plenty of media re: this in coming days.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/30003...onrad-hurrells-mother-his-biggest-inspiration



I hope your quarantine procedures are better than ours, multiple breaches coming to light in the fallout from the two women allowed out early to attend a funeral: 320 "close contacts" now have to be traced & tested. Jacinda ain't happy & has handed the whole thing over to the military to administer from now on.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/po...-ardern-sends-military-in-after-border-bungle

There have been a couple of cases here in WA where people have broken quarantine and the law has come crashing down on them. This is to make an example I would imagine, other than the public health implications obviously.

 

[waiopehu oldboy]

^ other than the two who failed to return to "managed isolation" after they & eight others were allowed out to attend a funeral, no one has actually broken quarantine: they've all been let out on compassionate grounds to visit dying relatives or attend funerals without first being tested. So no legal consequences for them.

 

[formerflanker]

Ardern calls out the military when one person with mild Covid symptoms is temporarily allowed into the community.
How far will she go when something serious happens?

 

[waiopehu oldboy]

^ multiple breaches, one involving two infected people who had 320 known close contacts while infectious. Those 320 are now in isolation & will need to be tested twice. Not sure how many contacts by the others who were let out when they shouldn't have been but it's bound to be a pretty significant use of resources, thus serious imo. Note also that while she's put a military guy in charge it's still primarily a Health & Immigration operation, it's not like she's put the Army onto the streets.

 

[waiopehu oldboy]

Further to the above, Health Dept now saying 90 people were let out early on compassionate grounds & they can't say how many were tested first. Includes two groups of ten to attend funerals, one of which had ~150 attendees.

 

[fatprop]

Sure.

22/50 States are now seeing an increase in DEATHS. That is a factor of more INFECTIONS (assuming the deaths/ infections rate stays more or less constant).

It is interesting to see some of the explanations as to the increases

In Texas, COVID-19 case totals and hospitalizations are rising. The state says prisons and meatpacking plants are key factors.

....................... The 14-day trend line shows new infections in Texas have risen about 71% in the past two weeks. Although confirmed infections have increased across the state, hot spots like state prisons and meatpacking plants, which have recently been the sites of mass or targeted testing, are responsible for a portion of the increase, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services................

Part of the state’s increase of new confirmed cases reported since late May is a result of mass testing in some prisons, which began May 12. Since prisons started reporting test results May 26, the number of prisoners reported to be infected with the new coronavirus has skyrocketed — jumping from about 2,500 to 6,900 in two weeks.


State data shows that overall cases jumped by 19,000, or 34%, from May 25 to June 7, and nearly a quarter of that increase came from 10 counties with prisons and meatpacking plants............................................

In addition, the number of people hospitalized from the coronavirus, reported each day, has grown from an average of 1,656 during the week ending May 24 to 1,811 in the past week. Hospital capacity in Texas has been cited by Abbott as a key metric dictating his decision to reopen the state. Texas, unlike states like New York and Louisiana, has yet to face overcrowded hospitals and an inadequate supply of ventilators for coronavirus patients.

 

[waiopehu oldboy]

"Florida governor Ron DeSantis last week said the upward trend in confirmed cases was mostly a reflection of more testing for the virus combined with spikes in some agriculture communities.

"But the number of tests performed daily peaked three weeks ago, and the percentage of positive tests is now over 6 per cent – more than double the 2.3 per cent rate in late May."

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12340844

 

[The_Brown_Hornet]

It's going to be interesting to see the effect in mortality rate with these additional cases and also with the possible use of the steroid dexamethasone in treatment for critical patients.The medical system in Texas is pretty robust and absent a massive sudden spike in cases ought to be able to cope.

 

[formerflanker]

Adam Creighton in today's Australian says:
On whatever measure you choose — deaths, infections, rate of transmission — the epidemiological models that convinced governments to take a sledgehammer to their economies, now mired in unrest, have proved scandalously pessimistic and out by orders of magnitude.
He goes to to say the infection fatality rate, we were told, would be about 1 per cent; it’s closer to 0.2 per cent, akin to a severe flu.

The main theme of his column is the disproportionate response, and compares Sweden and Japan which didn't impose hard lockdowns yet did OK on the deaths tally.
Creighton makes a good case.

 

[The_Brown_Hornet]

I just did some quick calculations comparing the CFR when the known cases in the US hit their peak per day (Apr 24) and now and it's held reasonably steady at 5%, after some early fluctuation. That said, looking at the charts new deaths per day seems to be dropping and the new cases have levelled off but not dropping by as much as other countries, maybe even slightly rising with the opening up of many cities.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

Cumulative mortality rates in Europe and the US are interesting to observe. Europe's is a clear couple of percentage points higher than the US. The UK's is even worse than that.

EDIT: Faaark, look at France and Belgium!

 

[Braveheart81]

The main theme of his column is the disproportionate response, and compares Sweden and Japan which didn't impose hard lockdowns yet did OK on the deaths tally.
Creighton makes a good case.

As usual though, he completely ignores the economic effects that these countries have suffered irrespective of their response.

Consumer spending dropped by around 25% in Sweden which had little in the way of enforced lockdowns.

Denmark meanwhile had stronger lockdowns and suffered a 29% drop in consumer spending but suffered only around 20% of the number of deaths per million people that Sweden did.

His analysis is unbelievably lightweight. The only way that any of his positions make sense is if you pretend that Sweden's economy has been largely unaffected because there wasn't significant government intervention to depress the spread of the virus. Of course their economy has been massively affected and the significant government intervention has come in the way of stimulus measures like pretty much every country because there was no escaping the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.

What case is he making exactly?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.04630.pdf

 

[fatprop]

What case is he making exactly?

The position that the lockdown wasn't as effective as suggested or even necessary

 

[Teh Other Dave]

The main theme of his column is the disproportionate response, and compares Sweden and Japan which didn't impose hard lockdowns yet did OK on the deaths tally.

Horse shit. Sweden had excessive morbidity and have still suffered economically. They're also a long way off 'herd immunity' A lose-lose.

This article is clearly culture war. Morrison and colleagues have largely put politics aside and listened to his scientific advisors. Creighton, on the other hand, is just dangerous.

 

[fatprop]

Horse shit. Sweden had excessive morbidity and have still suffered economically. They're also a long way off 'herd immunity' A lose-lose.

This article is clearly culture war. Morrison and colleagues have largely put politics aside and listened to his scientific advisors. Creighton, on the other hand, is just dangerous.

Sweden made mistakes in not putting sufficient protections in place for nursing homes and the aged (90% of the dead in Sweden were over 70) and not providing (or encouraging) their Somalis refugees to have enough vitamin D - they were overly represented in the other 10%

 

[Ignoto]

The position that the lockdown wasn't as effective as suggested or even necessary

Sweden's unemployment rate is 9% up from 8.20% last month with a view of going to 10% - https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate

The Swedish government are expecting the economy to shrink 7-10% as well - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/coronavirus-swedens-gdp-actually-grew-in-the-first-quarter.html

Doesn't really sound like 'business as usual'.

 

[fatprop]

Sweden's unemployment rate is 9% up from 8.20% last month with a view of going to 10% - https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate

The Swedish government are expecting the economy to shrink 7-10% as well - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/coronavirus-swedens-gdp-actually-grew-in-the-first-quarter.html

Doesn't really sound like 'business as usual'.

Nup, nowhere is getting out of this cleanly, everywhere made mistakes and the costs will not be just economic, we are now getting reports of increases in suicides, family violence and divorce

And just wait until the job keeper finishes here, I know a couple of companies that will be shedding staff

 

[Braveheart81]

The position that the lockdown wasn't as effective as suggested or even necessary

He's not doing that successfully at all.

If he was actually making that case he'd need to do at least one of the following:

• show that countries that didn't restrict movement avoided most of the economic pain felt by countries that did, or;
• show that countries that did restrict movement early enough to make a difference didn't reduce their number of cases or deaths below countries that didn't.

As far as I can see he's doing neither of those things because neither of them happened.

 

[Up the Guts]

Hmm, seems on the day we have reports that Victoria are considering halting further restrictions easing after they discover further community transmission and that the job market is going to deteriorate further post Job Keeper ending that it might be a touch early to start reviewing optimal strategies.