Coronavirus 4 - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

[stui magpie]

Then clearly some people are dickheads.

[pietillidie]

The problem is the fixation on infection. If we treated this like any other virus / disease and only seek medical attention when sick, we wouldn't be overwhelming anything.

Look at testing centres being overwhelmed. Not with sick people, but with people wanting to travel and those who think they have been exposed.

The only beneficiary are pathology businesses.

We could act this was with the common cold and have identical ramifications on emergency, health, frontline, worker availability and supply chains, and ultimately inflation expectations

You really are reminding me of a young university leftist

If your aunty had balls she'd be... Your risk equation and behavioural economics are wrong, even if Omicron turns out mild.

Think of the dynamics here. You're not putting a five dollar bet on a likely winner. You're putting a life or death/systemic collapse bet on a likely winner. It's not even close to the same thing and changes the game.

Favourites lose. The bet is even worse when you don't know anything about horse racing and don't have good data on fields, tracks, weather, riders, trainers, bloodlines and finishes. Even the best in the business aren't certain, so why would people who can't even do entry level maths to get into the beginner's statistics class, let alone an advanced med class, be certain?

The minute you're betting life or death on a specialised subject it's a different bet in all ways. Nothing can change that.

You're asking the entire populous to buy a mispriced and unqualified risk assessment simultaneously. This really does sound like utopian communism. "If only we all [imagine some utopian fantasy] together anything is possible." This really is the far right becoming the far left. If the far left knows nothing the economy and meeting payday, and the far right knows nothing about science, systems and risk.

[eddiesmith]

The problem is the fixation on infection. If we treated this like any other virus / disease and only seek medical attention when sick, we wouldn't be overwhelming anything.

Look at testing centres being overwhelmed. Not with sick people, but with people wanting to travel and those who think they have been exposed.

The only beneficiary are pathology businesses.

We could act this was with the common cold and have identical ramifications on emergency, health, frontline, worker availability and supply chains, and ultimately inflation expectations

As long as they keep expecting people to get tested and isolate if you spend even 30 seconds in a shop with a person who later tests positive of course they’ll keep having way too many get tested unnecessarily.

[Dave The Man]

Looks like Masks indoors will be Back

https://twitter.com/annajhenderson/stat ... eJfMw&s=19

[pietillidie]

Here's a practical example of doing the right thing. A bloke I work with (remotely) has a case so mild he doesn't feel the slightest bit sick. He had a tiny tickle in his throat once or twice and thought it was his central heating. His neighbours, who are going on hols, were due to pop over to say goodbye before leaving, so he did a test in advance and to his surprise tested positive.

Yes, the mildest case ever in this instance, but it still could've ruined someone's holiday.

Okay, so then you say the problem here is the stupid rules forcing everyone to worry about ruining someone else's holiday over a mere sniffle. That might be true at a future date, but Covid has never been a mere sniffle or even roughly like the flu, no matter how often this furphy is repeated. This was published in October:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that in the US there were 1.8 deaths from flu per 100 000 population between 1999 and 2019. The estimated death rate from covid was 217.54 per 100 000 in the US and 206.73 per 100 000 in the UK.

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2514

That massive difference might have gone through to the keeper for some, but no one responsible for other people's lives can make decisions without the next set of reliable data even though more people are getting vaccinated, Omicron seems milder, etc. Patience, for goodness' sake.

[Pies4shaw]

From the ABC's COVID blog:

NSW has recorded 3,057 COVID-19 cases and two deaths in the 24 hours to 8pm yesterday.

It is the first time daily cases have reached the 3,000 mark anywhere in Australia.

Hospitalisations again increased today to 284, up from 261 yesterday.

There are now 39 patients in intensive care.

The latest infections figures have come from 136,972 tests.

More to come.

Victoria has recorded 1,245 new local COVID-19 cases and six deaths, as demand for testing overwhelms several sites in Melbourne.

There are 392 people in hospital with COVID-19, of whom 73 are in intensive care and 43 are on a ventilator.

The health department said a further 43 people were in ICU but their infections were no longer considered active.

The state's seven-day average for hospitalisations has steadily increased over the past fortnight, from 296 on December 7 to 387 today.

The new cases were detected from 66,888 test results received yesterday.

There are now 13,355 active cases of the virus in Victoria, and 641 people have died during the current outbreak.

[stui magpie]

Okay, so then you say the problem here is the stupid rules forcing everyone to worry about ruining someone else's holiday over a mere sniffle. That might be true at a future date, but Covid has never been a mere sniffle or even roughly like the flu, no matter how often this furphy is repeated. This was published in October:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that in the US there were 1.8 deaths from flu per 100 000 population between 1999 and 2019. The estimated death rate from covid was 217.54 per 100 000 in the US and 206.73 per 100 000 in the UK.

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2514

That massive difference might have gone through to the keeper for some, but no one responsible for other people's lives can make decisions without the next set of reliable data even though more people are getting vaccinated, Omicron seems milder, etc. Patience, for goodness' sake.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that Covid is comparable to the Flu, but that data needs to be viewed in some context.

Firstly, the flu data needs to be taken in context of a highly vaccinated population but secondly the number of reported cases would be a small part of the whole number of cases, the majority of people with a mild case wouldn't have sought medical attention so the case would go unreported. This means the real number of deaths per 100,000 is probably quite a bit lower. lets just take it as it stands.

With the Covid data, we have the reverse issues.

Until recently with Omicron, the vast majority of reported cases were in those not fully vaccinated, as have been the deaths. With mass testing we have a much more accurate idea of case numbers, but we also know that 95% of hospitalisations are not fully vaccinated.

I don't think we have reliable data as yet on what the deaths per 100,000 cases of fully vaccinated people are.

Looking at raw numbers as best as I can figure out,

in 2020 in Australia we had 28,408 cases for 909 deaths. Most of these elderly.

In 2021 to date we've had 230,285 cases for 1245 deaths, the vast majority of these are unvaccinated

In 2019, in Australia there had been 214,377 notifications of laboratory-confirmed influenza (likely a much smaller number than actual cases) and 486 deaths.

Before I panic, I'll want to see good data on hospitalisations, ICU's and Deaths for fully vaccinated people.

[David]

Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/aust ... 59j2x.html

On the possible expansion of mask mandates around the country, Professor Baxter told Melbourne radio station 3AW that people had to get used to wearing them.

She said people once had to get used to wearing pants; if they could get used to them, they could get used to wearing masks, she said.

[Dave The Man]

Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/aust ... 59j2x.html

On the possible expansion of mask mandates around the country, Professor Baxter told Melbourne radio station 3AW that people had to get used to wearing them.

She said people once had to get used to wearing pants; if they could get used to them, they could get used to wearing masks, she said.

We be Wearing Masks for Years

[stui magpie]

Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/aust ... 59j2x.html

On the possible expansion of mask mandates around the country, Professor Baxter told Melbourne radio station 3AW that people had to get used to wearing them.

She said people once had to get used to wearing pants; if they could get used to them, they could get used to wearing masks, she said.

What if I want to wear a skirt?

What a ridiculous comparison

[pietillidie]

To see how bodies like SAGE reason through their decisions, below is a snippet of their minutes from Dec 18. There is just nothing outlandish in the reasoning at all, while they hope to have clarification shortly:

The number of Omicron infections in the UK has continued to increase very rapidly with the doubling time in England currently around 2 days. This is faster than the growth rate seen in March 2020.

2. In England it is almost certain that there are now hundreds of thousands of new Omicron infections per day. Levels of Omicron infection are currently highest in London. Reported numbers of confirmed and suspected Omicron infections will only be a small proportion of the actual number. This is because there are lags between people becoming infected, being tested, and getting test results (data lags matter most when growth is very fast); not all tests allow the variant to be identified; and not everyone who is infected is tested.

3. Currently observed numbers of Omicron infections admitted to hospital in the UK are probably around one tenth of the true number because the data lags of hospital reporting. The observation that there are apparently not many people being admitted to hospital because of an Omicron infection is therefore misleading. It is currently very unclear how many such people there are.

4. In Gauteng, which is ahead of the UK in the epidemic trajectory, high levels of infection are now leading to significant numbers of hospitalisations, despite the young population and high levels of past infection, but this may be slowing. Other parts of South Africa have an epidemic trajectory behind Gauteng and more in line with the UK.

5. It is still too early to reliably assess the severity of disease caused by Omicron compared to previous variants. Although a preliminary analysis from South Africa suggests that this wave may be less severe than previous waves, a comparison of SGTF (mainly Omicron) and SGTP (non-Omicron) cases within this wave suggests less difference between variants. Some severity estimates should start to become available in about a week as hospital data accumulate. Even if there were to be a modest reduction in severity compared to Delta, very high numbers of infections would still lead to significant pressure on hospitals.

6. As a result of the very high number of current infections, hospitalisations in UK will reach high levels in about 2 weeks even if transmission is reduced soon, because there are lags between infections, symptoms appearing, and hospitalisation (high confidence). There are likely to be between 1,000 and 2,000 hospital admissions per day in England by the end of the year. Many of these will be people who are already infected now or who become infected in the next few days. The acceleration of the booster vaccination programme will not affect transmission and severe and mild disease in time to mitigate these hospitalisations for the rest of 2021 (high confidence).

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... ember-2021

[Dave The Man]

Anyone Else Find it Weird where we getting Told that Restrictions should come back but the Goverment is going the Other Way?

[David]

Yes. Before it was "trust the science"; now the same epidemiologists are telling us that vaccines aren’t enough on their own to fight the omicron variant and governments seem to be committed to putting their fingers in their ears. I’m sure the Dandrews diehards have already embraced this new direction in full "We have always been at war with Eurasia" fashion, but the rest of us are bound to feel a bit of whiplash.

In the meantime, something that could have helped has been $@&^# up, again (I’m guessing this one’s on the feds):

https://www.theage.com.au/national/as-c ... 59j6f.html

Melbourne pharmacist Stephen Speirs, who runs a pharmacy in the CBD, said some corporate customers had been buying “50 or 60” tests at a time.

“They are just flying off the shelf,” Mr Speirs said.

Umber Rind, a GP who works at Campbellfield in Melbourne’s north, where Delta spread rapidly, believes making rapid tests free could have prevented countless infections among families during the Christmas period, and it was a missed opportunity in the fight against Omicron.

“In the UK, they’re free so why can’t they be free here?” she said.

[stui magpie]

^
The Dandrews die hards lost the capacity for reason a long time ago. Dom in NSW is leading the charge and other states are falling in line with their own local quirks.

National Cabinet tomorrow will be interesting. More borders are open, more restrictions on people moving are being reduced. I read an opinion piece somewhere today, all politicians of all parties follow the polls, there is clearly no appetite from any government to ruin Christmas with increased restrictions.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. massively increasing case numbers when they're majority under 30 aren't necessarily going to lead to massive increases in hospitalisations or deaths in a highly vaccinated society

As far as the tests go, I saw them in the pharmacy today. $15 for a single test. pass.

[Dave The Man]

^
The Dandrews die hards lost the capacity for reason a long time ago. Dom in NSW is leading the charge and other states are falling in line with their own local quirks.

National Cabinet tomorrow will be interesting. More borders are open, more restrictions on people moving are being reduced. I read an opinion piece somewhere today, all politicians of all parties follow the polls, there is clearly no appetite from any government to ruin Christmas with increased restrictions.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. massively increasing case numbers when they're majority under 30 aren't necessarily going to lead to massive increases in hospitalisations or deaths in a highly vaccinated society

As far as the tests go, I saw them in the pharmacy today. $15 for a single test. pass.

Well Cases are Skyrockting in Sydney in Melbourne they are Pretty much Staying the Same so far

I am expecting a Huge Case Numbers next week with the Weekend having X-Mas and Boxing Day