News Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread II

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Feb 11, 2013
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They may be the biggest but they are possibly the worst.
I’m not talking accuracy of news here, more the implications of said story...

whether it’s true or not at this point is irrelevant. The ramifications will be massive.. Listen to what she’s just said, it wasn’t an accident, China deliberately shut down America. On a major cable network.
 
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i said that in an earlier post a couple of pages back - if its reclassified then it does not have to be reported. just say 32 cases and u dont have to have a separate tally in brackets.

Flags Numbers have you met Numbers 7577969923 ? Maybe you can catch up and discuss the square root of each other?
 

Themanbun

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Your assumptions are based around the continuation of incompetence by the Victorian government, a reckless opening up, and the idea that this is proposing a let it rip strategy. None of those things are or should be true.

The article you quoted spends half the article telling people that COVID ain't so bad if you're young and the other half telling us to put a ring around the elderly and get on with our lives. Forgive me, but I don't see how that is going to lead to anything other than mass infection.

I have studied a fair bit of economics myself and would dispute your assertion that outbreak trumps lockdown as the driver of economic outcomes.

You are welcome to. Studies out of UChig, Copenhagen and Cornell (IIRC) disagree.

How long would it take our state economy to recover if we lost 30% to 40% of our hospitality businesses, and a major chunk of our bricks and mortar retail? It would devastate employment in the state for several years and cause a major crash in the commercial property sector.

It would take a very long time. I'm not disputing that.

Putting a ring around the elderly and liberating the rest, as your article put it, as was done in a few countries, saw consumer spending drop by almost as much as comparable countries whose hard lockdown prevented an uncontrollable outbreak.

Anecdotally, I will not be dining out or shopping in person if there are significant levels of virus transmission in the community. Most people I speak to feel the same. There goes that. The data shows that about a significant portion of consumers feel the same. Between 25-30 per cent overall drops in consumer spending and even more than that figure directed from hospitality/bricks and mortar to food delivery, online shopping.

I also think you don't have enough data to be confident in your assertions on mental health. I am not dismissing it as a possibility but your example is an extremely narrow set of data in what is a very complex and multi-layered issue.

Well if you don't respect the admittedly limited data, my intuition tells me that when relatives and loved ones die, and every venture out of the house is riddled with anxiety about catching a virus that has run through the community people also will be significantly affected in terms of mental health.

Can we get away from the notion that it is a binary choice between an extended period of hard and lengthy lockdown and the virus running rampant?

As I said, when you link and endorse articles that spend half the time telling us the virus is not that deadly and we should ring-fence the elderly and get on with our lives, I reckon there's a fair suspicion on the part of the author that the virus could lead to a massive outbreak.

Would policy makers be prepared to be held accountable if we took your approach and the virus did manage to jump containment and rip through the community, collapsing the economy, the medical system and the mental health supports? Probably not. It is a very real risk and not one that can be ignored.

There is a whole range of different scenarios and possibilities. We are now in a position where we should be exploring those possibilities and looking to the fastest way to safely open up our economy and manage risk at the same time. Our Government is not doing that.

Again, I'll feel much more comfortable with the 'range of different possibilities' if every commentary I read on it isn't littered with attempts to tell the reader that the virus isn't that bad and implicit concessions that they suspect it could run rampant if we followed their plan.

That's the thing, 'safely' opening up the economy may have different meanings to you and I. That's even if there is a 'safe' way to do it. We were still in restrictions and completely blew out.

People who were in quarantine have treated it as an honour system and not given a s**t. There are still huge swathes of employees who don't even get sick leave. That's on top of the government bungles and contact tracing fails.

I'm just not convinced there is a 'safe' way to open until transmission is incredibly low. That opinion piece did little to sway me.

___________

Anyway mate I respect that you've got a different opinion - ultimately we both want what's best for society we just have different ideas about it 👍
 
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Are you referring to something I have said? As I don't think I have implied that the pandemic is over.

I would disagree with the premise of your last two sentences.

No, 7577..., I’d never do that. I was referring to the opinion writer in the Age and what he has written. It’s fair enough that you disagree with the premise of my last two sentences. However, I firmly stand by them and have held that stance since the beginning of the pandemic. In my opinion, everybody/country can be a genius one day and a fool the next with this virus.


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7577969923

Norm Smith Medallist
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The article you quoted spends half the article telling people that COVID ain't so bad if you're young and the other half telling us to put a ring around the elderly and get on with our lives. Forgive me, but I don't see how that is going to lead to anything other than mass infection.



You are welcome to. Studies out of UChig, Copenhagen and Cornell (IIRC) disagree.



It would take a very long time. I'm not disputing that.

Putting a ring around the elderly and liberating the rest, as your article put it, as was done in a few countries, saw consumer spending drop by almost as much as comparable countries whose hard lockdown prevented an uncontrollable outbreak.

Anecdotally, I will not be dining out or shopping in person if there are significant levels of virus transmission in the community. Most people I speak to feel the same. There goes that. The data shows that about a significant portion of consumers feel the same. Between 25-30 per cent overall drops in consumer spending and even more than that figure directed from hospitality/bricks and mortar to food delivery, online shopping.



Well if you don't respect the admittedly limited data, my intuition tells me that when relatives and loved ones die, and every venture out of the house is riddled with anxiety about catching a virus that has run through the community people also will be significantly affected in terms of mental health.



As I said, when you link and endorse articles that spend half the time telling us the virus is not that deadly and we should ring-fence the elderly and get on with our lives, I reckon there's a fair suspicion on the part of the author that the virus could lead to a massive outbreak.

Would policy makers be prepared to be held accountable if we took your approach and the virus did manage to jump containment and rip through the community, collapsing the economy, the medical system and the mental health supports? Probably not. It is a very real risk and not one that can be ignored.



Again, I'll feel much more comfortable with the 'range of different possibilities' if every commentary I read on it isn't littered with attempts to tell the reader that the virus isn't that bad and implicit concessions that they suspect it could run rampant if we followed their plan.

That's the thing, 'safely' opening up the economy may have different meanings to you and I. That's even if there is a 'safe' way to do it. We were still in restrictions and completely blew out.

People who were in quarantine have treated it as an honour system and not given a sh*t. There are still huge swathes of employees who don't even get sick leave. That's on top of the government bungles and contact tracing fails.

I'm just not convinced there is a 'safe' way to open until transmission is incredibly low. That opinion piece did little to sway me. At least the one Sbdan posted used other countries' models.

The plan we are currently committed to by our premier is based on achieving a target that theoretically has a 3% per cent chance of the virus significantly surging again based on assumptions that take very little or no account of improvements in capability and response measures. The premier has said he is going to continue to destroy our economy and the lives of many people with it until we achieve something that has a 97% probability of guaranteeing low case numbers. Any realistic assessment of that would look at those targets and assess that it could be several more months before we can achieve them and that getting out of stage 4 by late October is a fantasy. NSW would still be in stage 4 lockdowns if the Andrews test was applied.

Again your comment about people treating quarantine as an honour system is true but so did our state Government. That is an easy failing to remedy with vigilance and penalties. Your whole view seems to be based on the idea that our government is incompetent and the public is a bunch of uncompliant arseholes. We need to have a sophisticated range of responses in place that can allow to control and minimise outbreaks without resorting to crushing whole of population solutions.

I would argue on the mental health ramifications of lockdown they will take longer to play out than the impact of losing a loved one or the immediate fear of contracting the virus but will be every bit as severe. There are volumes of research that support the correlation between recessions and increased mental health problems and suicide.
 

7577969923

Norm Smith Medallist
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No, 7577..., I’d never do that. I was referring to the opinion writer in the Age and what he has written. It’s fair enough that you disagree with the premise of my last two sentences. However, I firmly stand by them and have held that stance since the beginning of the pandemic. In my opinion, everybody/country can be a genius one day and a fool the next with this virus.


On iPhone using BigFooty.com mobile app

I think your last sentence is valid but that doesn't mean that you can't look at those genius and fool moments and form a reasonable judgement on them well before the pandemic reaches some form of an endpoint. In fact, if we aren't doing that and learning and adjusting from them we run the risk of this thing going on far longer than it should.
 

Themanbun

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Your whole view seems to be based on the idea that our government is incompetent and the public is a bunch of uncompliant arseholes.

If this thread is to go by then I'm not alone. The thread has been probably 80 per cent gov-hate and then we spent a few pages just today and yesterday discussing how we are seeing a lot of non compliant behaviour in our local communities.

Again, it's only 'destroying' the economy if you presume that we will be virus free (or minimal).

It took us a month to go from ~40 cases per day to >500. Not long after that we were at 700. And that was while we were in the midst of restrictions and pretty much enforced work from home for anyone who could.

I don't think I'm being unrealistic here when I'm skeptical of the claims that 'putting a ring around the elderly' and 'liberating the rest' (which is exactly what Sweden did, it's a myth that they did nothing) won't result in significant outbreak.

It is a very real risk that you, and every other commentator who comes up with this idea seems to be downplaying.

If that risk eventuates, then the economic argument is dead, according to data from a multitude of studies now. This is a position I've only come to recently, before I got hold of the papers coming out from comparative studies, I presumed as you did that the lockdowns were what hurt the economies of the world. At first the economy was something I was prepared to sacrifice for the greater public health good (with heavy government supports that I've been criticised for here as well). I was legitimately shocked to learn that the data seems to overwhelmingly suggest that the virulence of the pandemic rather than the stay at home order were what drove the economic decline, not just in comparable countries, but even neighbouring counties/states abroad.

You are welcome to your opinion, but you asked for people to put their case forward so I did.

As I said before, we both want the best for society 👍
 
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Apr 24, 2013
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If this thread is to go by then I'm not alone.

Again, it's only 'destroying' the economy if you presume that we will be virus free (or minimal).

It took us a month to go from ~40 cases per day to >500. Not long after that we were at 700. And that was while we were in the midst of restrictions and pretty much enforced work from home for anyone who could.

I don't think I'm being unrealistic here when I'm skeptical of the claims that 'putting a ring around the elderly' and 'liberating the rest' (which is exactly what Sweden did, it's a myth that they did nothing) won't result in significant outbreak.

It is a very real risk that you, and every other commentator who comes up with this idea seems to be downplaying. If that risk eventuates, then the economic argument is dead, according to data from a multitude of studies now.

You are welcome to that opinion, but you asked for people to put their case forward so I did.

As I said before, we both want the best for society 👍


It should have taken us 2 months to go from 40 cases to ~20,000,000 but we are lead by cretins who have more interest in herding other cretins in to voting stalls.
 
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7577969923

Norm Smith Medallist
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If this thread is to go by then I'm not alone.

Again, it's only 'destroying' the economy if you presume that we will be virus free (or minimal).

It took us a month to go from ~40 cases per day to >500. Not long after that we were at 700. And that was while we were in the midst of restrictions and pretty much enforced work from home for anyone who could.

I don't think I'm being unrealistic here when I'm skeptical of the claims that 'putting a ring around the elderly' and 'liberating the rest' (which is exactly what Sweden did, it's a myth that they did nothing) won't result in significant outbreak.

It is a very real risk that you, and every other commentator who comes up with this idea seems to be downplaying. If that risk eventuates, then the economic argument is dead, according to data from a multitude of studies now.

You are welcome to that opinion, but you asked for people to put their case forward so I did.

As I said before, we both want the best for society 👍

I think you overstate the extent to which we were in lockdown at the time of the second wave. We had 10,000 people protesting in the city and the authorities basically ignored. The public had assumed that we had the virus beaten and the government basically was happy for that perception to be out there.

As we have seen in NZ even in a society that believes they have eliminated the virus there is a threat of outbreaks. It is important that we have the capability and resources to deal with them.

It is destroying the economy anyway you look at things.
 

Themanbun

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It is destroying the economy anyway you look at things.

Again, the data shows that if a significant outbreak occurs, the economy is gone anyway mate. If that's the case, I'd prefer to keep the health care system intact.

Your economic argument presumes that we won't have a significant outbreak. I'm not convinced that we can avoid a significant outbreak if we follow the steps in the article you mentioned (protect the elderly, liberate everyone else - again, this is what Sweden attempted to do).

I'm not going to repeat myself so I'll leave it there.
 
1600244936558.png

From Viz comics
 
Apr 24, 2013
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Where do they come up with these fines? It is a very specific non-round number.

There's no parliament to pull him up about it..............or anything.

27 lawfully elected constituencies currently do not have political representation.
 

NMFC49

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" Rejoice. Dan Andrews has destroyed the village to save it. "

A very thought-provoking and intelligent piece from Chris Uhlman in the Fairfax(do we still call them that?) press today. It really gets to the heart of the issues around the trade-offs being made right now and whether we are getting our priorities right.

Uhlman is one of the most rational and clear-eyed commentators we have on the political landscape. Even though he is married to a former ALP federal member I would defy anyone to infer a partisan leaning based on his work.

Excellent piece by Chris Uhlman, a moderate and well credentialed journalist. So the Age ran it on line but not in the print edition. Meanwhile they publish all the nonsense 'We stand by Dan' crap
 

7577969923

Norm Smith Medallist
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Excellent piece by Chris Uhlman, a moderate and well credentialed journalist. So the Age ran it on line but not in the print edition. Meanwhile they publish all the nonsense 'We stand by Dan' crap
The Age has always been further to the left than the SMH. Given it was published online today there is a chance it missed print deadline.
 
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