Coronavirus/COVID-19

Dramatically reported on AW. Wouldn’t have thought it would be a problem so hopefully they will be ok
Must be in multi dose vials

Infinitely small medical mistake compared to blunders that probably happen every day but has been #1 item for two days on the news
 
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Optimistic Dog

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Copied the from round 1 Thread as advised to get the on right topic thread from adogsfan5 post. Absolutely amazing how anyone can say Dan has done a good job. I guess people just support their political party rather than looking at the facts. Swap their political parties I would not care less Dan just does not stack up and has let his state down the facts are indisputable.

NSW received nearly 3.5 times returned travellers, yet nearly 25% of the cases and 6% of the deaths of Victoria.
 
Sep 7, 2015
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Copied the from round 1 Thread as advised to get the on right topic thread from adogsfan5 post. Absolutely amazing how anyone can say Dan has done a good job. I guess people just support their political party rather than looking at the facts. Swap their political parties I would not care less Dan just does not stack up and has let his state down the facts are indisputable.

NSW received nearly 3.5 times returned travellers, yet nearly 25% of the cases and 6% of the deaths of Victoria.

I don't think anyone would argue that the Vic government have handled the virus better than the other states. The government ****ed up and we had a really bad outbreak. I'll still vote for Dan or Vic Labor under a new leader at the next election though. I can forgive mistakes - especially when they are made in unprecedented circumstances. I'll take a government that is fallible over one that is blatantly corrupt.
 

philmb

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May 4, 2016
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View attachment 1067141

Copied the from round 1 Thread as advised to get the on right topic thread from adogsfan5 post. Absolutely amazing how anyone can say Dan has done a good job. I guess people just support their political party rather than looking at the facts. Swap their political parties I would not care less Dan just does not stack up and has let his state down the facts are indisputable.

NSW received nearly 3.5 times returned travellers, yet nearly 25% of the cases and 6% of the deaths of Victoria.

Not exactly a fair comparison...There were months there where VIC weren't taking overseas arrivals. And their respective outbreaks were different in that VIC's second-wave was mostly within a low socio-economic group where the infected were from large family homes working multiple jobs...Many states learned from VIC's second wave - where there was much resistance for a 'go hard, go early' lockdown approach in the early days of VIC's second wave, it is now accepted as the right approach (reference Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne's short immediate lockdowns since).
 

Optimistic Dog

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Not exactly a fair comparison...There were months there where VIC weren't taking overseas arrivals. And their respective outbreaks were different in that VIC's second-wave was mostly within a low socio-economic group where the infected were from large family homes working multiple jobs...Many states learned from VIC's second wave - where there was much resistance for a 'go hard, go early' lockdown approach in the early days of VIC's second wave, it is now accepted as the right approach (reference Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne's short immediate lockdowns since).

Exactly twice Victoria has not taken travellers and let other states mainly NSW to the heavy lifting because they stuffed up. Look at the QR codes only now are they trying to get an app to unify the government and private systems.
 

LittleG

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Nov 18, 2015
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Interesting listen this morning to coronacast. It’s all to do with the vaccine roll out and why we should follow the NZ model for vaccinating guards with the Pzifer vaccine, as it reduces transmission. Also the guards families and close contacts.... then use the other vaccines for ages care.
It all makes sense.



Also, Norman suggests that we get overseas Australians vaccinated with the pzifer vaccine, so that they can come home and not need to be quarantined in a hotel. Worth the listen.
 
Jun 19, 2016
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Interesting listen this morning to coronacast. It’s all to do with the vaccine roll out and why we should follow the NZ model for vaccinating guards with the Pzifer vaccine, as it reduces transmission. Also the guards families and close contacts.... then use the other vaccines for ages care.
It all makes sense.



Also, Norman suggests that we get overseas Australians vaccinated with the pzifer vaccine, so that they can come home and not need to be quarantined in a hotel. Worth the listen.
Sounds very sensible.
 
View attachment 1067141

Copied the from round 1 Thread as advised to get the on right topic thread from adogsfan5 post. Absolutely amazing how anyone can say Dan has done a good job. I guess people just support their political party rather than looking at the facts. Swap their political parties I would not care less Dan just does not stack up and has let his state down the facts are indisputable.

NSW received nearly 3.5 times returned travellers, yet nearly 25% of the cases and 6% of the deaths of Victoria.
Once again nobody is arguing that Victoria did well in letting the virus escape Hotel Quarantine but treating it like a simple arithmetic exercise is simplistic and - with many people - just a case of cynical political barracking.

As I and many others have noted before Victoria came into the crisis with a defunded and run-down public health system. Those responsible include the current Andrews government and governments of both persuasions who came before. This particularly affected the public health system's contract tracing efficiency and eventual its ability to cope at all.

NSW got lucky with the Ruby Princess and early nursing home breakouts and Gladys is probably now thinking "there but for fortune ...". The NSW breakouts were - like the Victorian HQ breakout - a result of poor management and naivety in the early stages of the pandemic (when aerosol transmission was still regarded as just a secondary possibility and everyone was more worried about singing Happy Birthday right through while they meticulously scrubbed their hands or sanitised door handles). However NSW's superior contact tracing at that early stage certainly stood them in good stead.

I think once the second wave had got out of control and hit 700+ new cases a day the Andrews government did in fact do a fine job getting it under control and back to zero cases. I don't think anything like that has been replicated elsewhere in the world, or if it has it's extremely rare.

However the original hotel quarantine escape was a disaster resulting from a fair amount of poor management and naivety.

You mention nothing of the federal government's complicity in the 800+ deaths* in residential aged care under their watch - perhaps because like any other bad news they relentlessly shut it down and swept it under the carpet so that people like you would forget about it. Or perhaps because, like them, you simply don't want to admit to complexity, ambiguity or anything that might reflect badly on the side you support. I hope it's the former. I remind you there were NO deaths in facilities run by the state government.

One thing I'm pretty certain of: for all its inefficiencies our federal system has served us well in this pandemic. We saw stubborn premiers (from both sides of politics) resist pressure from the Federal Government to open up. They were also able to act locally meaning responses and solutions were more tailored to each situation. They pursued their own path in their public health response. We'll never know for sure but I reckon if we had the federal government completely in charge of the pandemic response we'd have been looking at very much higher numbers of cases and deaths right across the country.

*EDIT - correction: 682 deaths (see Lancet quote below), not 800+. My error.
 
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Boristown

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May 24, 2015
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Anyone absolving the Victorian government for aged care deaths because 'that's the fed's responsibility' is getting cause and effect confused. The deaths were due to poor hotel quarantine management. If hotel quarantine was handled correctly, no massive spike in aged care deaths.
 
It never got into nursing homes in other states, apart from a smaller number in NSW, early on. But go on, blame the feds for Victoria’s failings.
Anyone absolving the Victorian government for aged care deaths because 'that's the fed's responsibility' is getting cause and effect confused. The deaths were due to poor hotel quarantine management. If hotel quarantine was handled correctly, no massive spike in aged care deaths.
Here it comes. Poor reading comprehension, simplistic arguments and mis-quoting.

To be clear:
  1. I am not blaming the feds for Victoria's failings or absolving them from aged care deaths and that should be quite clear from my earlier post. However I'm not lumbering the Vics with the Feds failings either.
  2. If either of those areas of failing were removed (the Vics or the Feds) it is highly likely the number of deaths would be massively reduced. In other words BOTH were causes. BOTH are responsible.

It's really not that hard to comprehend.

We have discussed all this before. In case you missed it here are some extracts from The Lancet to which I posted a link some time back:

But as time went on, a major weakness emerged: residential aged care homes. There have been just over 2000 cases of COVID-19 in residential aged care in Australia. Of the 904 deaths from COVID-19 in the country at the time of writing, 682 have been in aged care homes, mostly in the state of Victoria. That 75% of the country's deaths have occurred in such facilities gives Australia one of the highest rates worldwide of deaths in residential aged care as a percentage of total deaths. It has left families grieving and experts angry that their pleas to reform the sector had long been ignored.

“Homer Simpson could have seen the catastrophe in aged care coming with COVID-19 because it was there in your face”, said Professor Joseph Ibrahim, head of the Health Law and Ageing Research Unit at Monash University (Melbourne, VIC, Australia) and an expert witness at Australia's Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. “All I know is that you can't accept things as they are, because they're not right.”

In 1997, the Australian Government transformed the system under the Aged Care Act into a free-market model that was, in Ibrahim's words, “ill-conceived and never worked”. Transforming the model of care meant that aged care and health care would be treated as two different separate industries. As a result, private investment into aged care was able to flourish, which, experts say, turned people from patients into consumers.

“Back then, aged care was criticised as too institutional, so it was packaged as a social model of care whereby you don't need regulation”, said Kathy Eagar, professor of health services research and director of the Australian Health Services Research Institute at the University of Wollongong (Wollongong, NSW, Australia). “On that basis, they deregulated staff. By packaging residential aged care as social care, it dumbed down the care and created the perfect storm. This has been a disaster waiting to happen.” Eagar says that, by turning aged care into social care, the sector has been able to justify not having good infection prevention and control measures, sufficient staff ratios, and adequately trained staff.

“The system is not fit for purpose. When you have a system that doesn't even require a nurse to be on the premises then the whole thing is going to be a disaster… The pendulum has swung too far”, she said.

In 2011, the full funding and policy responsibility for aged care in Australia moved from the state and territory level to the federal government. Today, the sector represents a multibillion-dollar industry that is predominantly publicly funded but largely outsourced to the private sector. Experts say that the pandemic has brought to light systemic problems arising from such a policy.

“I don't think anything has gone wrong per se—it was already wrong”, Ibrahim said. “There were not enough workers to start with; the workforce that exists doesn't have the training for a contemporary aged care system. They're not equipped to manage disease complexity and they're not equipped to deal with ethical human rights issues. So, then COVID-19 arrives and there are not enough staff, staff who don't know what they're doing, staff who haven't been trained in infection control.”

Not only were residents infected, but hundreds of low-paid, low-skill workers in the homes were infected too. “If you depend on a low-paid casual workforce who go from home to home, then you can expect COVID-19 to just spread, which is exactly what has happened in Victoria”, Eagar said. “COVID-19 is now a major occupational safety and health risk.”

State-run aged care—which operates under the Safe Patient Care Act 2015, which enshrines in law minimum numbers of nurses and midwives to care for patients—has recorded very few COVID-19 cases and no deaths. Private facilities have no such quotas.

“Private providers don't necessarily care about aged care—they care about making a profit”, said Sarah Russell, public health researcher and aged care advocate.

As the Royal Commission continued into 2020, it turned its focus towards the worsening situation with COVID-19 in the aged care system. “This is the worst disaster that is still unfolding before my eyes in my entire career…There was a level of apathy, a lack of urgency and an attitude of futility which lead to absence of action”, Ibrahim told the Royal Commission in early August.

In a special report published in early October, the Royal Commission found that the government's attempt to prepare the aged care sector for COVID-19 was “insufficient”. The Commission made six recommendations, which include calling on the federal government to establish a detailed national aged care plan for COVID-19 (it has repeatedly denied that it did not have a plan) and to deploy infection control experts into nursing homes as a condition of accreditation.

The report also describes infection prevention and control measures in facilities as “deplorable”. “We heard of workers being told they could only use one glove rather than two, and a guideline at a residential aged care facility that only permitted two masks per shift”, the two commissioners, Tony Pagone and Lynelle Briggs, wrote.
 

Charlie Bucket

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Nov 16, 2015
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Anyone absolving the Victorian government for aged care deaths because 'that's the fed's responsibility' is getting cause and effect confused. The deaths were due to poor hotel quarantine management. If hotel quarantine was handled correctly, no massive spike in aged care deaths.

The same could be said with the feds not taking action over the royal commission findings in to private aged care facilities.
They knew things needed to change yet did * all. Even when the virus had breached the fed aged care homes, they did * all until it was too late.
Had they done what they knew they should’ve have, there would probably have been similar death figures as state run aged care homes. Almost none.

The death certificates of those that died in the age care facilities were signed long before the virus broke out.
 

Charlie Bucket

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I agree, the incompetence of both the state and federal government is shameful.

Not even a level playing field. Feds were aware of what could’ve happened had action not been taken. State gov made decisions they thought were correct, only to find out they weren’t.

Feds created a bomb knowing all it needed was a match for it to go off, watching on as the state gov unknowingly tossed one at the wick.
 
Their is plenty of blame to go around as this entire fiasco is a consequence of governments of all stripes relying on low-skilled and paid workers to provide what are mostly unseen services.

They never considered the fact that these people typically socialise, cohabitate or work across multiple industries just to make ends meet. This is all well and good for budgets and company profits, that is until a pandemic comes along and it dawns on the powers that be that these very people are the front line and the actual gatekeepers charged with keeping a pandemic out of a society that would rather not think about them beyond seeing them during the occasional visit to grandma in her nursing home.
 

Boristown

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May 24, 2015
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Not in state run aged care. Only fed run. How’s that possible?

Feds run it in every other state also, no? The difference is no other state bungled the hotel quarantine as badly as Victoria.

Victoria found itself the victim of federal and state incompetence. A deadly combo.
 

Charlie Bucket

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Feds run it in every other state also, no? The difference is no other state bungled the hotel quarantine as badly as Victoria.

Victoria found itself the victim of federal and state incompetence. A deadly combo.

That doesn’t explain how state run aged care faired so much better than fed ran aged care.

What happened there? Selective virus particles?
 
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