COVID-19 updates comments and concerns

Good news for Australia. Looks like the stay-at-home and close-down-almost-every-business strategy is working, as the rate of infection is still dropping from the peak back on March 22nd (13 days ago), with yesterday having less than a quarter of the new cases we had on the 22nd.

They've now also been adding in "at sea" as one of their foreign source categories*, which is over a third of all known foreign-acquired cases (and people returning to Australia already with the virus is still the largest source of cases in Australia).

*despite the original source being China, and the first strict measures were placed on people coming from China, people who came from South East Asia with the virus still only accounts for 1/20th (about 5%) of cases within Australia. What that means is, the people in charge here were so focussed on stopping people from Asia, they let the virus come in unchecked from everywhere else. Unfortunately, like the Americans have been finding out the hard way out, is that if you wait for the virus to start showing up in your city or state before you take action on limiting its spread, the virus has already infected a lot more people than you know, and often more than the hospital system can handle (compared to early pre-emptive action).

Australia is probably doing well with the really low death rate because we managed to reduce the infection rate to just 0.02%, which the hospital system could handle. The countries that are experiencing a thousand deaths each day had such a large number of infections (thanks to cultural behaviours or arrogant political leaders) that there was not enough intensive care equipment to cover all of the serious cases, leading to people dying who most likely wouldn't have if the (people and equipment) resources weren't so depleted.
Now the politicians over there have to play catch-up and be patient, because strict measures will now take some time to show results, as the people who are catching the virus this week in those heavily infected places with no room left in their hospitals, will be the ones dying next week of the virus or other complications.

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Originally Posted by griffin

Australia is probably doing well with the really low death rate because we managed to reduce the infection rate to just 0.02%, which the hospital system could handle.

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Two other factors:

- We're doing much wider testing. So the confirmed cased in some countries won't count those with cold-like symptoms who aren't elderly, for example. The actual death rate as a % of cases is lower, but they're not recording all those cases.

- The smoking rate amongst male Italian Baby Boomers is shockingly high compared to ours. That lifetime of abusing their lungs makes this disease far more potent. On a side note to that, Indonesia's death rate is going to be horrific in a couple of weeks - the smoking rate there is quite high.

It might look like we are testing a lot of people, and compared to some countries we are doing more tests per million people, but at 250,000 tests, that's still means 99% of the population haven't been tested... or more if some people are being tested multiple times (like health care workers). And you'd find that people who have serious symptoms are going to hospital, which would be most of the confirmed cases that didn't arrive from overseas.

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Originally Posted by dirge

- The smoking rate amongst male Italian Baby Boomers is shockingly high compared to ours. That lifetime of abusing their lungs makes this disease far more potent. On a side note to that, Indonesia's death rate is going to be horrific in a couple of weeks - the smoking rate there is quite high.

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That's certainly a factor, which had a lot of people at my worksite worried when this was first hitting, as warehousing and transport have higher rates of smokers, because the virus was targeting the lungs, and those with lung damage (from prior diseases, age and self-inflicted/smoking) are more vulnerable.

My noting of "cultural factors" was referring to the European and Middle-eastern countries that greet each other with cheek-to-cheek kissing instead of shaking hands. We were being told fairly early to not shake hands and not to touch our faces... so you can see how the virus spread so fast through some European countries in just a week or two before people were being prevented from contacting each other by being forced to stay at home.

Meanwhile, New York city ended up being like a giant cruise ship, with millions of people crammed into a small strip of land and a delay to act on social distancing, so there was no escape from the virus.
The sad thing is, when ever they finally get a drop in new cases, it will be at least a week until the death rate starts dropping, so as bad as it is now over there, there will be new record numbers of deaths for several days after the new case numbers start dropping.

At least for us in Australia, as long as we don't get complacent for at least four weeks, we should be seeing the death rate continue to fall, now that we've been two weeks since the peak of reported cases.
As people keep returning to Australia (and we still have some cruise ships parked off some capital cities), provided those returning people are isolated when they hit land, our social distancing policies may well be enough to kill off the public spread of the virus here in the next month or two... as long as we keep the borders closed until a vaccine is released, so that no one else can bring the virus back to our shores, and we can start re-opening businesses again.

Just got an email from Toymate, advertising hand-sanitiser...
It looks like everyone is trying to cash in (or maybe with us being told not to be buying non-essentials, they needed to start stocking items that they can sell if people aren't going into their stores to buy toys anymore).

I'd just never think to go into a toy store to buy hand sanitiser.
What next, they'll start selling toilet paper? :p

Transformers themed toilet paper. Go on you know you'd buy it.

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Originally Posted by gamblor916

Transformers themed toilet paper. Go on you know you'd buy it.

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Somehow little Scattors as the design seems appropriate.

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Originally Posted by griffin

Just got an email from Toymate, advertising hand-sanitiser...

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I wish I could find alcohol-based sanitiser in stores.

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Originally Posted by Unicran

It appears this virus has mutated rapidly. It's now called CONVID-19. ;)

Seriously though, Zoom video conferencing is doing my head in. No, I don't want to look up your nostrils. And put on some appropriate clothing. Just because you're working from home doesn't mean you can wear whatever.

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No video for our work calls, thankfully.

According to this ( from health.gov.au )

https://www.health.gov.au/sites/defa...ographic_0.pdf 2315 cases have recovered

:( Woman played her husband their wedding song over Facetime as she watched him die from Coronavirus :(