COVID-19 updates comments and concerns

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

My furniture warehouse workplace ended up offloading half of its staff, up from about 20% that I was first being told. Two months ago they were looking at the option of having the place closed one day a week, and the staff would end up with a 20% pay-cut from that missing day each week... so I don't know why they didn't use that option first, because they would be cutting costs and keep all of the jobkeeper money from the government. This option of cutting half of the staff may have saved them a fair bit of money, but now they have lost tens of thousands of dollars of "revenue" each week that they are no longer getting from the government, from all of those people they let go that the government is no longer paying the company to keep.
I must be missing something there. Surely cost cutting that ends up cutting their operating revenue significantly when they already have sluggish sales, would be a more dangerous thing to do for the business. Because if their cash-flow takes a big hit all of sudden like this, it will make their budgets outlays look really red all of a sudden, and areas of the business, or creditors, that require regular payments could then suffer.

Possibly related to minimising leave/etc payouts for if/when they lay off large numbers/a solid percentage of staff after the stimulus period ends? I've read about a few businesses who don't feel they'll be able to pay out accumulated leave/etc. when they fold so they're just closing up shop early.

Pretty terrible for the poor laid-off staff though.

[griffin]

Quick thought from something I was reading about today - with America back into a mostly lockdown pattern in most states, and likely to be shut down even more as the infection rate is still not slowing from the current restrictions... I wonder if cinema movies that were pushed back several months because of the April-May lockdown, will be delayed again, or will other countries that are able to open cinemas, be allowed to start screening them (America is the primary revenue market for cinema movies, so if they have to postpone or release more of the cinema movies online through paid streaming services, my guess is that they wouldn't bother allowing other countries see them in cinemas, because their box office takings would be insignificant).
For example, the film The New Mutants (which was already delayed 2 years), was pushed back from April to August because of the virus shutting down cinemas in America. I really don't see too many states in America allowing indoor venues like cinemas operating in a month's time, with almost all states recording increases in virus cases. And maybe Warner Bros is thinking the same thing, as they had pushed back their Wonder Woman movie from June 5th to August 14 due to Covid, and then a couple weeks ago it was pushed back further, to October 5th. And that's a big budget film that needs cinemas across the US to be operating to make back its money.
If we have cinemas operating here in the next few months, or at least in most states, I wonder if movie studios would consider releasing the movies here, because any cinemas or drive-ins that are currently operating here, are having to play older movies... so even if the cinemas can operate here, the American movie companies may not allow anything new to screen at them, forcing them to run at a loss or shut down without the new blockbuster movies to bring in the crowds.



Meanwhile, it's getting worse for NSW... and there are now some winding back of the recently lifted restrictions. (unlike in most other countries that had restrictions lifted while the virus was still active in the community, which just allowed it to spread again, most of the Australian states were justified in lifting restrictions, because all of the new cases for 1 to 3 months in WA, SA, TAS, NT, QLD and ACT were foreign arrivals who were put into quarantine... the outbreak we are now facing was entirely avoidable if the Victorian government had been more careful with it security protocols at the quarantine hotels - the rest of the country is now going to suffer for that mistake, as borders are going to close again, businesses will be told to close up again, and any chance of a trans-tasman bubble with New Zealand in September to help tourism is now impossible)

Unfortunately, with QLD only just 4 days into having it's borders back open with NSW, it has decided to do what NSW did with Victoria, and keep allowing people into the state if they claim that they aren't from an infected zone. Well, that didn't work so well for NSW, as they took too long to completely close the border, and it allowed people to spread the virus into a second state (it is never a good idea to just ask people to stay at home and not travel if they were from a hotzone, as there would always be those who don't care or don't take the situation seriously and do whatever they want... particularly if it is not a requirement, with significant penalties).

QLD now has a range of penalties from $4000 to 6 months in jail if someone was found to be from an exclusion zone and didn't declare it... but there will still be people who find a way around it, and as seen in the Sydney outbreak, it only takes one person contaminating a high-traffic location like a hotel, to spread it everywhere (like an airport, just not as fast).

One of the news programs last night when talking about the human trials that started in QLD yesterday (I think it might have been on The Project), claimed that there were new results from an ongoing study of infected people in Europe who have recovered from the virus, suggesting that only 17% of people still had the virus anti-bodies in their system after 3 or 4 months. If that is actually true, or close to it, it will not be possible to gain a "herd immunity" (having most people catch the virus, recover or die, and then it is over more quickly - which is the theory that Sweden is using, sacrificing a lot of lives in the belief that the virus will die out if enough people have been infected and recover).
It also means that a vaccine will be virtually useless, if the anti-bodies it creates in the people who get it, don't stay active for more than a month in over half of the people.
(best estimates of a vaccine being ready for general use is still at about middle of next year (12 months), with 6 months being the absolute earliest if everything goes right with the trials, and the test subjects don't catch the virus & there are no major side-effects... and even then, the rollout of the vaccine will take a few months as each batch is manufactured and distributed)

Hopefully we hear more on "long term" studies of people who have recovered, to see if people are indeed vulnerable to Covid several months later, and see if any people catch it a second or third time by the end of the year. If it does happen, it might take a while to know for sure, because most people have no symptoms, so they might develop symptoms the second or third time, and not know that they've already caught it before.

That would then be the worst case scenario (even if there is a vaccine), if people can catch it more than once, as it would never be able to be eradicated globally... and isolated countries like Australia would have to start adopting an eradication program, to eliminate the virus (which we had pretty much done in all states before the outbreak in Victoria occurred from the breach in security at a quarantine hotel). Once eliminated, the country would then need to have all arriving people be isolated in quarantine (preferably on an offshore Australian territory to prevent future breaches), and rebuild our economy away from international tourism and education, as inbound arrivals would stay.
That's my thinking at least.

[1AZRAEL1]

Got abused by a Social Distance Warrior (my phrase I coined it lol, someone taking it upon themselves to tell people off) for not doing enough to monitor social distancing. Beyond me making announcements to people, what else can I do? If I had to call the police every time people didn't adhere to social distancing or listen to me, I'd have police on my train the whole time. It's not possible.

[griffin]

This page is worth a read, for a look at how each state has been with the virus... including the sharp increase in Victoria, overtaking all other states in terms of case numbers and per-capita numbers.

The state-based graphs also show that NSW is currently where Victoria was 4 weeks ago, when they had just one area as a hotspot, with daily case numbers in the teens... which became 40-50 3 weeks ago, to 70-80 2 weeks ago, to 200-300 last week to today.

Worldwide, the only measure that has proven to work in reducing the virus numbers (not even trying to eradicate it), is total lockdown that only has people out of their houses for vital services, food/medicine shopping, and employment that isn't in the services sector and observes social distancing and cleaning. New Zealand did it, Singapore did it, Australia did it, and even New York did it... but every location or country that re-opened before the virus was eradicate, EVERY country, has seen a resurgence of the virus.

And countries that do eradicate the virus (like Australia and New Zealand) only takes one slip-up for the virus to repopulate (the quarantine hotel breach in Melbourne and the quarantine breach in New Zealand)... and no matter how much testing is being done, no matter how many people are tasked to find all contacts that could be infected, and how much we have selected suburbs being told to not travel out of their area, the virus will not be contained while people are allowed to mingle in public, especially before they know that they are infected (if they are eventually tracked down as a contact of someone else).
I would recommend QLD close its border again to NSW, and any states that are still virus free, to open up to each other. Then NSW and VIC need to go back to the April-May level of lockdown, to kill off the virus again... and they have to realise or remember, that a lockdown takes about 1 week to take effect, so what ever the daily case numbers are when you start it, double it and that will be the peak, with more deaths from the higher number.
It might not be something people there want to return to (especially for people who never returned to work since the first lockdown started), but if NSW locks down now, it will take less time to kill off the virus and return to the process of re-opening.... the state will only have a peak of 100 cases a day, which should limit deaths to 4 or 5. This would compare to waiting a couple weeks, with the virus hitting 100 cases per day, thinking in vain that the virus could be contained while people are able to interact with each other (masks, hand-washing and social distancing reduces the spread, but doesn't prevent it... and that's only if every single person does all three, which we know will never happen here).
If the state waits until 100 case per day to start acting, it will be another week of increases and deaths before the lockdown takes affect on reducing case numbers.

The same with QLD - they need to close the border now before any infected NSW people enter (with most going to themeparks and holiday locations that have concentrations of people, many of whom also travelled there from somewhere else, taking the virus back with them to more places, than if it was just a hotspot in a suburban location). Business groups and tourist companies have been pressuring the QLD government to open up the border, and they are not going to let it shut back down, even after we have virus cases show up in the state. But they need to understand that, if they close the border before the virus gets in, they can still do business with people from SA, WA, NT, TAS and QLD... however, if they force the border to stay open to be selfishly trying to make money from people in NSW, 2-3 weeks after the virus starts showing up here, every business in QLD will have to shut down again completely, preventing them from doing business with any state, including their own.
Having an economy crawling along at 50% and remain virus free, is much better than having a 70% economy for just 2-3 weeks and be operating at 0% for another couple of months during a new lockdown.
Since I'm in QLD, this bothers me, because it was really feeling like life was back to normal up here with more people returning to work and schools back to normal, without a risk of being infected after 3 months of no new domestic cases and our premier being so tough with locking up our borders for longer than necessary. But now I feel that with the state election just 3 months away, she is going to bow to business groups to not close the borders while there are no cases found within QLD... even though it will be too late after cases are found here. (if she closes the borders before infections appear, she will be targeted as being too hasty, but then how do you prove that it was the right time to do it)


The third alternative is to slog through the virus like in America, with businesses open for about 2 months, before too many cases and deaths force people to shut down voluntarily to avoid getting sick themselves (or infect their elderly relatives and friends).

Some stats are circulating on facebook at the moment about the true cost in lives and value to the economy if the virus worked its way through all of America, resulting in the average of 1% death-rate and the 10% of people who will have life-term health problems after recovering from the virus.
1% sounds really small, but in America that's 3.8 Million people dead, which would be the entire population of Brisbane wiped out. Each death costs money to the businesses they work for (if they were employed), and costs money to the families they were providing for, not to mention the insurance payouts of those who are life insurance.
Then look at the 10% of people who will never work again (another 38 million people - more than the population of Australia), or even be able to live life to the full ever again, needing constant medical treatment or assistance, as people who ended up with serious symptoms leave hospital with damaged lungs, organs and nervous systems. That's an extra 10% of people on the welfare system, who will be costing hospital systems through ongoing treatments (and the original covid treatment, on expensive ventilators and Intensive Care beds).
That's at least 11% of the entire population removed from the employment pool, and collecting welfare instead of paying taxes.
All the talk from business groups and politicians about lockdowns costing the economy... preventing deaths and serious illness, would save the economy more in the long run.