And certainly not in the same way that China has or may have.
I’ll pay that it is possible but the last hedonistic socialisations on the beach, the sports fields and the nightlife before we started to take things seriously are just barely a week ago.
There is also the inferred seasonality that this virus like most, seems to be more virulent in winter or we are as a species more susceptible at that time. We are coming out of summer, our flu season is June to September peaking in August. Now we might have it strangled by then, or had enough time to build up our medical supply chain. Or it could be appalling.
And were the late implementation of self-isolation strategies to get us off the exponential infections and death count curve we still have to find a strategy to get life back to near-normality without the bulk of the population having any exposure to the virus and risking as second wave.
I don’t have it, but at some stage I (and everybody else) are going to need to so as to get my (and their) immunity and I’d prefer that to happen at a time when there is a treatment program if necessary and not contribute to the overstretch of a medical system that needs to attend to all those other non-Covid-19 life threatening conditions.
If we have beaten this then it’s not much more than blind luck and the “tyranny of distance” in epidemiological terms.
You may be right but your numbers are screwy. The US is having more deaths per day than we are having new cases. They have tens of thousands of new cases per day.
Like you I am amazed at the inability of Aussies to take anything seriously. Probably nearly everyone I work with has at least one degree yet some of them are still going to work. Largely to sit around talking on the phone with the people who are working from home. Fuckwits.
Last time I checked the US had nearly half the number of new cases of Aus. Checking now, US is 198 vs 334 in Aus in the last day. Where are you getting YOUR numbers?
If you’re looking at the Worldometer site, you have to go to the ‘yesterday’ tab to get a proper view. ‘Today’ is usually still accumulating at any time that an Australian is probably awake.
The Wikipedia pages on ‘2020 coronavirus pandemic in…’ have some good graphs too - specifically, ones which give you the multi-week trend in various indicators. Though they do tend at the moment to be drowned in minutae about specific cases
It’s pretty tricky. I was checking the worldometers.info site yesterday, refreshed it and 19 people died. Later I did the same and the 27,251 dead became 27,250 making me a virtual Frankenstein. At one stage it had Australia’s death toll at over 600.
I think the most encouraging factors are the small number of people that are receiving critical care (23) and the declining increase in cases despite the increasing test rate which is one of the highest in the world per million people.
I like the Johns Hopkins map better than the Worldometer site. For many countries, including Australia, Hopkins breaks the data down to the state level, and for the US they have county-level information.
When you’re still in the exponential growth phase, the new infections (y-axis) go up in proportion to the total infections (x-axis). That’s the diagonal line. The animation shows countries following the line as time passes, and then eventually dropping off of it (although the drop off thus far is mainly just China and South Korea.)
Australia isn’t as far along the curve as many of the others, but you still appear to be in the exponential growth phase.
Working out whether one is in the exponential phase still or not depends upon the day on day change. Cautious hope in that we have had a downward trend of new cases each day since the 25th of March. That is hard to see on a logarithmic plot, as it only shows as a slight curve away from a straight line.
At the time of writing this the graph cited above was only current until the 28th, so it only reflected a couple of days of non-exponential growth.
We do lots of tracing of infected people. Where I live only four known cases have not been traced back to either direct contact with travellers, or actual travellers from aboard. This makes for considerable hope that there is very limited community infection occurring. As I mentioned earlier, the Ruby Princess cruise ship made a huge mess of our numbers, releasing a few hundred infected people into the community. Luckily, knowing who they all were meant that they could be tracked down, tested, and contacts traced quickly. So the damage was far less than it might have been.
As for most countries, the next week will really show how well we are doing. It will get us past 2 weeks of major restrictions, and when we should start to see the real effect.
I don’t understand how they can trace contacts when the virus can apparently be spread by trips to the supermarket. Are they tracking every waitperson they ordered coffee from, or every shopper who tried on an outfit after they did? There is some very contradictory messaging going around.
Yeah, every time they had a new official case at the University (it’s up to 4 now) we all got mail about how these people had apparently all come in on just one day, gone to one building or worksite, gone home again, and the building/worksite was being disinfected. None of them apparently stopped off at a cafe for a cup of coffee, or came in by public transport, or was in the company of random people in any way.
One assumes they do the best job they can. The fact that there a small number of people testing positive with no known association with known infected tells one that some do slip past. But given how small that number is at the moment, there is some hope that the efforts are working pretty well. A university however is one of the worst places I could think of for spreading. When I was teaching at one I was first in line for a flu shot every year, simply because the place was so bad. Nothing like walking into a lecture theatre filled with students, half of whom were just back from overseas. They might not have brought anything from back home, but there is nothing as good as international plane flight for catching something, except for, it seems, a cruise ship.
Despite the insanity of letting everyone of the Ruby Princess, there is no doubt that the passengers on the ship were quite aware of the problem. Many expressed surprise that there wasn’t any screening or processing done when they disembarked. So at least some of them would have behaved sensibly and responsibly.
I just gleaned some statistics off the Victorian Health department website. This is for hospitalisations in the last week - other folks can do other states, I guess, but I have no reason to think Vic is doing any worse than average. I think this gives a much clearer picture than ‘official confirmed cases’, because that is very dependent on who they think is worth testing (and keeping the hospitals from overflowing is the main game here)
24/3: 12 in hospital, 2 in icu
25/3: 12 in hospital, 2 in icu
26/3: 14 in hospital, 3 in icu
27/3: 22 in hospital, 3 in icu
28/3: 21 in hospital, 3 in icu
29/3: 26 in hospital, 4 in icu
30/3: 29 in hospital, 4 in icu
Community transmission estimates have risen from 6 to 26 in the last week.
Not desperate yet, but certainly not going in the correct direction
24-Mar 818 12 8
25-Mar 1029 10 4
26-Mar 1219 16 10
27-Mar 1405 134 19 9
28-Mar 1617 147 22 11
29-Mar 1791 160 24 12
30-Mar 1918 157 26 13
31-Mar 2032 164 35 16
NSW has issued a lockdown order. No one is to leave the house except for the following reasons.
Work, if a person can’t work from home
School or an educational institution
Shops for food and other essential items
Get medical care
Exercise, but only if the exercise is done alone or with one other person
Why would they do that.
The largest cluster in New Zealand is associated with a large girls school and a single index patient that returned from overseas. 48 cases and counting - staff, students and parents.
