They’ve avoided closing schools, nonetheless about 93% of students are at home.
The argument is that if schools shut there will be a significant drain of staff from health and other essential services as people stay home to look after the kids. Nonetheless there was encouragement not to keep your kids at home. This has not been satisfactory or clear-cut to anyone, especially teachers who feel they are being exposed. The words ‘mixed message’ have been said, quite often.
I’m not sure how this lines up with other school calendars, but in Australia the new year starts with children going to school from Feb to December. whatever happens with teaching, it will be a significantly diminished year for most people. The more affluent can afford tutors or specialised teaching but it will be tough for others - the rollout of personal computers and teaching tech was still underway, so there are probably many families where there is no laptop, ipad or similar they can use.
Last week, the Prime Minister said he was keeping the schools open and send your kids to school. Our state Premier said keep them home if you can. I think everyone is just making their own decisions, but most people are keeping them home.
An article in the Medical Journal of Australia suggests that social distancing could push the peak infection period out till mid October. That’s another 7 months of social distancing, at minimum. I think most people are thinking about this in terms of a few weeks.
It has always been at least six months. Just that nobody in leadership had the balls to say so. There are maybe rays of hope. If, and it is a big if, some cities/states can actually become free of any new infection for a solid period, maybe then can open up a little, but they would need to lock the borders. Even then there are risks. Introduction of mass testing capabilities may help.
Our state borders remain porous. Trucking remains, and there are travel exemptions for many working people. Especially areas like mining. Our FIFO mining towns are probably a huge risk.
It is going to be difficult. No doubt.
I thought they were cancelling all the FIFO stuff? Or do you mean economically at risk?
I was just looking for information about FIFO workers, and I found out that the WA government is using drones to police social distancing rules. They shout warnings at people who are too close together.
Each state manages the rules on things lie FIFO. It is very fluid, as you would expect. SA has some exemption for FIFO at the moment, but they may be curtailed anytime. I’m still on mailing lists for primary resources (from a previous life). This came in on the 27th.
Shutting down mines like Roxby Downs just isn’t possible. You can’t abandon in place and expect to be able to pick things up again once things calm down. Even if production ceased entirely maintenance remains a significant undertaking. And given the location of Roxby, that means FIFO.
My main point is that true closed borders just isn’t viable. Stuff and people have to get through. The numbers are probably within the bounds of controllability, with much more stringent controls and eventually testing of people. You certainly won’t be going anywhere if you have a temperature. But the risk is non-zero if you hope to open an otherwise infection free city up again. It only needs one case to slip past and the whole mess unravels and we are back to months of lockdown. No easy answer. Significant improvements in the scale and speed of testing may be enough to balance the equation. That remains only a hope for now.
That’s the thing. Several in the US underestimated how serious things were. If we’re being honest, there still are lots of people who aren’t taking it seriously enough. We’re over 200k cases now, and it’s likely there are many, many more who have it. The numbers have been artificially low until now due to lack of testing. We’re catching up on the testing front, but we still don’t have a good idea how many cases there really are.
Australia does not appear to be much different in this regard. Nor do several other nations. Once widespread testing goes into effect, suddenly a jump in cases happens in every country that tries it. It’s not a coincidence.
So, no new number of cases is not necessarily a bad thing, but the double-negative is not proof-positive in this case.
If you blindfold yourself, in normal times it is usually safe to assume there is not a knife wielding maniac in front of you. But if there have been reports that knife wielding maniacs have decided to have a convention in your town, this is suddenly not the best assumption to make.
I’d love to see the numbers on that. The sources I’ve seen indicate it’s high on the list but not the highest.
I’m not exactly sure where all the other Aussies in the thread are posting from but where I am, in Victoria, schools were due to go on ordinary Easter holiday on March 27. So it’s a bit moot, for us. When official term starts again … well, I’m not going to treat it like it’s a lock-in because anything can happen in two weeks, but the talk so far has been of a “mixture of in-person and online learning”. Which I interpret as meaning that if you have to send your kids in then you can, but you can choose otherwise if you can.
Apparently over 260,000 (about 10,000 per million) have been tested to date. The article that you linked to indicates that Australia doubled its rate in the week to 30 March. Currently over 10,00 test a day are being done.
As always, the government(s) talk up thing like testing rates. We do have a pretty high one as it goes, but nothing extraordinary. Like most places, testing is confined to those who directly need it. People who are ill, and contacts of those confirmed with it. There is no random community testing. But anyone with a temperature, cough and sore throat can get tested. They need not be particularly ill. General paranoia is sending anyone with even a tickle in the throat to their GP, so whilst not systematic, a lot of people are being tested. And the positives are few.
OTOH, there is very little evidence for community infection thus far, well not in my state. Not none, but very few cases, and this has held true for some weeks, so indications are that the rate of unknown, asymptomatic cases is still very low. It could blow out, but we have been in near lockdown for nearly two weeks, so chances are that the residual unknowns would being making themselves known about now. The next few days will probably contain the answer.
SA, Vic, QLD, and ACT have similar guidelines for testing, something like:
You have travelled overseas in the past 14 days AND have symptoms.
You have travelled interstate in the past 14 days AND have symptoms.
You have been in contact with a confirmed case AND have symptoms.
You are a healthcare worker with direct patient contact AND have a fever (≥38) OR an acute respiratory infection (e.g. shortness of breath, cough, sore throat).
You are an aged and residential care worker AND have a fever (≥38) OR an acute respiratory infection
(These are the current SA guidelines. Victoria & Qld are also testing people with symptoms from a known outbreak area, and First Nations communities)
NSW is testing all those, and have recently started testing people with symptoms who are referred by a GP or clinician or from an area where there has been an outbreak.
WA is currently testing anyone with symptoms.
I’m in Sydney, and it has not been easy to get a Covid test here until very recently. So I’m still holding my breath about the rate of community transmission. OTOH, given the hospitalisation rates, it’s obviously not rampant in the community.
Cases of unknown origin are WAY higher than they were two weeks ago. There was a nifty little graph with these in the Guardian datablog yesterday … sadly the article got updated and the graph went away (:dubious:) but I managed to note down the numbers for the 20 days preceding 30/3 before that happened. They went like this:
Considering that you either need to have actual serious pneumonia or (recently) be a health care worker in order to get a test without a known contact or travel history, I think we can take it that each of these numbers represent about another 20 mild or asymptomatic cases walking around out there. So that’s low in a ‘calm before the storm’ kind of way, but not in a ‘we’ve got this under control’ kind of way.
And the hospitals are still filling up.
IMO we’ve still got way more of a “people not taking this seriously enough” problem than a “people panicking” problem.
Did’t see the graph, but agree with your conclusions.
Australia has a falling number of new cases.
This is because Australia has imported cases, not endemic disease. In particular, the number of new cases in NSW has fallen, because the number of new cases in NSW.aus was driven by cruise ships and international arrivals. Now that travel restrictions are in place, the number of new cases arriving (5 or 6 days ago) from elsewhere has dropped.
What we see now in new cases iis the tail end of imported cases, plus people who were infected by them, plus community acquired cases.
I think that the number of secondary and tertiary cases will also drop, but that’s still the future.
We would have a better idea if they were actually reporting the numbers for primary (imported), secondary, tertiary and unknown origin, but they aren’t.
And, in Melbourne, I heard a talk-radio host cut off one of his callers (not me!) for suggesting that the number of tertiary/community acquired infections was tiny. Dangerous! Runs against the agreed discourse! Right now, you aren’t allowed to say that kind of thing on right-wing talk radio.
As the number of primary cases drops, the number of secondary and tertiary cases grows (hopefully at a less than 1:1 rate). The further it gets and the wider it grows, possibly (depending on the numbers), the more dangerous it gets for random people in the community and, (depending on the numbers), the more important social distancing becomes for the most of us.
There’s also this link, which gives detailed transmission-source data for all the states, except that Queensland has mysteriously ceased to exist :dubious: