That’s good. I’d not heard of The Mandarin (“news of interest to Australian public sector managers” since 2014). It’s so slow that it’s almost unusable for me. The other site mentioned above doesn’t really give me the information I want.
The Mandarin does split numbers into imported/acquired/community/unknown, but not into secondary/tertiary, which I think would be the really interesting number. I think the states aren’t providing those numbers.
T think that the reason Queensland isn’t included is because it was just splitting it’s numbers into known/not identified yet.
The other interesting number would be the amplification factor. I am absolutely sure that people must be trying to calculate this, but not releasing it. Perhaps it was on the Mandarin site but it gave up before I could find it.
Melbourne. I think the government is tracking them, but may not be releasing that level of detail all the time. A few days ago, one of the NSW Health media releases had a little list at the bottom of the major sources, and how many were infected from each. E.g. there were 32 cases linked to the Boogie Wonderland party in Bondi on March 17th. (Boogie Wonderland’s Facebook page is like an object lesson in why we need social distancing.)
From the NSW Health numbers, so far, it looks like around 10% of cases end up in hospital, and 20% of those (so 2% overall) end up in the ICU. Around half the ICU cases require ventilators.
Yes. It’s the rate of hospitalisation that those countries who initially tried the herd immunity approach fell foul of. When a treatment is found that allows those with moderate symptoms to be nursed back to health without hospitalisation then those of us without exposure can be progressively released from self isolation. And I have no idea how a progressive release could be done but we can’t risk a mass relaxation of distancing promoting a second exponential spike.
And judging by our number of deaths and ventilator cases, our hospitalisation rate is high: it’s easy to get into hospital.
… Or for some reason our hospitalised cases are just luckier than people hospitalised in other countries. Better hospitals? More sunshine and vitamin D? Nobody knows.
And I don’t want to sound like a crank, but West Australia reported only three new cases yesterday. Yesterday also had the highest April temperature on record (39.5 C). Coincidence? Probably.
And I am wondering if any ship has contributed more to the misery of any country than the Ruby Princess.
Yeah, probably. But the numbers in the last week have been okay. (ETA: @Cicero)
It looks like we’re in a position where we actually might be able to go for a New-Zealand-style elimination strategy, but I don’t know if all the states are up for that. NSW … seems like not.
I have a feeling that NT and WA might be though - and they might be willing to keep the borders shut to the eastern states in order to keep it out of their backyard.
ICU numbers have been very encouraging in the last week … they go 83, 96, 101, 86, 81, 81, 80
I think they may be going up again this evening though, since that most recent cruise ship docked.
The ship which brought bubonic plague to the British Isles;
The ship that brought Francisco Pizzaro and his conquistadors along with measles, smallpox, influenza, typhoid etc to South and Central America;
The Santa Maria bringing Columbus and the Mayflower bringing the Pilgrims and the same biological agents;
The First Fleet coming into Sydney Cove with the gamut of Old World disease and killing thousands of times more of the indigenous people than were passengers on the Ruby Princess;
You could also add the troopships which brought the 1918 pandemic from North America to the killing fields of Europe (social distancing at a time of trench warfare?)
Only 22 new reported cases yesterday, but hundreds of thousands cases and tens of thousands of death = bad , but few cases and minimal deaths = also bad it seems.
As I recall, the Mayflower Pilgrims were lucky that when they started out, they met someone who could speak English :). And doubly fortunate that there was unoccupied cleared land that they could use with the farming methods demonstrated by their English-speaking guides
600 cases from the Ruby Princess, leading to 30 acquired cases. Reproduction ratio 0.05, which would suggest 1 or 2 tertiary transmission cases amongst close family, if such were possible, which seems unlikely.
We now have more recovered cases (3000+) than active cases (3000-). New cases yesterday ~100, which indicates, I think, that we are still seeing new imported cases, but also includes the far more important number of acquired infections. That would be a 0.033 ratio per day (say 0.5% total) if it wasn’t mostly imported cases.
My state school has told us not to send kids to school if you are at home. I don’t get the notifications (the school only talks to people who have a smart phone), so I don’t know if they are demanding documentation, but they’ve told us that most of the teachers won’t be there.
Here in SA we seem to have 3 hot spots of secondary transmission. A baggage handler, a group of tourists for the USA in one of our winery districts, and the Ruby Princess. For a while secondary transmission from the Ruby princess was the dominant reason for testing positive. I think we dodged a bullet. The saving grace of the Ruby Princess debarcle was that we knew the names and addresses of all the passengers. So within a very short time health authorities in all the states were able to get in contact and isolate them, plus start contact tracing. They didn’t need to wait for passengers to become symptomatic before identifying them. So reproduction was stamped down much faster than usual. We still have a residual community infection with no identified path, but it is small, and there is some hope we can squish it out.
I work in Supply Chain in FMCG. Being a Japanese company our financial year is April-March
First fortnight’s sales figures for FY20 are in and we are running at 80% BPlan, which was set back in Oct/Nov last year. I was stunned it was that high but the marketing bods seem to think that sell though could hold at those levels.
Possibly browsing is way down but people are going to buy on a mission and then getting out of the malls and strips quicksmart?
Not my field, but a 20% down-turn in business sounds broadly consistent with the 10% unemployment figure that is being touted, and the ~10% of shops that have shut up around my area (which is mainly a restaurant-cafe strip, so pretty heavily hit). Hopefully the Jobkeeper / Jobseeker grants will come at the right time to keep people shopping for the non-essentials.
I think there is a sense among those of us lucky enough to have kept our jobs, our special duty for the rest of the year is to really splash the cash, support local businesses and share the love.
A recent report on technical modelling of the local transmission of COVID-19 from the Peter Doherty Institute (Peter Doherty won a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1996 in the field of immunology and is one of our national treasures)
When the initial modelling of the pandemic infection rates were done the base reproduction rate of R0 for COVID-19 was usually set around 2.5 i.e. every infected case infects 2.5 others, hence the exponential growth of the pandemic.
Due to the implementation and acceptance of social distancing policies and other environmental factors like Australia’s lower population density and the arrival of the pandemic outside the normal flu season the local effective reproduction rate R*eff *has been estimated as around 0.5. Obviously anything sustained below 1.0 is El Dorrado.
The big unknown is the level of asymptomatic cases but these results would suggest that local elimination of COVID-19 may be achievable.
