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No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

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Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#171

Post by tzs »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #127
rswail wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all know that we are in "COVID normal" not "normal" until there is a widely delivered effective vaccine. However, it's much easier to test, trace and isolate small outbreaks ("whack a mole") than if its widely spread and uncontrolled. Recently we had a single case of a school child that went back to school before they should have. Two days after he tested positive, the following happened: * The school was closed a…

Yeah but isn't this impossible? People go to the grocery store and come into contact with hundreds of people in an hour.

For most viruses whether or not you get sick or become infectious after being exposed to them depends on how strong the exposure was. The amount you need is called the infectious dose.

The infectious dose of COVID is not known, but believed to be somewhere in the several hundred to a thousand viruses range.

An infected person breathing normally near you might expose you to something like 20 or 30 per minute (breath is normally expelled with low force, so it doesn't contain viruses from the lower parts of the respiratory tract). Talking might do around 200 per minute. A cough or sneeze can do millions.

Thus, if I have COVID and go shopping at the same time you do, wearing a mask, and don't cough or sneeze pretty much in your face when we happen to pass each other, you almost certainly are not going to get it from me, and it makes little difference for contact tracers to find you.

It is the people that I spend a few minutes talking face to face to or that I spend a long time near that contact tracers need to find.

Note that it doesn't depend on who you get the viruses from. If a lot of people in the grocery store have it, then even though you might only get a handful of viruses from each person you pass you still might accumulate an infectious dose during your time in the store.

To control it, you need to get the number of infections down enough that people won't be getting it from casual transitory contact, like when grocery shopping, and people need to limit situations that involve more extended contact to times/places where the people they have extended contact with can be identified and traced, and need to limit the frequency of those events so that there is time for contact tracing to work.

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#172

Post by nstj »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #162

Anyone knows if Australia is going to accept "tourists" anytime soon? I would love to spend a few weeks there and get away from the chaos. (and of course I would get tested before going, etc)

Australia has recently introduced a “travel bubble” which allows residents of New Zealand to visit without quarantine (albeit with a couple of edge cases). Interestingly, residents of Australia aren’t permitted to travel in the other direction yet.

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#173

Post by azakai »

questionsta wrote: post #123

Genuine question from a fellow software engineer (throwaway because COVID is such a wedge issue. And for the record I'm currently in Australia and spent the early part of COVID pandemic in the US so have familiarity with both sides of the equation): Does anyone have a plan to get the world out of COVID? Previous pandemics such as SARS/MERS were contained but had no vaccine, Spanish Flu wasn't contained but there were…

Even with a vaccine, I'd expect the world to be different than a year ago. There will be long-term changes. Much of Asia went through such changes after SARS, so the world has experience with this.

But we can get to something very close to normal, with differences from before. More mask-wearing, more government powers to do contact tracing, more health checks on borders and other travel limitations, more remote work, etc. So it might not be the same "normal" as before, and some of those things will be unpleasant, but we can live with them (and some will have other benefits, like remote work and a decrease in flights will help against climate change).

And specifically I think you're downplaying a vaccine. Even a 70% effective one would make a huge difference in how the virus spreads, potentially decreasing R below 1 even in Europe and the US and other hard-hit areas.

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#174

Post by qeternity »

L-four wrote: post #76
m0zg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've only postponed the inevitable though. Virus is gonna virus - it's not going anywhere, ever. I'm not downplaying. I really hope you've used this time to prepare and didn't just sit on your behind hoping it'd go away.

It's not going away, we are actively getting rid of it.

What measures are getting rid of it permanently? Until there is a vaccine, herd immunity is the only path. We won’t rid ourselves completely and it will keep coming back.

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#175

Post by umvi »

tomhoward wrote: post #15

Melbourne resident here. We're feeling pretty relieved to be getting these results and excited to be tentatively emerging from nearly four months of fairly strict lockdown. Much is being made of the fact that back in August when Melbourne was reporting over 700 new cases on some days, UK and France were reporting similar new case numbers, yet we are now getting zeroes and those countries have out-of-control spread. A…

If you emerge from lockdown, won't that result in increase of rate of cases?

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#176

Post by jonsno56 »

icpmacdo wrote: post #143
anoncake wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IFR of Covid is closer to 0.5% than to 1%. That is something we are perfectly used to: For example, Australia had a death rate of 0.63% in 2019.[1] Of course having anyone die isn't "fine". But the death of less than 1% of the population is something we can tolerate, not some kind of disaster of unprecedented magnitude worth a lockdown causing damage we can't even foresee yet. [1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistic…

CDC's survival percentage based on the IFR per age group 0-19----99.997% 20-49---99.98% 50-69---99.5% 70+-----94.6%

I love how you can produce statistics about survival rate but not disability rate. Because surprise, you don’t have a clue

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#177

Post by jonsno56 »

LeCow wrote: post #154
Jedd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Sydney resident. My other half is a high school teacher - she's had I think 4 cases of cough / sniffles that have required a test, with the process being free (as you say), convenient (walking distance - there are many places that offer the swab test), and fast (results back within 48 hours, usually faster, via SMS & email). I've caught a train into the office 3 times since March - public transport utilisation…

The mistake is to think it's never going to happen. It will get you eventually, could be 5 years, 10 years...but it will come.

It’ll get YoU in particular in 10 years cause you won’t get vaccinated

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#178

Post by makomk »

fiskfiskfisk wrote: post #81
luckylion wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A point for Germany: the current outbreak is much stronger than the one in March, even though we didn't have obligatory masks in March (they've been in effect since April; few people had them before they became obligatory). We had very few cases during the (pretty warm) summer (in the county I currently live in, there were zero cases in June). March peaked at around 5.5k on a single day, October peaked at ~13k with m…

There were no real testing infrastructure in March. Everything was an unknown, and most people didn't get tested unless they showed serious symptoms and were close to hospitalization. The current assumption in Norway, based on testing and WHO guidelines) are that we detect about 1/2 of the active cases through testing now, compared to 1/10 back in March. Applied to your numbers, the current outbreak in Germany is abo…

Germany was the one country in Europe that did have fairly decent testing infrastructure in place during the spring outbreaks, though. So that doesn't apply so much to them as it does to other European countries. It wasn't quite as good as it is now - looking at the RKI's stats, they did over 400,000 tests in the week at the end of March when test positivity hit its spring peak, compared to over 1.2 million the last few weeks - but they didn't have the massive ramp-up in testing that most other European countries did.

Speaking of test positivity, their all-time high is 9% and the most recent week for which information is available isn't that far off that at 5.6%, and I think that number's effectively a week old at this point. All indications are that Germany really, genuinely does have a bigger outbreak this time around.

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#179

Post by chillacy »

m0zg wrote: post #70
JimTheMan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just came out of months of hard lockdown in Melbourne. Everyone wants to downplay our results. But we went hard and obeyed the rules. I really do think we acted exceptionally as the public. I see what other places with outbreaks are doing, and it seems very lax.

You've only postponed the inevitable though. Virus is gonna virus - it's not going anywhere, ever. I'm not downplaying. I really hope you've used this time to prepare and didn't just sit on your behind hoping it'd go away.

Measles is still out there, it has not been eliminated, there are cases in Africa and South America https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/measles/globalmeaslesoutbre...

Yet we don’t really worry about it in the US: people are (mostly) vaccinated, and getting a visa to enter the country requires vaccination.

Covid might be similar, except given anti vaccine sentiment the US, Australia might have to throw the US on the list alongside Brazil, Nigeria, and the Congo.

Re: No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

#180

Post by ywhjaknskkkw »

umvi wrote: post #175
tomhoward wrote: post #15

Melbourne resident here. We're feeling pretty relieved to be getting these results and excited to be tentatively emerging from nearly four months of fairly strict lockdown. Much is being made of the fact that back in August when Melbourne was reporting over 700 new cases on some days, UK and France were reporting similar new case numbers, yet we are now getting zeroes and those countries have out-of-control spread. A…

If you emerge from lockdown, won't that result in increase of rate of cases?

Yes. The lockdowns just delay the inevitable at a tremendous cost.
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