Or maybe some people desiring flexibility?
And you understand casuals are paid higher rates to compensate for no sick/annual leave. Approx 25% higher/hour in most cases. Sometimes more?
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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Coronavirus
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And you understand casuals are paid higher rates to compensate for no sick/annual leave. Approx 25% higher/hour in most cases. Sometimes more?
the flexibility of casual is almost entirely a one way street.
if an employer says 'dont come in tomorrow, its quiet' the employee goes 'ok'
if the employee goes 'im not coming in tom', the employer goes 'have a nice life'
and rings the next bloke willing to work for $19
and I agree, the meat works and aged care outbreaks are surely related to a low paid, casual workforce with no sick leave, in physically close proximity
OK but because their work patterns are like that means that if they get the virus they potentially spread it to multiple workplaces. The data seems pretty clear given the type of work that is getting hit. More than 1 person has mentioned it here, it was mentioned by both Andrews and Sutton.
25% if not much is still not much.
Most aged care workers would be on low pay, and missing a shift or 4 man people will literally struggle to put food on the table for them and their families.
Most people worrying for multiple employers in the aged care industry do so so they can make enough money to get by.
An Insecure casual workforce is a factor, but prob more significant are their actual working conditions, working in close proximity to their colleagues for lengthy periods, and in meat works the cold wet air increases transmission risk.
Well he didn't have a day off as he did the test on a Saturday and I thought the Govt was imploring people to be tested, symptomatic or asymptomatic ?
This is the letter he got, if they didn't want asymptomatic people tested WTF would they have it on the letter ?
It clearly states here, no symptoms and you can go about life normally.
Hence my original post about being con****ingfused
Last edited by a moderator:
Its pretty clear. If you don't have symptoms go about your usual business. Not sure anywhere I've seen or read the gov't encouraging people with no symptoms to be tested. If anything the message has been don't get a test if you have no symptoms (unless you live or are a close contact of someone who has tested positive). Don't waste kits and time. If your employee just got tested because he felt he was doing the right thing and had no symptoms and no known positive contacts its pretty clear he could go about his normal business.
Yeh the government should run all aged care facilities and employ workers full time. Unfortunately the residents would all be dead because the gov't would also have run the quarantine.
Personally would love to see pay rises for all those working in healthcare of the old and disabled. Unenviable and difficult job.
This is wrong.
There are a number of reasons to get tested. Symptoms is the main one, but depending on your exposure there are other reasons.
I've had government officials knock on my door and tell me to get tested even though I didn't have symptoms, because of my post code. People who are close contacts are being advised to get tested.
People in my workplace are currently getting very confusing and mixed advice about whether they should be tested based on being sort of but not quite close contacts. By the way, the definition of close contact is waaaay too strict, and probably a big reason why our contact tracing isn't working effectively.
This is all a bit of a mess at the moment, and unless we get some clear and consistent instructions it's going to unravel very quickly.
Correctly counting the cost shows Australia's lockdown was a mistake
The future will now be worse because the flawed pandemic health projections didn't correctly calculate their effects on economic welfare.
Correctly counting the cost shows Australia's lockdown was a mistake
The future will now be worse because the flawed pandemic health projections didn't correctly calculate their effects on economic welfare.www.afr.com
Paywalled. Are they really claiming Australia should not have locked down? Seems bizarre if so.
Correctly counting the cost shows Australia's lockdown was a mistake
The future will now be worse because the flawed pandemic health projections didn't correctly calculate their effects on economic welfare.
Gigi FosterContributor
May 25, 2020 – 2.44pm
Save
Share
Australia’s economic policies in response to the coronavirus threat have been driven in the main by projections of death and infection rates, produced by epidemiological modelling, that since have been proven to be orders of magnitude above what any country anywhere in the world, regardless of policy, has experienced.
Meanwhile, the welfare costs of our economic policy responses have been either overlooked entirely, gestured towards vaguely but not actually calculated, or calculated in waysstrikingly out of alignment with international best practice when estimating the welfare costs of different policy alternatives – eg, using full value-of-a-statistical-life (VSL) numbers, rather than age-adjusted VSL or quality-adjusted life years, when valuing lives lost to COVID-19 (which are predominantly the lives of older people with a few years, not an entire life, left to live).
The costs of what we have done are enormous and will show up most obviously over the next few months in the body counts sacrificed to causes other than COVID-19. AAP
A leading reason for points 1 and 2 is that it’s a lot less work to count bodies and point to scary body-count projections than to think hard about the many and various costs – many invisible and requiring a reasonable counterfactual that is, again, mentally taxing to create; many manifesting only over time – that arise when we take the drastic economic policy actions we have taken.
The costs of what we have done are enormous. These costs will show up most obviously over the next few months in the body counts sacrificed to causes other than COVID-19 – like from famine, preventable diseases and violence in lower income countries; and deaths from despair, isolation, and non-COVID-19 health problems that have lost resourcing in better-off countries such as Australia – but will also stem from sources that don’t have actual deaths of presently living people attached to them.
Lower GDP now and going forward means lower levels of government services on education, healthcare, research and development, infrastructure, social services, and myriad other things that keep us happier, healthier and living longer.
Advertisement
RELATED
How they got the returns wrong
Kids whose education has been disrupted due to our mandates that schools and universities move activities online, and young people who have lost their jobs or are entering the job market during the recession we have created, will carry the impact of these disruptions for years.
Discoveries of cures for diseases other than COVID-19 will be delayed; IVF babies won’t be born; our progress on lifting up the tens of thousands of Australian children who live in poverty will be set back.
The future we’ll now have is worse than the future we could have had without the policy responses we have seen.
That comparison of what-we-will-have to what-we-could-have-had can be expressed in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs), and compared directly to estimates of the QALY and WELLBY costs of the COVID-19 deaths and suffering that our policies have averted.
When you make this comparison, correctly, the evidence is clear that Australia’s lockdown has been a mistake.
In hindsight, instead of reacting out of fear, our government could have understood its primary role early on to contain and reduce the population’s fear; it could have set proportionate and targeted policy, not blanket policy (eg, extreme lockdowns were not what drove the decline from peak infections in Australia: when many of the harshest measures were set, infections were already on the decline); and it could have been perennially mindful of the massive economic and hence human welfare costs implicit in any decision to stop trade, pull children out of school, or lock people away from their friends and family.
In normal times, we jump up and down and fill national airwaves about changes in GDP or unemployment rates that are an order of magnitude less than what we are seeing now. In normal times we don’t track single-digit daily death rates from any cause as a leading indicator of whether it’s safe to venture outside, knowing that hundreds of people in Australia die each day from myriad causes. In normal times we talk about striving for health not through sitting at home and avoiding other people, but by building our strength and supporting our immune systems. People today have lost their perspective on what is normal.
RELATED
Coronavirus shutdown: did it go 'too far'?
As the costs of our decisions become more and more apparent, with time, our fear will stop controlling our minds. I hope the perspective of the public and policy-makers returns quickly, so we have a chance of handling things better if the next wave of the virus attacks again what is now one of the most immunologically unprepared high-income countries in the world: Australia.
That''s an interesting opinion above. I hope she's going to track her claims & publish the data & compare it with the worst case models she claims they will be worse than. Including the fallout statistics of those countries of the things she claims our response has caused. Otherwise it's just an opinion based on little fact.
There is no doubt lockdown has serious economic and social costs that will be long-term. The question is if you don’t lockdown and have a free-for-all like the US, are you better off?
Evidence from Sweden says no.
The last line is interesting - "so we have a chance of handling things better if the next wave of the virus attacks again what is now one of the most immunologically unprepared high-income countries in the world: Australia."
She's making the argument that because we've suppressed the virus, we'll be in trouble later. It's the "herd immunity" argument. I suppose she thinks it's better for it to sweep the population, take out the oldies, max out the hospitals (and take out of lot of our best medical front-liners). There's also the additional deaths/costs of people not being treated for regular conditions because the hospitals are overrun.
Maybe she has a point if we never get a vaccine and we have to let the virus run through populations - a bad situation. Given some promising results from clinical trials I hope it doesn't get to that.
Evidence from Sweden says no.
The last line is interesting - "so we have a chance of handling things better if the next wave of the virus attacks again what is now one of the most immunologically unprepared high-income countries in the world: Australia."
She's making the argument that because we've suppressed the virus, we'll be in trouble later. It's the "herd immunity" argument. I suppose she thinks it's better for it to sweep the population, take out the oldies, max out the hospitals (and take out of lot of our best medical front-liners). There's also the additional deaths/costs of people not being treated for regular conditions because the hospitals are overrun.
Maybe she has a point if we never get a vaccine and we have to let the virus run through populations - a bad situation. Given some promising results from clinical trials I hope it doesn't get to that.
Last edited:
Correctly counting the cost shows Australia's lockdown was a mistake
The future will now be worse because the flawed pandemic health projections didn't correctly calculate their effects on economic welfare.
Gigi FosterContributor
May 25, 2020 – 2.44pm
Save
Share
Australia’s economic policies in response to the coronavirus threat have been driven in the main by projections of death and infection rates, produced by epidemiological modelling, that since have been proven to be orders of magnitude above what any country anywhere in the world, regardless of policy, has experienced.
Meanwhile, the welfare costs of our economic policy responses have been either overlooked entirely, gestured towards vaguely but not actually calculated, or calculated in waysstrikingly out of alignment with international best practice when estimating the welfare costs of different policy alternatives – eg, using full value-of-a-statistical-life (VSL) numbers, rather than age-adjusted VSL or quality-adjusted life years, when valuing lives lost to COVID-19 (which are predominantly the lives of older people with a few years, not an entire life, left to live).
The costs of what we have done are enormous and will show up most obviously over the next few months in the body counts sacrificed to causes other than COVID-19. AAP
A leading reason for points 1 and 2 is that it’s a lot less work to count bodies and point to scary body-count projections than to think hard about the many and various costs – many invisible and requiring a reasonable counterfactual that is, again, mentally taxing to create; many manifesting only over time – that arise when we take the drastic economic policy actions we have taken.
The costs of what we have done are enormous. These costs will show up most obviously over the next few months in the body counts sacrificed to causes other than COVID-19 – like from famine, preventable diseases and violence in lower income countries; and deaths from despair, isolation, and non-COVID-19 health problems that have lost resourcing in better-off countries such as Australia – but will also stem from sources that don’t have actual deaths of presently living people attached to them.
Lower GDP now and going forward means lower levels of government services on education, healthcare, research and development, infrastructure, social services, and myriad other things that keep us happier, healthier and living longer.
Advertisement
RELATED
How they got the returns wrong
Kids whose education has been disrupted due to our mandates that schools and universities move activities online, and young people who have lost their jobs or are entering the job market during the recession we have created, will carry the impact of these disruptions for years.
Discoveries of cures for diseases other than COVID-19 will be delayed; IVF babies won’t be born; our progress on lifting up the tens of thousands of Australian children who live in poverty will be set back.
The future we’ll now have is worse than the future we could have had without the policy responses we have seen.
That comparison of what-we-will-have to what-we-could-have-had can be expressed in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs), and compared directly to estimates of the QALY and WELLBY costs of the COVID-19 deaths and suffering that our policies have averted.
When you make this comparison, correctly, the evidence is clear that Australia’s lockdown has been a mistake.
In hindsight, instead of reacting out of fear, our government could have understood its primary role early on to contain and reduce the population’s fear; it could have set proportionate and targeted policy, not blanket policy (eg, extreme lockdowns were not what drove the decline from peak infections in Australia: when many of the harshest measures were set, infections were already on the decline); and it could have been perennially mindful of the massive economic and hence human welfare costs implicit in any decision to stop trade, pull children out of school, or lock people away from their friends and family.
In normal times, we jump up and down and fill national airwaves about changes in GDP or unemployment rates that are an order of magnitude less than what we are seeing now. In normal times we don’t track single-digit daily death rates from any cause as a leading indicator of whether it’s safe to venture outside, knowing that hundreds of people in Australia die each day from myriad causes. In normal times we talk about striving for health not through sitting at home and avoiding other people, but by building our strength and supporting our immune systems. People today have lost their perspective on what is normal.
RELATED
Coronavirus shutdown: did it go 'too far'?
As the costs of our decisions become more and more apparent, with time, our fear will stop controlling our minds. I hope the perspective of the public and policy-makers returns quickly, so we have a chance of handling things better if the next wave of the virus attacks again what is now one of the most immunologically unprepared high-income countries in the world: Australia.
@MD Jazz you've posted this without comment. Do you agree with it?
Updating the 7 day trend for today:
7 July: 102.29
8 July: 111.00
9 July: 123.57
10 July: 155.29
11 July: 170.71
12 July: 199.14
13 July: 206.29
14 July: 217.57
15 July: 232.43
16 July: 254.14
17 July: 274.14
18 July: 274.29
19 July: 287.14
20 July: 301.14
21 July: 316.00
22 July: 351.14
That is not good, quite a rise. Unless the case numbers are below 300 tomorrow then it will stay at a similar level.
We gotta get this down. I reckon the shops are still quite full, you can see it in the full car parks outside large shopping centres. As for those who feel a bit off, get tested, and then go shopping, words fail me. You could ask what are they thinking but I think the answer is obvious: they're not.
That Fin Review article is a shocker, basically arguing that human life should be sacrificed on the altar of the economy. 2 words: get stuffed. The economy exists to benefit people, not the other way around.
DS
7 July: 102.29
8 July: 111.00
9 July: 123.57
10 July: 155.29
11 July: 170.71
12 July: 199.14
13 July: 206.29
14 July: 217.57
15 July: 232.43
16 July: 254.14
17 July: 274.14
18 July: 274.29
19 July: 287.14
20 July: 301.14
21 July: 316.00
22 July: 351.14
That is not good, quite a rise. Unless the case numbers are below 300 tomorrow then it will stay at a similar level.
We gotta get this down. I reckon the shops are still quite full, you can see it in the full car parks outside large shopping centres. As for those who feel a bit off, get tested, and then go shopping, words fail me. You could ask what are they thinking but I think the answer is obvious: they're not.
That Fin Review article is a shocker, basically arguing that human life should be sacrificed on the altar of the economy. 2 words: get stuffed. The economy exists to benefit people, not the other way around.
DS
