If a vaccine isn't developed it's gonna have to be a game of russian roulette for everyone unfortunately
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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
- Thread starter Tigers of Old
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Just an alternative opinion. And one that should not be dismissed without consideration, she's no lightweight? She points out consequences of our course of action that people like DS dismiss too easily.
A lot will depend on the development of a successful vaccine. If one isn't developed in 12 months what next? And 24 months? 3 years? Are countries like the states going to be in a better position long term in that case?
And what is the long-term strategy if we were to eradictae virus like NZ did? What do the other states do about VIC/NSW? Is the border to be permanently closed to VIC's if we cannot get back to 0?
Its a massively difficult challenge.
Personally I think we have to develop better strategies to protect the vulnerable (eldery/health compromised) whilst still trying to keep people in work. And allocate more resources into mental health support for the young.
15 years knocked off the life expectancy of those who recover.
www.watoday.com.au
But it's "just the flu"??????
COVID-19 deaths wipe out an average 15 years of life, symptoms linger in young
COVID-19 is wiping more than a decade of life expectancy from those who die from the disease, while some survivors suffer ongoing symptoms.
The author has never had an actual job and has spent her entire life in academia.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
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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.
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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.
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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.
Lewd acts, loud music, 'antisocial behaviour' in lockdown hotel
www.abc.net.au
Lewd acts, loud music, 'antisocial behaviour' in lockdown hotel
A traveller who underwent a 14-day mandatory quarantine stay in a Cairns hotel describes it as worse than being locked in a university "frat house".
Yes not just isolated to to Victoria.Lewd acts, loud music, 'antisocial behaviour' in lockdown hotel
Lewd acts, loud music, 'antisocial behaviour' in lockdown hotel
A traveller who underwent a 14-day mandatory quarantine stay in a Cairns hotel describes it as worse than being locked in a university "frat house".
Warning over WA hotel quarantine 'time bomb' as staff say rules repeatedly broken
www.abc.net.au
WA doctors fear repeat of Melbourne crisis as whistleblowers sound alarm on hotel quarantine
Serious concerns emerge about WA's handling of interstate and international arrivals, with repeated rule breaches and fears of an over-reliance on private security contractors in the hotel quarantine system.
www.abc.net.au
There are a lot of issues with quarantine in other places apart from Victoria. In some ways we have been lax but also unlucky here, or others have been lucky.
An ABC reporter going back to Tasmania just described that the bus trip to quarantine was full of people going to the hotel with little prevention measures and then everyone piling off the bus with members of the public just walking through the group as they congregated outside the hotel.
An ABC reporter going back to Tasmania just described that the bus trip to quarantine was full of people going to the hotel with little prevention measures and then everyone piling off the bus with members of the public just walking through the group as they congregated outside the hotel.
One hotel receptionist they interviewed said that there were no security guards at the West Perth hotel where she worked and where FIFO workers from the east had to quarantine. Apparently they are coming and going as they please and any calls to the Police get answered with instructions to call the Dept. of Health who then give instructions to call the Police.Warning over WA hotel quarantine 'time bomb' as staff say rules repeatedly broken
WA doctors fear repeat of Melbourne crisis as whistleblowers sound alarm on hotel quarantine
Serious concerns emerge about WA's handling of interstate and international arrivals, with repeated rule breaches and fears of an over-reliance on private security contractors in the hotel quarantine system.
Incompetence is not just limited to Victoria.
MDJazz, I don't dismiss the economic analysis, I just reckon it is upside down - we do not exist to serve the economy, the economy was created by people to serve people. We know there will be economic impacts but it is the emphasis that analysts often use, that we effectively need to sacrifice people to help the economy.
In any case, as Althom points out, we have no idea of the long term impact of this virus. How anyone can argue for herd immunity when we don't know if you become immune after recovering (evidence is stacking up that immunity is short-lived), we don't know the long term effects even if you recover and we don't know if there will ever be a vaccine. We have spent decades trying to make a vaccine for the common cold, ain't happened yet.
The reality is that, if there are long term effects from this virus and we can't create a vaccine, then the only choice will be to try and eradicate it from the human population. The only way to do that would be quarantine.
DS
In any case, as Althom points out, we have no idea of the long term impact of this virus. How anyone can argue for herd immunity when we don't know if you become immune after recovering (evidence is stacking up that immunity is short-lived), we don't know the long term effects even if you recover and we don't know if there will ever be a vaccine. We have spent decades trying to make a vaccine for the common cold, ain't happened yet.
The reality is that, if there are long term effects from this virus and we can't create a vaccine, then the only choice will be to try and eradicate it from the human population. The only way to do that would be quarantine.
DS
DS I think the point is we may well be saving 1 person to lose another in the long run.
You cannot dismiss the ongoing impacts this will have particularly those still in education right now. If the economy shrinks significantly and disposable incomes decline in real terms then the job pool will decline for a significant portion of time. This will result in higher unemployment rates amongst the young as employers will favour those with experience over those without.
The social payments system will come under increasing stress as tax revenues decline and therefore decisions will need to be made to either increase taxes elsewhere or restrict access to social payments. These all lead to impacts on suicide rates, on funding for the health system etc.
The discussion maybe is not the right time at this stage but when do we have it. The lockdown needs to be designed to have only a temporary impact on the economy, if there is to a much larger and longer impact on the economy then you cannot ignore the future impacts this has both on being in education right now, those coming out of education (and having fewer job opportunities).
These are very real issues that will impact our country for a generation. If you want to ignore them thats fine, but they cannot simply be purely ignored. The government is trying to get that balance right at the moment to ensure that Covid only has a temporary impact on the economy and to therefore protect the long term health of the economy, but the longer this goes on, the more we need to start answering these questions rather than just sweeping them under the carpet like you are trying to do.
Yes but it didn't explode again in WA, hence some of the commentary about how unpredictable this is.
15 years knocked off the life expectancy of those who recover.
But it's "just the flu"??????COVID-19 deaths wipe out an average 15 years of life, symptoms linger in young
COVID-19 is wiping more than a decade of life expectancy from those who die from the disease, while some survivors suffer ongoing symptoms.
Hence why 'living' with it is not an option.
Ummm no. You realise there are lots of diseases out there that we live with daily that have significant ongoing health impacts for people but we haven't eradicated that.
Personally for me, eradication worldwide (with the scale of infection we now have) is nothing but a fallacy. Suppression through a vaccine is the only way we know how to control it, but it will never be eradicated worldwide and we need to stop kidding ourselves that this is a possibility. The arrogance to think we can do that is astounding when we have NEVER been able to eradicate a virus without a vaccine before. I posed the question a week or so ago whether we have ever eradicated a virus before, and all people could come up with was smallpox, so we have eradicated 1. 1. Let that sink in. That was with a vaccine, it is huge arrogance and ignorance to think this can be eradicated worldwide.
Aren't lewd acts and loud music indicators of social behaviour?Lewd acts, loud music, 'antisocial behaviour' in lockdown hotel
Lewd acts, loud music, 'antisocial behaviour' in lockdown hotel
A traveller who underwent a 14-day mandatory quarantine stay in a Cairns hotel describes it as worse than being locked in a university "frat house".
You read it wrong. 15 years knocked off the average lifespan of those that die.15 years knocked off the life expectancy of those who recover.
But it's "just the flu"??????COVID-19 deaths wipe out an average 15 years of life, symptoms linger in young
COVID-19 is wiping more than a decade of life expectancy from those who die from the disease, while some survivors suffer ongoing symptoms.
How would they possibly know what the prospects are of those who recover at this stage?
Thats how I read it too. I'd like to see the data that supports this as it seems very high bearing in mind what we are told. Whilst we haven't been given specific ages of those that have died in Australia, but certainly all the talk in the last few weeks have been the people that have died have been in their 80's and 90's. I'm sure there have been some that have been younger but they have certainly been the more recent ones.
The average life expectancy in Australia is 83.5 years so it seems kind of far fetched that the data can tell us that 15 years is being wiped off life expectancy which allowing for averages would result in a mean average death age of about 66 which from what we are told of who is dying does not appear to be correct.
