Coronavirus (COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2) outbreak discussion

[Belli]

An article analysing Covid v Flu in Australia. I found it a good read so decided to post the link in case others were interested.

Flu may be back, but COVID is far from over. How do they compare?

This winter we’re seeing high rates of COVID and the re-emergence of influenza. So how do they compare, in terms of transmissibility and deadliness?

theconversation.com

 

[sptrawler]

As I said, we need a change of Govt to get things done, that the previous Govt couldn't.
The media aren't making a huge song and dance about every issue, which is good, the situation can't go on forever IMO.

Treasurer defends end of free RAT scheme​

The federal treasurer has defended scrapping pandemic leave payments and free rapid antigen tests for concession card holders despite rising COVID-19 case numbers.

As a cruise ship with more than 100 positive COVID-19 cases on board docked in Sydney on Wednesday, Jim Chalmers said the government could not afford to continue the schemes due to budget pressures.

 

[moXJO]

As I said, we need a change of Govt to get things done, that the previous Govt couldn't.
The media aren't making a huge song and dance about every issue, which is good, the situation can't go on forever IMO.

Treasurer defends end of free RAT scheme​

The federal treasurer has defended scrapping pandemic leave payments and free rapid antigen tests for concession card holders despite rising COVID-19 case numbers.

As a cruise ship with more than 100 positive COVID-19 cases on board docked in Sydney on Wednesday, Jim Chalmers said the government could not afford to continue the schemes due to budget pressures.

Could you imagine the screaming if Morrison said this.

 

[sptrawler]

Yes, the difference now is, the media narrative will change.
From the Govt isn't doing enough, to the Govt has to be fiscally responsible and have no option but to roll back the spending and the masses go "oh yes of course, whatever you say".?
As I said pre election, labor have to get in, to bring in changes that the Coalition can't, this is only the first of many IMO.
The summit will be an eye opener IMO, a back scratching fest of mammoth proportions.

Pandemic spending must be wound back to fix the budget

The government is right not to extend pandemic leave payments for workers with COVID-19.

www.smh.com.au

From the article:
Like any incoming leader, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese understandably wants to focus on a forward-looking agenda but the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet a matter of history.
The challenges of managing the pandemic have resurfaced this week as public health experts, business groups and members of Albanese’s own party question federal Labor’s decision not to extend pandemic leave payments of $750 for certain workers with COVID-19, as well as a scheme for free rapid antigen tests for pensioners.

 

[JohnDe]

‘There’s cumulative damage each time you get infected’​

The hope of governments that vaccination combined with prior infection would would spell the end of large Covid pandemic waves has been dashed. But there’s a balance we have not yet found.

More than 2½ years into the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no end in sight.
The virus is adapting with alarming speed, creating ever-larger waves of infection with each new ultra-transmissible variant. The hope of governments that vaccination combined with prior infection would result in broad immune protection that would spell the end of large pandemic waves has been dashed by the Omicron subvariants’ ability to evade immunity, with reinfections now commonplace.

This is not where Australia hoped it would be eight months after beginning to phase out lockdowns and mandatory restrictions. Our world-leading double-dose vaccination rates of above 95 per cent gave a measure of confidence to political and health leaders that the country would be able to open up while avoiding the many millions of infections and wide-scale death experienced by other nations. The focus was on protecting the vulnerable through vaccination and limiting severe disease. Few counted on almost nine million infections and 8000 deaths in just the first 6½ months of this year.

Since the arrival of Omicron’s first iteration, BA.1, late last year, subvariants have emerged one after the other. But it was with the arrival of BA.5 three months ago that it began to become clear that community-wide immunity was not about to stop the pandemic in its tracks. Numerous studies have confirmed that BA.5 escapes antibody responses among both people who had previous Covid-19 infection and those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted. The reduction in the neutralising antibody response to vaccination and infection against BA.5 has been estimated to be three to fourfold lower compared with BA.1, which was already substantially less than the antibody response to the original virus strain. Consequently, people can be reinfected within weeks of contracting Covid-19.

s long as new variants can evade immunity and reinfect those who have already had Covid and been vaccinated, fresh pandemic waves will continue. It is now clear that vaccination cannot be our sole answer to reducing the burden of disease during a pandemic that continues to rage.

“We had been led to believe in Australia that Covid is in the rearview mirror, that we’ve got it solved, and that to a large extent that we can get on with life,” Burnet Institute director and chief executive Brendan Crabb says. “But at the moment it’s not obvious that there’s an end in sight, or certainly not around the corner with the frequency of these Omicron variants, their capacity to evade prior immunity and the unfortunate likelihood there’s cumulative damage each time you get infected.

“We have a serious ongoing problem here. It runs the risk of breaking our healthcare system, but our society more generally, with absenteeism and illness. Much of the world is still unvaccinated, which is still where a lot of really worrying new variants might emerge. So for the moment the bad news is that what we’ve been experiencing now consistently for the past seven months is looking like continuing for the foreseeable future.

“The good news is there’s plenty we can do about it, way short of anything draconian.”

The evolutionary arms race that is now unfolding between fast-adapting variants versus periodically boosted human vaccine immunity was unexpected two years ago, University of Queensland virologist Ian Mackay says.

“The biggest thing is that we can’t predict what’s going to happen next,” he says.

“It’s likely to be a scenario like the flu, where we just keep getting different mutations and we have to kind of keep up with our vaccines. It is seeming that way at the moment. And I think that surprises a few virologists because we tended to think coronaviruses weren’t quite as variable as the flu. We thought this virus would have settled down, but it just does seem to be throwing out new variants that are escaping immunity, and so it’s managing to continue to spread very effectively. I think if the virus just continues to evade immunity as it is now, we’re going to see illness continue.”

During this winter Omicron wave, Australia has been recording what has now risen to more than 30,000 infections a day and hospitalisations have risen to around 4600. However, intensive care unit admissions are well down – about a third of what they were in January despite a similar number of hospitalisations.

Hospitalisations are predicted to peak in a couple of weeks at similar levels to January of around 5500 a day. The death rate for Omicron is just 0.1 per cent of cases, similar to the fatality rate of the flu, an enormous reduction from the average 3 per cent case fatality rate in 2020. Australia still has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19 in the OECD. Despite this, in 2020 Covid-19 had overtaken coronary artery disease as the nation’s biggest killer.

The seven-day average of deaths for the past several few months has been sitting at about 45 deaths a day.

“I guess the question still is, are we happy with that level of death, because if we’re not, we should be doing more to try and prevent as much transmission as we can,” Mackay says. “It comes down to us really needing to have a conversation about what we’re willing to put up with. We absolutely could prevent some of the harm that’s happening now.”

Late last year, after presiding over months of strict lockdowns, the premiers – and in particular NSW’s Dominic Perrottet – sent strong messages on opening up that life needed to get back to normal, especially for the sake of small businesses and the economy.

At the same time, a narrative took hold that the Omicron strain was highly infectious but generally caused mild disease. Omicron does cause less severe disease than Delta but it still makes some people very sick.

When the strain was emerging, Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said it would be a “very good Christmas present” if Omicron was more transmissible but milder.

Australians appear to have taken the lead of political leaders, with many in the community behaving as if the virus does not exist. Barely a mask can be seen in packed cinemas. Even in the few places that masks are mandatory, such as public transport, it appears that at least half of people no longer wear them.

But at the same time the high rate of deaths does concern people, says Essential Media director Peter Lewis, who conducted a recent poll on Covid-19 that showed only 4 per cent of Australians were comfortable with a yearly death rate from the virus of 10,000, which we are quickly approaching.

Most respondents to the poll agreed that hospitals were having to deal with too many Covid-19 patients and supported the reintroduction of masks.

Yet at the same time, 55 per cent of people thought we needed to “get on with life and treat Covid like another form of flu”.

“It feels to me we’re in a bit of a dreamlike state between those two extremes,” Lewis says.

“It feels like people are accepting both propositions at the same time that they don’t want deaths, and they want action. But they also want to get back to life as soon as possible and treat the virus like another form of flu. So we’re holding two contradictory principles at the same time.”

It is amid this contradictory public sentiment that the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee – which is made up of all the states’ chief health officers – issued a statement a week ago that set out a new direction in disease mitigation.

Increasing the rate of third and fourth vaccination doses was top of its action plan. But, importantly, it also recommended people wear masks in crowded indoor settings, emphasised the importance of ventilation and urged businesses to “consider the feasibility of some employees working from home and support employees to take leave when sick”.

“The AHPPC reiterates the shared responsibility of individuals, employers and governments in minimising the impact of Covid-19,” the statement says.

“There are a range of health behaviours all Australians can undertake to reduce the transmission of Covid-19, protect the community, in particular those most at risk, and protect our health system and essential services.”

Crabb says the policy statement represents an important acknowledgment that a suite of public health measures to supplement vaccination will be necessary to reduce the burden of disease as pandemic waves continue.

“The statement is a vastly improved advice document,” says Crabb. “We’ve got to focus on transmission; we have to switch our strategy to say actually, the number of cases does matter. That’s not been our position thus far, our position has been the number of cases basically don’t matter, we’re going to protect the vulnerable. But the number of cases do matter. We have to stem the tide or else everyone suffers.

“Our health system suffers, our businesses suffer.”

Yet despite the statement being agreed to by all CHOs, the only state government to have come out publicly to adopt the AHPPC’s recommendations as state policy this week has been Victoria (which rejected Victorian CHO Brett Sutton’s recommendation for mask mandates in some settings). Queensland this week has called for mask-wearing. Federal Health Minister Mark Butler’s main focus in the past two weeks has been on expanding eligibility for fourth boosters and antivirals.

“This is a really important issue for Australia, but there has been a lack of effective selling of the AHPPC’s message from the Prime Minister down,” Crabb says.

“Are the leaders really buying into this or not? Anthony Albanese, Dan Andrews, Dominic Perrottet, they’re very good at this – they should be saying yes, we’ve got a problem, but we can solve it. It is more than vaccines, but we can solve it.”

NATASHA ROBINSON HEALTH EDITOR

 

[wayneL]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but masks don't work (and are an environmental disaster)

The astonishing data that proves masks don't work

Masks are worn everywhere in Singapore and Kiwis are forced to wear masks in public including shopping malls. But both have higher Covid cases per million than Australia.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[JohnDe]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but masks don't work (and are an environmental disaster)

The astonishing data that proves masks don't work

Masks are worn everywhere in Singapore and Kiwis are forced to wear masks in public including shopping malls. But both have higher Covid cases per million than Australia.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Maybe it is time for a new record.

For every tabloid article telling us that 'masks don't work' there are 10 medical reports describing why and how they work.

"Can face masks help slow the spread of the virus that causes coronavirus disease? Yes. Face masks combined with other preventive measures, such as getting vaccinated, frequent hand-washing and physical distancing, can help slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19."​

Can face masks protect against COVID-19?

Face masks can help slow the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Learn about mask types, which masks to use and how to use them.

www.mayoclinic.org

 

[wayneL]

Maybe it is time for a new record.

For every tabloid article telling us that 'masks don't work' there are 10 medical reports describing why and how they work.

"Can face masks help slow the spread of the virus that causes coronavirus disease? Yes. Face masks combined with other preventive measures, such as getting vaccinated, frequent hand-washing and physical distancing, can help slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19."​

Can face masks protect against COVID-19?

Face masks can help slow the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Learn about mask types, which masks to use and how to use them.

www.mayoclinic.org

The numbers don't lie.

 

[JohnDe]

".. one observational study has directly analyzed the impact of mask use in the community on COVID-19 transmission. The study looked at the reduction of secondary transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Beijing households by face mask use (10). It found that face masks were 79% effective in preventing transmission, if they were used by all household members prior to symptoms occurring. .."​

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014564118

Conclusion​

Our review of the literature offers evidence in favor of widespread mask use as source control to reduce community transmission:​

​

Nonmedical masks use materials that obstruct particles of the necessary size; people are most infectious in the initial period postinfection, where it is common to have few or no symptoms (45, 46, 141); nonmedical masks have been effective in reducing transmission of respiratory viruses; and places and time periods where mask usage is required or widespread have shown substantially lower community transmission.​

​

The available evidence suggests that near-universal adoption of nonmedical masks when out in public, in combination with complementary public health measures, could successfully reduce Re to below 1, thereby reducing community spread if such measures are sustained. Economic analysis suggests that mask wearing mandates could add 1 trillion dollars to the US GDP (32, 34).​

​

Models suggest that public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high (39). We recommend that mask use requirements are implemented by governments, or, when governments do not, by organizations that provide public-facing services. Such mandates must be accompanied by measures to ensure access to masks, possibly including distribution and rationing mechanisms so that they do not become discriminatory. Given the value of the source control principle, especially for presymptomatic people, it is not sufficient for only employees to wear masks; customers must wear masks as well.....​

 

[wayneL]

Beijing eh?

 

[JohnDe]

Beijing eh?

An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19

Edited by Lauren Ancel Meyers, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Nils C. Stenseth

The available evidence suggests that near-universal adoption of nonmedical masks when out in public, in combination with complementary public health measures, could successfully reduce Re to below 1, thereby reducing community spread if such measures are sustained.

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[noirua]

 

[wayneL]

FWIW

 

[SirRumpole]

The numbers don't lie.

That depends on whose numbers they are.

Personally I chose to wear a mask in crowded places like shopping centres and use the hand wash when I leave.

Being an airborne virus these measures must help to an extent, so far I haven't yet been infected (touch wood).

If the medical evidence says these measures help, why should we not take their advice over one of Rupert's rags opinions ?

 

[Macquack]

That depends on whose numbers they are.

Personally I chose to wear a mask in crowded places like shopping centres and use the hand wash when I leave.

Being an airborne virus these measures must help to an extent, so far I haven't yet been infected (touch wood).

If the medical evidence says these measures help, why should we not take their advice over one of Rupert's rags opinions ?

Anti-vaxxers are bullet-proof. They don't need the Covid vaccinnes, so why the f would they need a mask.

 

[macca]

Rather pleasing to see that the ICUs are not under any pressure from the latest wave, perhaps the natural immunity thing is starting to happen.

In our family everyone has had Covid, all vaxed to max, except me and the Missus, we ain't vaxed and we are not sure if we have had it or not. We have had a couple of days when we fitted the symptoms but tested negative on the RATs

We do do this though, each evening we get sniffing the funny stuff

Hospital Study Shows that Covid-19 Can be Prevented with Hydrogen Peroxide

Hospital Study Shows that Covid-19 Can be Prevented with Hydrogen Peroxide

This article may be...

orthomolecular.activehosted.com

 

[DB008]

I think we are probably at strain BA.7 and BA.8 already circulating in the population worldwide, because the results always lag the tests.

There's a new COVID-19 Omicron subvariant, so what is BA.2.75 and​

why are some people calling it 'Centaurus'?​

Since the COVID-19 pandemic first began, many have become desensitised to these next few words:​

​

There's a new Omicron subvariant.​

​

BA.2.75 was first detected in India in early May. Since then, it's been found in Europe and the United States.​

​

The chief scientist with the World Health Organization (WHO), Soumya Swaminathan, said BA.2.75 appeared to have mutated in a way that could indicate "major immune escape".​

​

However, Dr Swaminathan says there isn't enough data to know how severe its impact will be.​

​

Here's what we know so far:​

​

What is the BA.2.75 subvariant?​

​

Adelaide epidemiologist Adrian Esterman says it's "another child of BA.2".​

​

"The fact is, there's no research that shows BA.2.75 is more transmissible or more serious," Professor Esterman said.​

​

"BA.2.75 has more mutations than BA.5. And that's what has researchers a little bit worried."​

In a video posted to the WHO's Twitter account, Dr Swaminathan said BA.2.75 had "not yet officially been named", but that some people were "referring to it as BA.2.75".​

​

"There are still limited sequences available to analyse, but this subvariant seems to have a few mutations on the receptor binding domain of the spike protein, a key part of the virus that attaches itself to the human receptor," she said.​

​

"It's still too early to know if this subvariant has properties of additional immune invasion, or of being more clinically severe."​

​

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07...vid-19-subvariant-ba-2-75-centaurus/101258198​

.

 

[moXJO]

Anti-vaxxers are bullet-proof. They don't need the Covid vaccinnes, so why the f would they need a mask.

Viruses pass through the majority of masks. Wearing them in outdoor settings, well you might as well wear a stack hat just in case you trip over as well.

They stop the distance it can go when breathing out, or sneezing. N95 will protect so long as proper handling/measures are taken. But no one seems to know how to use them properly. So not really. If people want to wear them go right ahead.

Rather pleasing to see that the ICUs are not under any pressure from the latest wave, perhaps the natural immunity thing is starting to happen.

In our family everyone has had Covid, all vaxed to max, except me and the Missus, we ain't vaxed and we are not sure if we have had it or not. We have had a couple of days when we fitted the symptoms but tested negative on the RATs

We do do this though, each evening we get sniffing the funny stuff

Hospital Study Shows that Covid-19 Can be Prevented with Hydrogen Peroxide

Hospital Study Shows that Covid-19 Can be Prevented with Hydrogen Peroxide

This article may be...

orthomolecular.activehosted.com

Interesting thing I'm seeing, nothing scientific about it though. The guys that were antivax or 2 shots are not getting it as badly as 4 shots.

There was some study about it triggering the immune system negatively for 8 months or something that I skimmed past somewhere.

 

[macca]

Viruses pass through the majority of masks. Wearing them in outdoor settings, well you might as well wear a stack hat just in case you trip over as well.

They stop the distance it can go when breathing out, or sneezing. N95 will protect so long as proper handling/measures are taken. But no one seems to know how to use them properly. So not really. If people want to wear them go right ahead.



Interesting thing I'm seeing, nothing scientific about it though. The guys that were antivax or 2 shots are not getting it as badly as 4 shots.

There was some study about it triggering the immune system negatively for 8 months or something that I skimmed past somewhere.

This is a real controversial topic in some places, I have seen figures from OS where testing shows that the Vax is better for months 1and 2, months 3-4 are much the same as no Vax, after that you better off not to be vaxed.

This seems to be supported by the decrease in the time between shots, originally once a year, then 6 months, then 4 months, now 3 months......... obviously we need a better vax

The report said that for the the MRna Vax to work it has to suppress our bodies T cells and killer cells, which means the bodies defences are part way turned off, so any other sickness gets a free run when attacking us. (colds and flu ?)

Very worrying aspect is that the Vax does effect the endocrine system and if our main defences against cancer are turned off or damaged then things like breast and prostate cancer may run amok.

In the leaked data from the DOD in the USA, breast cancers were up 300% in a little over a year.

This was later claimed to be a PC error but as these very scary details were released by 3 DOD Doctors it would seem reasonable to think they would know if it was true.

I read one of the head Medicos in Oz saying we will just have to learn to live with Covid, around here 90% are doing just that.

5% masks, still a bit of social distancing and not much club and pub time but Vax rates have plummeted because a huge % have had Omicron so see no reason to Vax or boost

 

[IFocus]

1000 cases in hospital 30 in ICU QLD.

And masks don't work?

Then for gods sake tell the medical profession to stop wearing them what would they know?