COVID-19 Round 13 - IT'S NOT A RACE!

How did this not get up as the title?

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Because it fell down instead?

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I’ve never been to Stead. Is it good, apart from the buildings?

You’ve been to paradise?

I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me.

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Straight from the Vic gov playbook

yeah, but Vic govt bad. This is Glad saving NSW.

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The Australian, bringing you quality front page stories like ā€˜what’s going on with Kyle Sandilands’ ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā–  alcoholism’.

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Number of cases not leaked from the 8pm cut off, but maybe they would be within the Commonwealth definition of hot zone and continue be eligible for income support.
A Coptic Orthodox Cathedral listed in exposure sites, unknown whether it was a red zone lockdown.

Re: England

No social distancing
No masks
100 percent capacity at venues of all sizes.
No quarantining for travellers with vaccinations.(returning britons).

From July 19th.

I’m massively jelly.

5m cases. 130k deaths.

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Journalists reporting that a school in Brewarrina has 160 indigenous students of a total of 190, but their investigative skills don’t reach to finding out how many of the 16yo+ indigenous have been vaxed.
it’s still NAIDOC week AFAIK.

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Yeah not of that bit.

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If you set out to purposely create a vaccine resistant variant of COVID, how would you best go about that?

Wouldn’t the best way be to have a large enough portion of the population unvaccinated, so you could let it spread wildly, but at the same time, immunise enough of the population with the vaccine you wanted the virus to become resistant to? Isn’t this a perfect melting pot to create a new vaccine resistant super-strain?

Don’t get me wrong, clearly getting as many vaccinated as possible is the right thing to do, and prioritising the most vulnerable is also very sensible. But instead of the world using these brilliant vaccines to help them crush this virus, most countries are planning to open up to maximum hospital capacity, even if there’s a risk of starting the entire last 18 month cycle from scratch with a new superbug.

So many rich countries have spent so much of their effort trying to minimise economic damage by avoiding lockdowns, and ironically, in the process, damaged their economy even more. And while I hope none of what I have said above comes to pass, if it does, we will have deserved it for placing economy over all else.

My biggest criticism of Australia’s response to the threat from COVID is that elimination was never our goal, we just accidentally achieved it. It has turned out to be beneficial, and should always have been the goal. We educate our brightest minds, give them experience and specialisation, then ask them to advise us about this threat to the world as we know it. Then we consistently ignore the overwhelming advice from the scientific and health communities we’ve asked for expert advice, because we’re all so greedy (not every person, but by and large).

We’re being warned about the dangers of opening up too fast, even now. But we’ll ignore that advice too, of course, because number of deaths today is now the only metric that matters. I’m a pretty optimistic bloke overall, but sometimes I think as a whole, we can be so blind. I hope we happen to stumble out of this mess mostly unscathed, even if it’s not because we’re so brilliant.

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I survived the Hong Kong tube for a year before vaccination - And the HK tube is super busy.

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At the end of the day, some countries have been forced to open up more because their citizens need to put food on the table - Not every country has a social welfare net and even in those countries that do, the support can’t go on forever - Not everyone throughout the world has the luxury of a WFH option - People from many countries don’t trust or listen to their Government and will not be deprived of personal liberties - It seems like some live in Utopia which is uncommon throughout the world.

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Pretty much - gain of function with a lot more hosts and stronger natural selection. The positive is that vaccines have the spike protein and I assume that this is the part of the virus genome that stays constant.

The vaccines we have are great but they’re nowhere near good enough at preventing infection and transmission to eradicate the virus entirely.

Honestly expected the last half of that sentence to be, ā€˜but have you ever tried dying of Covid?’

Sydney lockdown extended