Nope. Happy with just AZ
âPoland leading the wayâ with the dumbest â â â â Iâve seen uttered in months.
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If this was at a pharmacy, do you mind sharing how they confirm ID for a kid?
They didnât. I think from memory the only question asked directly to my son was how old are you. They asked me about any medical history of heart issues etc but I didnât have to show his medicare card or anything.
Ok.
Not saying Iâd follow though on this, but Iâm interested in getting an 11.8 YO vaccinated early so we can be able to do more sooner.
If itâs as easy as getting the âkids eat freeâ at Smorgys, then giddy up
I assume the check would be relating to the medicare no. when you book in. If you tried for somebody underage then maybe it will reject the booking. Not sure but thatâs how I would think it works
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Given Pfizer tested a 1/3rd dose on the 5-11 age group successfully, there will be a point where itâs not safe for an under age recipient to receive a full adult dose.
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Last big study on AZ long term effectiveness reported in August. In the next month, there should be good 6 month data on AZ out of the UK.
EDIT: Thereâs another study (September 2021) that shows the effectiveness against hospitalisation or death is a fit model with 83% of initial effectiveness continuing into perpetuity:
For hospitalised or fatal COVID-19 the model best supported by the data was one in which efficacy was the sum of a rapidly waning effect with half-life of 17 (95% CI 9 to 39) days and a time-invariant efficacy of 83%
And this was found for both Pfizer and AZ
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Which is the most important metric.
Yeah I could go on⌠the word diabolical comes to mind, to the point of utterly pointless, at least in the Metro region.
Entirely correct. As some of us have been saying for months, reporting vaccination data as a percentage of eligible persons is as useless as it is misleading.
Alan Kohler: So many pandemic questions, so few answers, so much spin
Australia appears to be the only country in the world manipulating vaccination data to make it look better than it is: We refer to the percentage of over-16s; other countries refer only to the percentage of the total population.
So when the Morrison government says itâs going to force the end of state lockdowns by cutting off financial support at 70 and 80 per cent vaccination, thatâs really 56 and 64 per cent.
And itâs nowhere near enough.
The United States is now 55 per cent fully vaccinated, and cases are running at more than 110,000 a day with nearly 2000 deaths. The UK is 67 per cent vaccinated and has 35,000 cases a day.
Singapore is now 80 per cent (of the total population) vaccinated and is seeing its highest number of cases since the pandemic began â 2909 new cases on Friday and eight new deaths. Schools have had to close again.
The Doherty Institute modelling shows that if we open up at 70 per cent vaccination there will be an overwhelming 23,680 hospital ward admissions of unvaccinated people in the first 180 days, plus hundreds of the vaccinated.
What does that mean for hospitals? What happens if you have an accident or a heart attack? Will there be any point calling an ambulance? And if one eventually arrives, will you get a bed?
Has this been modelled? If not, why not? And if so, letâs see it.
For the first time in the pandemic, Iâm now worried for my family â not so much about getting COVID-19 because weâre all fully vaccinated, but about getting something else, or having an accident, and having to go to hospital.
And we can all forget about elective surgery for a while.
For the first time in any of our lives, Australians might be unable to simply rely on the health system, which is an astonishing thought.
When lockdowns have to end because the federal government refuses to provide financial support for those affected, a third of the population will be unvaccinated and vaccination wonât be mandatory, except for a few industries and international travellers.
We can understand the pressure, especially in Melbourne, the worldâs most locked-down city: Lockdowns and emergency payments canât go on forever.
As Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said: âI put to you, if itâs not 80 per cent doubleâdose vaccinations when we bring to an end the COVID disaster payment and the business support payment, then when is it?â
Itâs not 80 per cent double-dosed, Treasurer, itâs 64 per cent, which is a different, much riskier proposition.
And mandatory vaccination gets some people very upset, as we saw with the recent riots in Melbourne, so you can understand why politicians are dancing around that.
Contact tracers overwhelmed
You might be wondering why the government can even think about opening up at 70 to 80 per cent of adults vaccinated (56 to 64 per cent of everybody) if Doherty says this means tens of thousands of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital.
Itâs because the modelling also says that the hospitalisation numbers can be significantly reduced with âtest, trace, isolate, quarantineâ (TTIQ) measures, so thatâs what the politicians focus on.
But that modelling is based on 30 cases a day; TTIQ simply doesnât work when there are thousands of cases a day, as there are already.
Also, the âIâ in TTIQ â isolate â is almost as damaging economically as lockdowns, with businesses including supermarkets having to close for lack of available staff.
If there are close to 900,000 infections in the first 180 days after opening up at 70 per cent, as the Doherty modelling indicates, there would be so many people isolating that it would be the same as a full lockdown and the economy would stop.
And, of course, there would be no financial support from the government for businesses whose staff are at home isolating.
The one big positive is that the rate of vaccination has increased a lot, including for 12 to 15-year-olds, although weâre still well behind the rest of the world.
But beyond that, Australiaâs pandemic response has become a mess of political spin and confusion.
Legal matters unaddressed
That includes the question of mandatory vaccination.
The federal government is adamant that vaccination is free and voluntary and that wonât change ⌠except for travellers, that is, who must show an International COVID-19 Vaccine Certificate, and federal aged-care workers.
Last week the Victorian government issued an amazing list of 118 âessential workersâ who must be vaccinated by October 15 to go to work.
It covers just about everybody except baristas, who are arguably essential workers dealing closely with the public.
The rest of the country is mandating vaccination for health workers, plus a few others.
New South Wales has added churchgoers, but that might change once the church-going Dominic Perrottet becomes Premier this week.
There is no coherent national plan for who needs to be vaccinated, nor any guidance for businesses and event managers about what to do.
Will they be covered by public liability insurance and WorkSafe if they allow unvaccinated customers and staff onto the premises?
What are the employment law and privacy issues around mandatory vaccination?
The basic principle of employment law in Australia is that directions to staff must be both lawful and reasonable, but what is reasonable?
And can an employee who catches COVID-19 sue her employer for not having proper ventilation, or not requiring masks and distancing?
So many questions, so few answers, so much spin.
Alan Kohler writes twice a week for The New Daily . He is also editor in chief of Eureka Report and finance presenter on ABC news
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Lots of stats stuff in this link
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When you also look at the Doherty modelling, not only was the starting point 30 people, which weâve been told wonât make much difference, but itâs also Delta, which weâve been told wonât fundamentally change the results of the model. I canât wrap my head around that last one, but letâs assume that is also correct. They know more than I do.
What worries me with the modelling is that it counts on contact tracing to be as effective at thousands of cases a day, and do a large chunk of the dampening of spread, and vaccination to do a much smaller amount of the dampening of spread. And weâre still modelling near a million cases in the first 3 months? How will contact tracing have a large dampening effect with so many cases? Even with current case loads, contact tracing is not having nearly the dampening effect it would at 30 cases a day. Not. Even. Close.
So if weâre looking at near a million cases in 3 months with all these unlikely scenarios holding true, how many cases are we looking at if any of them donât? It sounds rather like weâre going to be left with 2 choices. Accept much higher deaths for a few months, or⌠lock down again within weeks of opening up.
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Interesting to note the date the data is taken from.
Oct 3 Medicare info.
So if someone like @brunz has had his second dose of vaccine, but it hasnât made its way to Medicare yet, he is yet to be counted in the second dose figures.
Iâd also be interested to know whether our population figures are accurate. We know there is an anomaly of city living people.
What of those that have passed away since the census? Or those that passed away between their first and second dose.
It shouldnât make too much of a difference, but just another stat geek thing to consider.
The Feds didnât say that.
This is what they said:
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The one and only reason that the other states have lower death counts than Victoria is the lockown. We stood in front of that bullet and protected the rest of the country, but I doubt they are overly aware of the sacrifice Victoria made for them.
Sydney showed very clearly what the impact on the rest of the country is by not locking down hard and early. Iâm sure NZ is very thankful for Gladys trusting her population to not disobey government suggestions.
The lockdown has sucked. But those low death counts in the other states are largely the result of Victoriaâs 2020 lockdown acheiving elimination.
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By memory, they said it only sets us back a few weeks on the modelling.
Was there more that was said?
@Aceman I know Iâm chipping in well after the conversation moved on, but the main reason Victorians are annoyed about NSWâs handling of the outbreak is the first few weeks. They tried to be clever, using the least intrusive measures of any state in the country. SA, WA, NT, QLD all used the snap lockdown strategy successfully. NSW decided to do something different for what looked like a mixture of pride and politics and it backfired. For those of us watching in Victoria, we could see exactly what was about to happen and the anger just grew as our predictions turned out to be spot on.
Now thereâs a good chance that the spread wouldnât have been contained, even if theyâd followed the same protocols as the rest of the country, but itâs incredibly galling that they didnât try.
The other thing that â â â â â â Melbournians off is the lack of effective control on movement out of Sydney. It was a proven strategy that had prevented spread out of Melbourne in 2020, but Gladys point blank refused to do it. Again, itâs fairly likely that embers would have jumped the border, but good chance that it would have taken more time to happen.
What stuffed Melbourne was 3 different groups travelling down from Sydney illegally in the same short period of time. That seeded a broad range of sites and left the contact tracers unable to find the source of the various outbreaks. Thatâs something that a ring of steel around Sydney should have prevented, or at least reduced the number of incurisons.
Youâre spot on that once things got going that both states have done very similar things, both have by and large done a good job considering the circumstances. But that attitude by Vic towards NSW has a fairly well reasoned foundation.
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Change of cast coming up for Days of Our Lives.
Jeanette is moving to Government House by the end of the month.
She will be replaced by Krispin Hajkowicz
Who knows which actors will appear for NSW.
I wouldâve thought that after Brooke finished marrying Ridge for the 8th time, then moved onto 10 other cast members that a change was needed.
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