Corona virus, Port and the AFL.

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Forzaport said:
I’m starting to see more and more stories about there being an unusual drop off in heart attacks and pneumonia cases as these cases are now COVID-19 cases (patients may also be delaying seeking treatment due to fear of the virus leading to poorer health outcomes). This seriously skews the data as patients have some very consequential co-morbidities that is getting lost in the COVID-19 reporting. It helps to explain why COVID-19’s impact is greater in older people as they tend to have underlying age related issues.

There’s also the issue of clinical coding. It looks like hospitals are incentivised to code for COVID-19 as there is more funding readily available. Bottom line is that the number of COVID-19 hospitalisations may not be representative of actual COVID-19 cases due to clinical coding.


www.nytimes.com

Where Have All the Heart Attacks Gone? (Published 2020)

Except for treating Covid-19, many hospitals seem to be eerily quiet.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Be warned, you have most likely been dubbed a member of the subversive and delusional "jUsT tHe flU" crowd!
 
raptalia said:
Just heard a woman on the ABC arguing for international students to be given JobKeeper. The scheme we have is going to cost $130 billion and this silly cow wants to spend billions more on people who are not even Australian citizens.
Click to expand...
If I were the ALP (and hence the ABC) I'd be ensuring that this thing finishes up costing the government so much money that I couldn't lose the next election. This story doesn't surprise me in the slightest. You'll see ALP amendments adding to the cost left right and centre...
 
Powerage said:
Be warned, you have most likely been dubbed a member of the subversive and delusional "jUsT tHe flU" crowd!
Click to expand...

Should have perhaps kept reading the thread before posting that.
 

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Powerage said:
Be warned, you have most likely been dubbed a member of the subversive and delusional "jUsT tHe flU" crowd!
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Totally just the flu


 
Powerage said:
Oh, you always do? I can't see that in the Port Adelaide Posting Guidelines.

Anyway, why?
Click to expand...

Because you would have seen that Forzaport wasn't labelled as you suggested and a respectful discussion was had that enlightened and informed anyone who read it.

You seem to be one of those that's put your flag in the contrarian camp and attack anyone that challenges you.

Why is that?
 
Couple of stories on today's PBS Newshour caught my interest. Will put them in separate posts.

Bill Gates was interviewed for 12 minutes talks about stuff he has been doing with his foundation for over 15 years in his Global Health Initiative and has warned of a pandemic coming since early last decade.

Also made a good point people need to consider. If people say you have to factor in that less cardio deaths and other deaths aren't being reported, and just counted as virus deaths, then what about deaths that have occured because resources have been transferred to fight the virus and both patient care and research for cures aren't being done and they now pass away because they aren't being attended to.

Judy Woodruff:
At a time when everyone is looking to understand the scope of the pandemic and how to minimize the threat, one of the best informed voices is that of businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates. The co-founder of Microsoft has spent the last few decades focused, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on improving global health, including reducing the spread of infectious diseases. We spoke earlier this evening.

Bill Gates, thank you very much for joining us. You were one of the prescient few years ago who said that an infectious disease outbreak was coming that could kill millions of people.
How is what is happening now different from what you expected?

Bill Gates:
Well, sadly, I would say that the economic damage is much greater.
I put $3 trillion for a respiratory virus spreading around the globe. And, you know, clearly we're going to go well beyond that. You know, the whole goal of speaking out then wasn't to be able to say, I told you so when it happened. Rather, it was to make sure we did the right thing, so that diagnostics would come out right away, the timeline for a vaccine would be very short.

And, sadly, not many of those things were done. So now we're scrambling to come up with therapeutics, scrambling to try and figure out how to get this vaccine made. But — people are rising to the occasion, but it's a very bad situation.


Talk about returning to "normalcy". Says squarely that until a vaccine is found large gatherings will be banned. So footy with no crowds will be the norm if it comes back before a vaccine.

Judy Woodruff:
But when you talk about returning to some semblance of normal, what are we saying that looks like? I mean, you mentioned keeping up social distancing. What could life look like, say, six months, a year from now?
There's still some of these — some of these steps we're taking now, they would remain in effect?

Bill Gates:
Yes. I'm working to write about that.
The closest model today is, you look at China. They are sending people back to work, but they're wearing masks. They're checking temperatures. They're not doing large sporting events. And so they have been able to avoid a large rebound.

There are countries like Sweden that aren't locking down quite as much and seeing, OK, do their numbers go up? If so, can you trace back, which are the activities that are causing that? We need to learn from all the countries. Our partner, international Health Metrics and Evaluation, is looking at forecasts, where they compatriot different countries. And then that's helping us to understand, OK, which policies in which countries seem to be working?
And so we will be far closer to normal once we get those case numbers down, but there will be some things where the benefit to the risk, like large public gatherings, may not resume until broad vaccination has taken place.

Judy Woodruff:
Meaning conventions, gathering — when you say large public gatherings, over 10 people?

Bill Gates:
Yes, well, we will have to figure out how to draw that threshold. And we may even understand age-specific risk at that point. And so having a classroom with 30 young people in it may be just fine, because their role in transmitting the disease, we will understand in the next month or so. It may be so limited that you're far more liberal with young people getting together than you would be with a general-age audience.


Allocation of resources to Covid-19 means other issues are being ignored.

Judy Woodruff:
And, finally, a personal question.
You certainly know this issue better than most anybody else, and yet it has shaken a lot of people. It has caused people who are normally, you know, together in their lives to be quite rattled. How do you think — how do you think you have been affected by this?

Bill Gates:
Well, I'm deeply shaken.
I — you know, every day, I'm like, are we really in this situation? Wow. You know, there are things like polio eradication that, you know, was — we were — we felt like we're making progress on that. This is going to be an unbelievable setback for that.

You know, people are taking the resources that are funded for that and shifting them to this priority. So, you know, who knows where we will be on those other efforts?

We have some great HIV breakthrough drugs that we want to get out into trials. Those trials aren't happening. In fact, the top people who were going to work on that are — have been reassigned to work on the coronavirus vaccine.

So, the foundation is scrambling, because it has a lot of the key understandings and relationships to accelerate some of these solutions. But our normal work is suffering. And you just look at people who are isolated at home or, you know, overcrowded in their home, or kids who are going to lose three months of learning, the amount of pain involved in this thing is gigantic. And, you know, so it's deeply troubling, but we need to still act to minimize all of that.


 
I rarely use the word hero, as the media has dulled my acceptance of it they way they cheaply label anyone and anything as a hero or heroic.

But these couple of Emergency Medical Technicians in New York, PBS spoke to, the guys and gals we call ambos are bloody heroic in my eyes. Paid a pissy $37,000 a year salary, have to work another job to survive, working non stop, WITH NO HEALTH CARE, know they will probably get infected, but just carrying on and doing their job.

Judy Woodruff:
New York does remain the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. Doctors, nurses, and medical teams who are in that state are bearing the brunt of a surge of seriously ill patients. William Brangham recently spoke with two who are on the front line about their work.

William Brangham:
Adam Bliden is an EMT, an emergency medical technician, in Rockland County, about 25 miles outside New York.
Same with Pearse Matthews. They both drive ambulances, responding to 911 calls across the county. Like so many places in New York right now, coronavirus has become all-consuming. I spoke to the two of them the other day.

As a percentage of the calls you're getting now, how many would you assume are coronavirus cases?

Pearse Matthews:
A hundred percent.

William Brangham:
A hundred percent?
Pearse Matthews:
A hundred percent.
Adam Bliden:
Yes.
The rarity of getting a regular emergency, which sounds crazy, a regular emergency, where someone needs our help right away, and we can do something, in 10 calls, you may have one.
Almost — yes, so it's almost 100 percent are either confirmed cases or suspected cases.

William Brangham:
That has got to be — I don't want to put words in your mouth, — but nerve-wracking? Like, if every person you possibly interact with, sometimes very, very close, if you're worried that person has coronavirus, that's got to be, I mean, mentally exhausting.

Adam Bliden:
It is. It is, that coupled with the call volume going up drastically, and in most cases more than doubling your call volume every day. So, a shift that you might see, you know, eight patients on, you're getting called to 16 to 20 different houses. We're going from 100 calls a week to 200 and 250. It's — it's intense. It's really intense.

Pearse Matthews:
It's scary. And I would say a better word to use is terrifying, especially when you don't believe you have the correct PPE to use.
And it's scary. We're scared just as much as the regular person. But, again, we have to do this job. We signed up for this. This is what we do for a living. And EMS personnel and hospital personnel are proud to do it.
But it's very scary. It's not that they're very infectious. That is obviously the case, that COVID is an infectious disease. But it's also that the people that we're seeing may not live. And as EMS and health care workers, we're used to trying to do our best to save lives. So, it's emotionally taxing, I think, on the health care personnel.

Adam Bliden:
Last week, me specifically, there were at least three patients who I'd seen earlier in the week who I came back to work a couple days later and found out they had passed away. I was just there. How quickly was that that she went from being alive to not alive anymore, or he went alive to not being alive?

William Brangham:
That's got to make the statistics that we see — these numbers and cases going up every day, we see them as bar charts, but, for you guys, it seems obviously a lot more visceral.

Adam Bliden:
Yes, it's not a chart. It's not a graph. It's a person who you saw, who you touched, who you spoke to. And now they're not. Now they're — you know, sadly, they have gone on to become a statistic.
That's — that's one of the harder parts of this, for sure.

Pearse Matthews:
Last night, I got off at 2:00 a.m. I went to a friend's house to evaluate his father, who is bed-ridden, who was diagnosed with pneumonia.
I cried from the station to his house, and in front of his house for probably about two additional minutes, because I — you know, during my shift — I worked for 24 hours straight. I couldn't really — you know, I couldn't really have emotions, because I was working.
You know, we have to do our job. We all have to do our job. We signed up for this. This is what we have to do. We have to treat these patients, and make sure everything's OK, and treat the community.
And after the end of our — my shift, I broke down. I cried, you know, just thinking about everything that I had to see, the patients that I knew probably would not make it.

Adam Bliden:
On top of that, we — we have the fear: Have I been exposed? You know, am I going to give it to someone else?
All of us — you ask anyone in emergency services, we're all immortal. You can't kill us. And now it's getting closer to home, that we need to start considering our own health as well.
I think, yesterday, we lost — they were retired guys, but there were two firefighters who passed away yesterday from this. Those are guys who gave their whole life to their fire departments. So it's getting closer and closer to home for all of us. It's no longer, you know, if we're going to be exposed. That's gone. We're all going to be exposed. We don't know when.

William Brangham:
On top of the stresses of the job, of worrying whether they themselves might get sick, many EMTs also have to work for low pay and few benefits.

Adam Bliden:
The average salary for an EMT in New York state, doing what we're doing through all of this, is about $37,000 a year.

William Brangham:
Wow.

Adam Bliden:
Yes.
Right now, both Pearse and I, everyone who's doing what we're doing, we're juggling, usually, it's two or three jobs just to keep working, so we can pay our bills.We do this because we love it. Everyone knows there's no money in it. But, right now, I'm doing all of this with no health insurance.

William Brangham:
No health insurance?

Adam Bliden:
No health insurance.

William Brangham:
How — how is that possible…

Adam Bliden:
I…
William Brangham:
… it doesn't come through the job?
Adam Bliden:
The job doesn't offer it. And our affordable marketplaces aren't very affordable.
If I get sick and, OK, I go get tested positive, I can't go to the hospital. Literally, life or death is what's going to put me in the hospital. It's scary. And, you know, people come out, and they show us their support. And I love it. I love — I have eaten so much pizza in the last two weeks. It's been great.
(LAUGHTER)

Adam Bliden:
I don't need pizza. I need to be able to pay my bills. I need to be able to work a 40-hour workweek, and live like a normal human being.

William Brangham:
I know you guys have probably seen all these videos of people clapping out when there's a hospital shift rotating out. And, I mean, I hope you know that there is — everybody out there does on some level appreciate how crucial you all are to keeping all of us safe.

Pearse Matthews:
I appreciate you saying that.
And it's tremendous support. And we need it, because it's not easy. It's really not easy. You know, we're scared also. The general public is scared about this virus, and we are too. But we also know that this is our job. And we love to do this. This is something that you have to have passion for helping people, and on the medical side, just making sure — fixing people and making sure they're OK is something that we like to do. We love to do it.
So it makes — it makes us feel really good when we feel the support from the regular people and also from other agencies, like police and fire. I appreciate that a lot.

 
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Forzaport said:
Totally just the flu


Click to expand...


To clarify, everyone who questioned the accuracy of Covid-19 data or comorbidity data was lumped into the just the flu club by sobrave despite noone actually even suggesting that it was such.

"Just the flu" became sobrave's euphemism for "anyone open-minded and inquisitive enough to question whether reported covid-19 data was completely accurate and contextual".

Apparently this meant we were questioning the existence of the Covid-19 pandemic, or suggesting that it was no more serious than the seasonal flu.
 
Canoogs said:
I find it more likely that the demographics of cruise passengers shares some strong correlations with those who are more vulnerable to Covid-19.
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Well Princess Cruises demographics...

Doesn't seem to be much of an issue with P&O Cruises which used to appear on Today Tonight/A Current Affair because of the actions of a very different demographic...

raptalia said:
Just heard a woman on the ABC arguing for international students to be given JobKeeper. The scheme we have is going to cost $130 billion and this silly cow wants to spend billions more on people who are not even Australian citizens.
Click to expand...
For the ones that work in jobs and thus potentially are paying taxes...
 
Capital Power said:
If I were the ALP (and hence the ABC) I'd be ensuring that this thing finishes up costing the government so much money that I couldn't lose the next election. This story doesn't surprise me in the slightest. You'll see ALP amendments adding to the cost left right and centre...
Click to expand...
Lol what? If the government somehow weather this storm nobody will care how much is costs and nobody will vote Labor because they spent too much money to help people?

Sent from my Nokia 7.2 using Tapatalk
 
edgie said:
Lol what? If the government somehow weather this storm nobody will care how much is costs and nobody will vote Labor because they spent too much money to help people?

Sent from my Nokia 7.2 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Sure, people are going to feel that the government did the right thing to try and lessen the pain.

My point was on the other side of this, there's going to be a huge financial impost that can only be reigned in by reducing spending and/or increasing taxes, both of which provide electoral risk leading into the next election. It's in the opposition's interest to maximise that risk.
 
Capital Power said:
Sure, people are going to feel that the government did the right thing to try and lessen the pain.

My point was on the other side of this, there's going to be a huge financial impost that can only be reigned in by reducing spending and/or increasing taxes, both of which provide electoral risk leading into the next election. It's in the opposition's interest to maximise that risk.
Click to expand...

It will be harder for a Labor government to attack these initiatives than vice versa. A taxing the rich/business in a climate of double digit unemployment whilst also cutting services is not something Labor can run with. Labor will find it hugely difficult to win the next election. Libs will win the next election, then embark on a large cost cutting of all the essential services and privatise whatever we've got left to privatise. They'll go too far in many people's eyes and then Labor will win the election after that.
 
Papa G said:
It will be harder for a Labor government to attack these initiatives than vice versa. A taxing the rich/business in a climate of double digit unemployment whilst also cutting services is not something Labor can run with. Labor will find it hugely difficult to win the next election. Libs will win the next election, then embark on a large cost cutting of all the essential services and privatise whatever we've got left to privatise. They'll go too far in many people's eyes and then Labor will win the election after that.
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Yeah they're doing a reasonable enough job with this, and the election is far enough away that people will forget about the fiasco that was the handling of the bushfires. Plus there's likely to be the friendly media that'll do its best to keep that out of the spotlight.
 
Powerage said:
To clarify, everyone who questioned the accuracy of Covid-19 data or comorbidity data was lumped into the just the flu club by sobrave despite noone actually even suggesting that it was such.

"Just the flu" became sobrave's euphemism for "anyone open-minded and inquisitive enough to question whether reported covid-19 data was completely accurate and contextual".

Apparently this meant we were questioning the existence of the Covid-19 pandemic, or suggesting that it was no more serious than the seasonal flu.
Click to expand...

Heaps good meta commentary bro.
 
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