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Aussies: Football, Meat Pies, and Rampant SARS


Stubby

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4 hours ago, Wall Flower said:

I think there is some reasonable criticism to be made of the early days of the current outbreak. The initial infection of the driver was a gap in protocol that should have been plugged, although probably a shared responsibility between the company and the two tiers of government. There is also an argument to be made that lockdown should have happened immediately that case was identified, which was likely the only chance of stopping the outbreak.

Bolded 1 - this stuff is why the dumb media frenzy pisses me off so much, there absolutely are reasonable criticisms but they don't tend to be the ones getting the air time. I don't think I disagree with most of your criticism and I'm not a supporter of hers, I do disagree with you on the press conferences though. The accountability absolutely needs to be a thing, but I think they were simply functioning as a feedback loop on the media circus rather than actually functioning as that. Bolded 2 - definitely something we can say with hindsight, I think it was a mistake but I think it was one made in good faith due to a misread of the data.

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It was a very tight timeframe between receiving the science that Delta was substantially different and the evolving situation in NSW. Delta was pretty well known to be significantly more contagious in May, but that did not give NSW a helluva lot of time to develop a different response to a Delta outbreak.

I haven't watched the video at this point, but I think the big piece of missing data was whether a place that had successfully eliminated multiple vanilla outbreaks with contact tracing and light lockdowns would fail to contain delta. There weren't exactly that many countries which had eliminated vanilla in the first place to act as the test case for it.

1 hour ago, Skyrazer said:

Fed LNP though is going to have a rougher time. Election is going to need to be called pretty soon and the ScoMo govt has been dropping the ball on multiple fronts. They're probably hoping for vax rates to continue going strong and to start reopening in time for election by which time, much of the public undergoes a case of "forgive and forget".

I feel like this is how it should be, but not actually how it is haha.

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2 hours ago, karaddin said:

 

I haven't watched the video at this point, but I think the big piece of missing data was whether a place that had successfully eliminated multiple vanilla outbreaks with contact tracing and light lockdowns would fail to contain delta. There weren't exactly that many countries which had eliminated vanilla in the first place to act as the test case for it.

 

It's been over 20 years since I properly studied epidemiology, but I do know that measures effective in stopping a virus with an R0 value of between 2 and 3 are not going to be effective at stopping a virus with an R0 value of 6 or 7. Either the problem was NSW had incompetent epidemiologist advisers, or not enough was known about delta and esp the R0 value, or the NSW govt didn't want to hear and refused to take extra measures, or some combination of all 3. I think the main problem was not knowing enough about delta. But it is likely that even knowing enough (or as much as we did when it hit us), I think the govt was probably going to be inclined to go too soft on it. After all, almost everyone thought we overreacted with just one case, and that was 2 months after the outbreak started in NSW, and we are not exactly having an easy time of it.

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1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's been over 20 years since I properly studied epidemiology, but I do know that measures effective in stopping a virus with an R0 value of between 2 and 3 are not going to be effective at stopping a virus with an R0 value of 6 or 7. 

I remember Delta being pegged at about 50% higher than Alpha in the discussions coming out of the outbreak in India, not 2-3x higher. This ABC article from early June matches that, pegging it as 50% more than Alpha and double vanilla at around 5. The NSW contact tracing and limited restrictions had successfully eliminated Alpha outbreaks.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/100190414

Again, I'm not arguing they made the right call - it clearly wasn't. I just think it was made in good faith. Part of the context for the decision was that all the federal economic assistance that had been integral for earlier lockdowns had been removed so the impact of pulling the trigger was going to be major and fall heavily on the disadvantaged.

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59 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I remember Delta being pegged at about 50% higher than Alpha in the discussions coming out of the outbreak in India, not 2-3x higher. This ABC article from early June matches that, pegging it as 50% more than Alpha and double vanilla at around 5. The NSW contact tracing and limited restrictions had successfully eliminated Alpha outbreaks.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/100190414

Again, I'm not arguing they made the right call - it clearly wasn't. I just think it was made in good faith. Part of the context for the decision was that all the federal economic assistance that had been integral for earlier lockdowns had been removed so the impact of pulling the trigger was going to be major and fall heavily on the disadvantaged.

I don't know what to say. 50% more infectious than Alpha should have been an alarm bell to competent epidemiologists that rinse and repeat would have an unacceptable probability of failure. Just because the same approach to vanilla worked for Alpha, it would be the borderline incompetent for epi advisers to imagine it will continue to work with higher R0s. Increasing R0s have a quasi exponential effect. If the R0 is 50% higher you are not going to just get 50% more cases, you are going to get at least double, possibly more.

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It's easy to pontificate on a message board about what should have been an obvious decision, but I've watched a sizeable chunk of the country smearing a lifelong public servant for months like she's a partisan figure for doing her job. I don't give a fuck about whether people are fair to Gladys but I do care about the long term consequences of doing this to someone like Chant.

There is no solid indication that she did anything other than make a wrong call in a difficult situation trying to balance competing forms of harm while still keeping our state from collapsing under the virus. At every step she's given every indication of choosing public good over politically popular shit with trying to keep police out of the process, attempting to protect the privacy of individuals during preliminary outbreaks, keeping the police away from sign in data etc. Trying to protect public trust in the system and the health care authorities to keep up compliance and honesty instead of scaring people off being transparent.

I'm just another person spouting off on a message board, to turn around and talk like my bullshit here indicates incompetence on the part of Chant and the rest of NSW health is the sort of shit you'd get really pissed off at if I made arrogant assertions about NZ. 

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Hello all, I've been a bit MIA the past couple of weeks as we have just welcomed a baby into the family! I've been blessed to already have a stepdaughter and now my wife has given birth to a son. Hooray but these late night wakeups are killing me!

On politics - Andrews doesn't take any prisoners, does he? Situation in Victoria looks like it could genuinely boil over. 

Gladys - I think is rusted on for a while yet. As has been pointed out, a while until the next state elections, I think the pandemic is still a net positive for her. The fact that Victoria and the ACT have also been in long lockdowns while going harder initially has helped save her, I think. The ICAC stuff will be the real kicker but it hasn't really stuck yet, so there would have to be new revelations for that one to really make its mark.

Federal - ScoMo is in a precarious position, having been wounded on a number of fronts not least of which has been the pandemic. However, Labor hasn't really taken the fight up yet (admittedly harder to do in a pandemic) and it will be up to Albanese to really land some hits in the leadup to the election. Still, given ScoMo's "presidential" style of campaigning, you can't help but think that ultimately the election will be about himself - whether the electorate is tired of his style or whether they'll continue to buy what he's selling, and I think Labor will have to base their campaign around that.

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15 minutes ago, Jeor said:

Hello all, I've been a bit MIA the past couple of weeks as we have just welcomed a baby into the family! I've been blessed to already have a stepdaughter and now my wife has given birth to a son. Hooray but these late night wakeups are killing me!

 

:cheers:

Sleep when the baby sleeps, as much as you possibly can.

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I don't really care for any foreign warships visiting regardless of nuclear capability. What purpose does it serve other than showboating, literally. And in the case of Aussie, re-supply (of provisions, not fuel) isn't even a good practical reason, since we live next door. Having said that, our original nuclear free intent was to make sure no nuclear weapons entered our territory. The US and Britain having a neither confirm nor deny policy meant the only ships they could send here would be un-armed vessels. But the US and UK decided if some ships couldn't visit then no ships will visit. Fine by us. Thouh we have had the occasional un-armed, CO2 spewing navy vessel visit recently so positions have soften a wee bit.

Unfortunately an anti-nuke weapon stance got hijacked by anti-nuke everything crowd and so anything smelling of nuclear-ness got taken off the table, including domestic nuclear power. Since Aus and the USA and the UK all took great pains to say that these subs would not carry nuclear weapons, this could have been a moment to start to create a differentiation between weapons and energy in the minds of NZers and start a move towards a more rational attitude to things nuclear. But no, that chance has gone begging.

The good thing is we didn't need to make a decision, except to decide not to change the legislation. So in terms of the antagonism between China and the US/UK/Aus the situation is neutral and we are not taking sides. Everyone involved knows this at the foreign policy and diplomatic level. It's just news media and blowhards who like to snipe at little old NZ who are making a thing out of it. If we are irrelevant and don't matter, then why waste column inches on us?

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24 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I don't really care for any foreign warships visiting regardless of nuclear capability. What purpose does it serve other than showboating, literally. And in the case of Aussie, re-supply (of provisions, not fuel) isn't even a good practical reason, since we live next door. Having said that, our original nuclear free intent was to make sure no nuclear weapons entered our territory. The US and Britain having a neither confirm nor deny policy meant the only ships they could send here would be un-armed vessels. But the US and UK decided if some ships couldn't visit then no ships will visit. Fine by us. Thouh we have had the occasional un-armed, CO2 spewing navy vessel visit recently so positions have soften a wee bit.

Unfortunately an anti-nuke weapon stance got hijacked by anti-nuke everything crowd and so anything smelling of nuclear-ness got taken off the table, including domestic nuclear power. Since Aus and the USA and the UK all took great pains to say that these subs would not carry nuclear weapons, this could have been a moment to start to create a differentiation between weapons and energy in the minds of NZers and start a move towards a more rational attitude to things nuclear. But no, that chance has gone begging.

The good thing is we didn't need to make a decision, except to decide not to change the legislation. So in terms of the antagonism between China and the US/UK/Aus the situation is neutral and we are not taking sides. Everyone involved knows this at the foreign policy and diplomatic level. It's just news media and blowhards who like to snipe at little old NZ who are making a thing out of it. If we are irrelevant and don't matter, then why waste column inches on us?

Who does NZ run to in the case of aggression from a stronger antagonist though, if not the US and Australia? Seems like they want to have their cake and eat it.

Edit

But the bigger concern is probably that Ardern seems to have used the nuclear excuse as a convenient way to subtly join her Chinese masters in signalling displeasure at this submarine deal.

(By the way, has she managed to grudgingly condemn the Chinese actions against the Uyghurs as genocide yet?)

 

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I'm guessing there will be buildings condemned from this. So there will be a bit of demolition and rebuild on the cards as well as repair. I hope there will be a coordinated engineering assessment of all commercial buildings to make sure instability doesn't go undetected.

According to an article I just read this was the biggest onshore earthquake east of South Australia ever recorded. Apparently NT, WA and SA have bigger ones from time to time. The article didn't mention Tas.

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I'm laughing at the idea that NZ would come running to Aus for protection. Even if we had the subs already and the fail money sink Joint Strike Fighters already, in any meaningful conflict we're just delaying until the US arrives as well. In this hypothetical marathon style running for help we'd just be asking why they ran in the wrong direction before sending off our own runner.

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20 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Unfortunately an anti-nuke weapon stance got hijacked by anti-nuke everything crowd and so anything smelling of nuclear-ness got taken off the table, including domestic nuclear power. Since Aus and the USA and the UK all took great pains to say that these subs would not carry nuclear weapons, this could have been a moment to start to create a differentiation between weapons and energy in the minds of NZers and start a move towards a more rational attitude to things nuclear. But no, that chance has gone begging.

Well, New Zealand's geographical location on a monstrous fault line - and natural hydro suitability - really mean we've got no real business dabbling with nuclear. 

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