So can someone ( who doesn't just make it up ) tell me how many people have died from this very dangerous and highly contagious delta variant in Australia. I keep hearing how bad it is from the drama queen media but just don't see it.

It's not so much as writing it off as wanting to get the actual facts, like the one person that died was 90 and did they actually die as a result of delta or was it labeled that way. We are misinformed by media and government officials alike, when you read from a medical journal different information from the government it's simply disturbing.

Or to put it another way. The average life expectancy of Covid deaths is six months, which means that while Covid may have been the nail in the coffin, anything that happened this year would likely have finished her off, a cold , a fall, literally anything

FormulaNova said..
I have worked with government departments, in government departments, and in big companies.

Decision making can often be slow and difficult and often the outcome is coloured by one or two dominant people or the least challenging decision. I.e. the one where its unlikely to be a problem if it doesn't work out 100%.

These are not the places where quick and effective decisions can be made.

In our case, the government is treading carefully but slowly. We should have had dedicated quarantine facilities and the services around them BEFORE the more contagious variants popped up. Nope. Now because this never happened, some poor driver has caught it from flight staff and then resulted in the shutdown of NSW.

This is typical big organisation outcome. No one made a contentious decision, so no one got in trouble for it, and when the excrement hit the fan the response has been/will be 'oh, we couldn't have avoided it anyway'.

So it'd be fair to say that the bigger the institution, the more ponderous the progress as everyone has to have their say to justify their existence.

Looks like your government might be tripping over its own feel and declaring itself to be "treading carefully". The Guardian as a source, so YMMV:
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/10/stuffed-how-australias-unconscionable-gamble-on-covid-vaccines-backfired

tarquin1 said..
Its not the death rate that is the problem. Its the contagion rate that is the problem. Each variant is more contagious.
The health system of any country can not deal with this when numbers explode. Hospitals fill up. They have to call the army in to build makeshift hospitals in carparks,fields etc.
Then the death rate starts going up all of a sudden.
The vaccines are still being quoted as over 90% effective of keeping you out of hospital.
This has been explained to me from a doctor a radiologist and the head of the children's department at the hospital here in Cannes. Who have all gone through 3 waves of COVID and are looking at a 4th one soon. They all got vaccinated as soon as they could.

No, the death rate is *THE* problem. The common cold is just as infectious, but the death rate is pretty much zero. Measles is 3 to 4 times more infectious, but less deadly. Each variant may well be more contagious, but they're also less deadly: we see this in the statistics. And this is the usual evolution of viral infections, so nobody should be surprised.

Hospitals fill up every flu season and get "overrun" because hospitals aren't designed and built to cope with mass public emergencies. Remember the Nightingale hospitals in the UK? Complete waste of money, they were barely occupied after two months. When people talk about hospitals being overrun, they're talking about the wards set aside for treating infectious disease, not the whole hospital. You can't just build massive wings and have their sitting there unused 99.9% of the time.

Right now in NZ the children's hospitals are being "overrun" by RSV: kids that would otherwise be exposed naturally to RSV missed it this year due to the "immunity debt" created by lockdowns. The first publicly acknowledged example of lockdowns doing harm that I've noticed... and just wait for the next flu season.

Vaccine effectiveness explained: www.livescience.com/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-explained.html

Kamikuza said..

FormulaNova said..
I have worked with government departments, in government departments, and in big companies.

Decision making can often be slow and difficult and often the outcome is coloured by one or two dominant people or the least challenging decision. I.e. the one where its unlikely to be a problem if it doesn't work out 100%.

These are not the places where quick and effective decisions can be made.

In our case, the government is treading carefully but slowly. We should have had dedicated quarantine facilities and the services around them BEFORE the more contagious variants popped up. Nope. Now because this never happened, some poor driver has caught it from flight staff and then resulted in the shutdown of NSW.

This is typical big organisation outcome. No one made a contentious decision, so no one got in trouble for it, and when the excrement hit the fan the response has been/will be 'oh, we couldn't have avoided it anyway'.

So it'd be fair to say that the bigger the institution, the more ponderous the progress as everyone has to have their say to justify their existence.

Looks like your government might be tripping over its own feel and declaring itself to be "treading carefully". The Guardian as a source, so YMMV:
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/10/stuffed-how-australias-unconscionable-gamble-on-covid-vaccines-backfired

I said this before, that I am no fan of this government, but they have spread their bets and unfortunately the AZ gamble didn't pay off and their second choice Pfizer has come on home.

A great government would have signed up for enough doses of every vaccine for every person, but our government is far from that, and to be fair its a difficult decision. If the AZ vaccine had no problems, then they would probably be okay.

Have other governments placed similar bets, but just happened to have picked a better choice, or are they all committing to vaccines from many suppliers for all of their population?

What country do you live in? What have they done there with vaccines?

The supply of Pfizer might be a moot point. With so many people deciding for themselves that they don't want it, the supply may be more than demand. In retrospect they should have offered some sort of option for people to get vaccinated early if there was not sufficient take-up by the people eligible for it. It seems the government forgot about human nature and assumed that everyone wanted it.

tarquin1 said..

Kamikuza said..

tarquin1 said..
Its not the death rate that is the problem. Its the contagion rate that is the problem. Each variant is more contagious.
The health system of any country can not deal with this when numbers explode. Hospitals fill up. They have to call the army in to build makeshift hospitals in carparks,fields etc.
Then the death rate starts going up all of a sudden.
The vaccines are still being quoted as over 90% effective of keeping you out of hospital.
This has been explained to me from a doctor a radiologist and the head of the children's department at the hospital here in Cannes. Who have all gone through 3 waves of COVID and are looking at a 4th one soon. They all got vaccinated as soon as they could.

No, the death rate is *THE* problem. The common cold is just as infectious, but the death rate is pretty much zero. Measles is 3 to 4 times more infectious, but less deadly. Each variant may well be more contagious, but they're also less deadly: we see this in the statistics. And this is the usual evolution of viral infections, so nobody should be surprised.

Hospitals fill up every flu season and get "overrun" because hospitals aren't designed and built to cope with mass public emergencies. Remember the Nightingale hospitals in the UK? Complete waste of money, they were barely occupied after two months. When people talk about hospitals being overrun, they're talking about the wards set aside for treating infectious disease, not the whole hospital. You can't just build massive wings and have their sitting there unused 99.9% of the time.

Right now in NZ the children's hospitals are being "overrun" by RSV: kids that would otherwise be exposed naturally to RSV missed it this year due to the "immunity debt" created by lockdowns. The first publicly acknowledged example of lockdowns doing harm that I've noticed... and just wait for the next flu season.

Vaccine effectiveness explained: www.livescience.com/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-explained.html

The whole hospital gets over run and scheduled operations,treatments,checks etc don't happen. Its going to take France over a year at the moment to catch up. With another wave coming and doctors and nurses already tired its only going to take longer to get that operation you need.
My wife's friend that is a doctor is having to tell people "well you probably should have an operation but at the moment its not possible. If it gets really bad come back".
The radiologist said he has done more lung e-rays in the last year than he has done in his 30 year career.

Sounds like what you're saying is triage is really bad. The only be thing worse than losing millions to a pandemic is locking up billions in a failed attempt to stop it.

FormulaNova said..

psychojoe said..

tarquin1 said..

Kamikuza said..

tarquin1 said..
Its not the death rate that is the problem. Its the contagion rate that is the problem. Each variant is more contagious.
The health system of any country can not deal with this when numbers explode. Hospitals fill up. They have to call the army in to build makeshift hospitals in carparks,fields etc.
Then the death rate starts going up all of a sudden.
The vaccines are still being quoted as over 90% effective of keeping you out of hospital.
This has been explained to me from a doctor a radiologist and the head of the children's department at the hospital here in Cannes. Who have all gone through 3 waves of COVID and are looking at a 4th one soon. They all got vaccinated as soon as they could.

No, the death rate is *THE* problem. The common cold is just as infectious, but the death rate is pretty much zero. Measles is 3 to 4 times more infectious, but less deadly. Each variant may well be more contagious, but they're also less deadly: we see this in the statistics. And this is the usual evolution of viral infections, so nobody should be surprised.

Hospitals fill up every flu season and get "overrun" because hospitals aren't designed and built to cope with mass public emergencies. Remember the Nightingale hospitals in the UK? Complete waste of money, they were barely occupied after two months. When people talk about hospitals being overrun, they're talking about the wards set aside for treating infectious disease, not the whole hospital. You can't just build massive wings and have their sitting there unused 99.9% of the time.

Right now in NZ the children's hospitals are being "overrun" by RSV: kids that would otherwise be exposed naturally to RSV missed it this year due to the "immunity debt" created by lockdowns. The first publicly acknowledged example of lockdowns doing harm that I've noticed... and just wait for the next flu season.

Vaccine effectiveness explained: www.livescience.com/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-explained.html

The whole hospital gets over run and scheduled operations,treatments,checks etc don't happen. Its going to take France over a year at the moment to catch up. With another wave coming and doctors and nurses already tired its only going to take longer to get that operation you need.
My wife's friend that is a doctor is having to tell people "well you probably should have an operation but at the moment its not possible. If it gets really bad come back".
The radiologist said he has done more lung e-rays in the last year than he has done in his 30 year career.

Sounds like what you're saying is triage is really bad. The only be thing worse than losing millions to a pandemic is locking up billions in a failed attempt to stop it.

Sounds like you are saying that "Billions" not being able to hug their children or grandchildren is more important than millions of people dying in pain before their time.

What I consider worse is the people that value the life of other people as not important but are not socially conscious enough to take a vaccine to help those people and themselves return to a normal life. It's really bad.

This is almost an apt retort.
It's a shame about those people that died from the vaccine, it's not like you're asking people to have enough social consciousness to play Russian Roulette

tarquin1 said..
The whole hospital gets over run and scheduled operations,treatments,checks etc don't happen. Its going to take France over a year at the moment to catch up. With another wave coming and doctors and nurses already tired its only going to take longer to get that operation you need.
My wife's friend that is a doctor is having to tell people "well you probably should have an operation but at the moment its not possible. If it gets really bad come back".
The radiologist said he has done more lung e-rays in the last year than he has done in his 30 year career.

None of that is surprising, as it happens frequently. Given the history of budget cuts too, I'm not surprised they're understaffed.

We know several medical professionals here too, at various levels of the system. Their "COVID departments" are at various levels of fullness and while the media loves the shocking headlines it makes, the hospitals aren't actually about to implode.

FormulaNova said..
What country do you live in? What have they done there with vaccines?

Japan. They've gotten a few different vaccines, but recently ditched AZ (IIRC) and given away their stock overseas somewhere. They've left vaccination plans up to the states, and the states have left it up to local councils, so it's a bit of a hodgepodge and slower than overseas.

Government here has also had to contend with lobbying by doctors to be designated as the only professionals allowed to administer injections, as they've seen a decline in their private clinic practices over the past year. And things like people intentionally unplugging vaccine freezers; the usual anti-vax idiocy here.

Then there's the protestors claiming "Olympics kill us all" because they really believe the media fear-porn, I guess. And because of that, Japan Rail is going to spot-check bags of people going into Tokyo because they're worried about domestic terrorism related to said protests.

Meanwhile, the trains are still running, life is pretty much normal because it's unconstitutional for the government to lockdown

I'm happy to wait for the vaccine. There's no benefit to getting it, as NZ still requires non-consensual quarantine of healthy people no matter how many shots you've had and is making stupid noises like they'll continue the 2-week gulag at the border even if everyone in NZ is vaccinated.

Kamikuza said..

FormulaNova said..
Sounds like you are saying that "Billions" not being able to hug their children or grandchildren is more important than millions of people dying in pain before their time.

What I consider worse is the people that value the life of other people as not important but are not socially conscious enough to take a vaccine to help those people and themselves return to a normal life. It's really bad.

Have you asked the grandparents if they'd prefer to accept the very low risk of dying from COVID or miss out on seeing their grandkids? Isn't it good that the government has taken the responsibility of that decision away from them.

What, like flu vaccine? 2019 saw over 800 Australians die of the flu, from 310,000 lab-confirmed infections. All those non-socially conscious people who were happy to go about a normal life, with all its inherent risks, I guess...

My parents like seeing their grandkids, but I think if it came down to a choice between seeing them in the future but chatting with them over facetime or similar, they would prefer to live a bit longer.

My father is of the age where he saw a lot of polio victims and the result of the vaccination program. So for him its a no-brainer. I guess if you see major death or disease changed because of a vaccine, it sways you one way. Lucky for both of them they seem to be healthy and both had AZ with no problems.

FormulaNova said..
Clearly there is no censorship for these alternate ideas on the internet. You would think if they had merit that they would make it into more mainstream news feeds. Maybe they will?

I remember reading in mainstream news that the US intelligence groups noted a lack of mobile calls and cars parked around the Wuhan research centre around the time of the expected accident. This to me implies that there was an accident in this centre and the virus got out. It was mainstream, so should I believe it? Is it possible that the researchers there made a mistake and it got out? Sounds much like human nature to me as people do make mistakes.

Absolutely incorrect. YouTube channels getting strikes and shutdown for doing things other than promoting the vaccine, the party line on lockdowns, suggesting the virus might have been a lab leak... etc etc.

And there was literally a day when you'd be banned from Facebook/Twitter etc for discussing the hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked from a lab, then the very next day you could discuss it without being banned.

Is it possible someone made a mistake? Of course it is, it happens all the time. Remember the US State Departments papers from a few years before that criticized the WIV for poor equipment and standards? That was a conspiracy theory of course and now if you don't jump on a vaccine that has no long-term safety data -- it's because you've got the wrong politics.

FormulaNova said..
My parents like seeing their grandkids, but I think if it came down to a choice between seeing them in the future but chatting with them over facetime or similar, they would prefer to live a bit longer.

My father is of the age where he saw a lot of polio victims and the result of the vaccination program. So for him its a no-brainer. I guess if you see major death or disease changed because of a vaccine, it sways you one way. Lucky for both of them they seem to be healthy and both had AZ with no problems.

That's your parents, and they're entitled to their level of risk-acceptance. Do you think it's the same for, or that it should be enforced on, absolutely everyone else?

Living in Asia, we've seen SARS-1, MERS, all the bird and swine flu epidemics and yet... it's never lived up to the dire and grim predictions of the epidemiologists, or the hype of the media.

It's going to be at least another 2 years before we can get back to NZ to see all the grandparents, and they're old and in failing health. I refuse to sit locked in a hotel room for two weeks -- and pay for the privilege -- let alone subject two little kids to worse-than-home-detention conditions. Not that you can actually get a spot in the idiotic quarantine gulags because the tech-savvy and well-heeled are snapping them up with not-quite-bots before anyone else can.

That's just our tough luck though, right? Shouldn't have left the Motherland eh.

Kamikuza said..

It's going to be at least another 2 years before we can get back to NZ to see all the grandparents, and they're old and in failing health. I refuse to sit locked in a hotel room for two weeks -- and pay for the privilege -- let alone subject two little kids to worse-than-home-detention conditions. Not that you can actually get a spot in the idiotic quarantine gulags because the tech-savvy and well-heeled are snapping them up with not-quite-bots before anyone else can.

That is your own decision. If it really were super important to you, you would do the 2 weeks. I went through 2 weeks of home isolation here in WA and I didn't like it. It was incredibly boring, but it was only 2 weeks. At the time I was happy to be able to visit NSW and return to WA at all and counted myself lucky.

Kids are malleable. They won't like being locked up for 2 weeks but they will survive so its not the end of the world.

Inconvenient. Yes.

I think we must all agree that the information given to base your decision on is not clear. There is indeed cencorship, capture and mis information (whether on purpose or not who really knows). There is no consistency among countries nor within their own states for that matter. The WHO changes it's narrative continually.

like just about everything - taking the vaccine is not a zero and one issue. It is not binary. Human existence and it's systems are messy.
saying no to the vaccine with a list of links to support is just as ridiculous as saying yes with counter supporting links. Even more ridiculous is vehemently holding your ground on one side or another by abusing the opposing view.

take my little world for instance. Wife is booked in to get it. I have an immunosuppressed kid. She is pressuring me to take it for that very legitimate reason. My dad has had it, my mum isn't going anywhere near the damn thing.

So this division is even within the families themselves.
we just have to accept - we just don't know.