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Everything posted by Harry
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To be honest though I don't know whether to believe it. He's posted it on Twitter where he has a 2% ratio of being honest. Am I wearing as tin foil hat here? I dunno. He will now skip the debates, and have the opportunity to either come out before the election claiming Covid is no big deal or alternatively withdraw from the contest he thinks he's likely to lose and sub in Nikki Haley or pence and create last minute chaos. Presumably Biden now isolating as a close contact of a confirmed case and at an equal or greater risk if he catches it.
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Unbelievable. As if the 2020 election needed further uncertainty and angst. If trump truly has Covid, at his age that likely means he has a 15% chance of being dead before the election, and a significantly higher chance of being hospitalised and incapacitated. It also means Biden will need to isolate and go off the campaign trail and could well be infected himself after being a catching pad for trump spittle for 90 minutes on Tuesday night. Next level unbelievable shit.
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I reckon he'll be gutted with how that went. I have time for Chris Wallace tbh. He did a good interview with Trump recently and generally you watch him and realise he's an important voice providing some sense to Republican Fox viewers. I don't think he was prepared for the extent to which trump came out hell bent on making it a shitshow. But he didn't help himself and moved on at times he should have pressed harder, and let blatant lies go unchecked.
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They do though if it helps maintain some alignment and improves the quality of communication and decision making during a pandemic. We were all second guessing whether the world health organisation were taking talking points from China and no other country takes Trump seriously. Each country just reacted after the fact with people thinking "should we just do what Italy did?". The same situation with Obama or even Bush as president I think would have resulted in greater cohesion and less chaos. That's not from them dictating what to do but by being the biggest, well respected person in the room that smaller countries look to follow.
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Pete was the person who's strategy came closest to winning imo. If he'd gotten a clear declareable victory in Iowa he goes on to win new Hampshire and then the nomination. That said, you'd wonder how religious black American voters would turn out for a married gay democratic nominee. He would be the most articulate candidate by far but so much of the American system is voting blocs based on narrow interests and criteria. His homosexuality could easily result in a defeat.
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I know I should care less than I do. But I really can't help but feel the entire world would be so profoundly different under a more coherent president, and a generally more liberal United States. I feel the Covid outcomes throughout the entire western world would have been profoundly different if a US president operating in the role of leader of the free world had stood up, sent their people into China and grabbed the bull by the horns and led the world's response. Instead Barking Spider's "I don't want the numbers to look bad" stance dominated and everybody was behind the 8 ball.
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The split field of challengers may be the reason. Cory Booker, Harris, Buttigieg would all have been compelling nominees but struggled to get traction and ultimately Biden's nomination was decided by the largely not politically engaged democratic base in South Carolina.
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I'm too anxious to watch. Worried Biden will fuck it up.
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Was there any recommendation for a follow up test further into the incubation period? My sister in law works in childcare and when she was a close contact of a confirmed case she had to isolate, get tested (was negative) then quarantine for a further 7 days and test again. If negative the second time then you're cleared to return to work.
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This was after her having been a close contact of a confirmed case? Gosh mate that must be unsettling. Any idea when you'll get results back? Was she symptomatic at the time of the test?
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The serological testing done in New York suggested 22% of the city had been infected in the first wave. Which would around 2 million cases rather than the 400000 they had actually confirmed through testing. It's one thing to keep in mind when looking at the second wave and seeing peaks that look almost as bad as the first wave... The true height of the peaks in the first wave is an unknown and product of comparably very limited testing
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I don't think there's much point blaming wrongdoers mate there will no doubt be a correlation to that but the bottom line is this virus is a nasty piece of work and seems to spread like wildfire, particularly in the most densely populated areas and morso as the weather turns, and good measures will allow it but not stop it. This is what happened in Melbourne where we locked down early in March and got to literally zero Covid cases over multiple weeks in late May. Then 1 hotel manager and security guard from the airport arrivals quarantine hotel got sick and it surged back out into the community through a cool winter with 20,000 confirmed cases and 800 deaths We initially went to a stage 3 lockdown which meant only prep and final year high school students learning on site and all others from home, similar with remote work etc. After 5 weeks that did not significantly bend the curve so we went to hard lockdown. Other parts of Australia did the same thing the first time round, and kept it away all winter and it still hasn't returned. As I see it the European economies have a call to make this winter and it will be whether they are prepared to lock down harshly again or take a more Sweden-like approach and lock down what you can without going to the same extreme as before (and sustain a second wave at least as bad as the first).
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Melbourne's contact tracing team was overwhelmed and was a big part of why we locked down again over winter. When cases start rising exponentially the time available per contract trace event starts reducing exponentially and the efficacy of the process drops away.
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An article from Melbourne I thought was interesting. https://www.smh.com.au/national/melbourne-uni-chief-says-victoria-must-address-difficult-ethical-questions-20200919-p55x82.html “The question everyone is skirting around here is what is the appetite in any country for disease and mortality associated with this virus,’’ he told The Sunday Age. “Every answer to that question is valid in one way or another. If you were to say we have no appetite whatsoever for any deaths from this virus, that is a perfectly reasonable position to take, but you have to take that position knowing the consequences. Professor Maskell says decision-makers must consider the role of quality-adjusted life year (QALY), a unit of measurement used by economists to predict and assess the impact of health policies. In simple terms, it assumes that a life near its end, whether because of disease or advanced age, is empirically different to a healthy life closer to its beginning. “We have to look at this as an overall picture. My personal view is there should be some form of sensible, public health, QALY-based analysis done and tough calls made. It boils down to a basic but very hard moral philosophy: What is the value of a 90-year-old’s life versus the value of the continuing livelihood and happiness of a 25-year-old?’’ he said. Professor Maskell arrived in Melbourne at the end of 2018 from the University of Cambridge to take over the running of Australia's top-ranked university. He spoke to The Sunday Age as part of a series of stories in which prominent Melburnians offer constructive ideas about Victoria's way forward. Each day throughout the pandemic, Premier Daniel Andrews has detailed COVID deaths recorded in the previous 24 hours, routinely describing as “tragic’’ the deaths of people in their 80s and 90s, including some who were in palliative care before they were infected. The Victorian government’s response to our second wave epidemic – broad suspension of commercial, educational and social activity to reduce the spread of the virus – stands in contrast to the approach being taken by European nations such as France, the UK, the Netherlands and Austria, where governments are resisting a return to lockdown despite facing substantially higher COVID case loads, and deaths, than we are. As French President Emmanuel Macron said last week: “We must adapt to the evolution of the virus, slow down its circulation as much as possible. But we must do it by allowing us to continue living: educating our children, taking care of other patients, treating other health matters, and having an economic and social life.’’ Why has Victoria taken such a different approach? Professor Maskell wonders whether we are a victim of our early success. “Australia dealt with it so efficiently at the start of the pandemic it became possible in people’s minds to eliminate the virus or keep it down at very low levels. If you look at Western Australia and South Australia and the Northern Territory, people would argue why can’t Victoria and NSW do that? “In other countries, either because they decided to do this, as in Sweden, or they were a shambles, as in the UK, they have got used to this virus being around and people dying from it. There is an experiential thing there, not just a national characteristic.
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In Victoria the Murdoch press came out hard against our premier and against the idea of a lockdown. It's got plenty of wind and so many people now are more ropeable with the premier about the lockdown than they are about the death. We are horribly divided.
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Below is a COVID trajectory comparison of my state (Melbourne/Victoria, in Australia) with key European countries including the UK, normalised for cases per million population. We are the green line. We implemented stage 3 restrictions from July 7 (most kids home from school). And stage 4 (total lockdown, no childcare, stay home 23 hours a day) on August 2nd. Note that the first waves look artificially low because the level of testing was way short of what was needed.
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In my opinion the CDC has been politicised and is being curbed by the trump presidency and by trump wanting to minimise the extent of COVID as an issue going into the election. Trump will want deaths and cases down and is suggesting a vaccine will be ready by Christmas. Like most things with Trump whoever refutes his lies becomes the enemy, even if it's a public servant providing accurate information to the public.
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I feel for you guys if you're just starting out in second wave territory, and heading towards the cooler time of the year. In Melbourne our second wave was more severe than the first (our first wave was fuck all by global standards tho). And our second lockdown was harsher, and frankly a lot harder to endure because of the mentally fatigued state we were already in by the time it started, particularly for those trying to juggle homeschooling with full time work. I'm not sure every government will take the path is took of very harsh punitive lockdowns this time round. Rupert Murdoch appears not to agree with them, which counts for a fair bit.
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D Well it's not all that different to the first lockdown. A few tweaks to the rules which I'd say is based on lessons learned from the first one and elsewhere. But that wasn't what I meant. It's just much harder for people to bear to do lockdown a second time. First time there was a sense of excitement, and everything was very new and different, and we were optimistic that we would shut down, knock this thing in the bud and then reopen. This time people were going in pessimistic, already at their wits end, in all times low states of physical and mental health, and devastated to be the only state being locked down and made out that we've done something wrong when really if you actually look at the detail our state did basically the same thing as Sydney and just got a worse result. If anything our premier actually led the way through the whole pandemic and drove the PM to shut down the first time against his own tendencies to want to protect the economy. And now he's being slayed in the press, his approval rating is through the floor, mutiny is brewing and we're tearing ourselves apart. I'm starting to think Sweden had the right of it tbh in adopting sustainable measures rather than asking people to do what isn't possible.
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The second lockdown is a fair bit harder than the first.
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At least now both sides of politics won't be short terming however possible to avoid the Stigma of being the government to break the 30 year constant growth streak.
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At least now both sides of politics won't be short terming however possible to avoid the Stigma of being the government to break the 30 year constant growth streak.
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At least now both sides of politics won't be short terming however possible to avoid the Stigma of being the government to break the 30 year constant growth streak.