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LOL! That’s not even what the Health Minister said. They said there were only 2 otherwise healthy people who died. You can have a chronic illness and get hit by a car and die but to say that your death doesn’t count to the road toll because of your chronic illness is just dumb. edit: Silvio Brusaferro is also NOT the Italian Health Minister

If we aim for 60% herd immunity (assuming that this is possible) and Australia has a population of 25M this means that about 15M will need to get infected. Assume a 1% death rate then this means that 150k people will have died. If we assume 10% require hospitalisation for a period of two weeks including the beds, hospital staff, and medical equipment then you will need 1.5M beds. At the end of the 2017/18 financial year there were about 62k beds. You can see that if the chosen 1.5M people were to require immediate hospitalisation we could not do it - and this does not take into account your garden variety hospitalisation such as births, appendicitis, etc. Nor does it take into account that out of those chosen 1.5M there would be medical staff further reducing the shortage. Then if you play around with stats like how many would be the primary bread winner, the age group, those released from hospital but still requiring treatment, and so on and so on. Basically we are screwed economically either way. Worst possible scenario is that we lose a large % of the 25 to 40 year olds from the labour market and from the child rearing market. Example case is Botswana which had an average growth rate of about 5% between 1965 (independence) and 1990. Then HIV hit the country hard bringing the country instability (lots of orphans) and a plummeting economy (source The Economist) and the world bank shows the chart to be bouncing between contraction and expansion repeatedly from 1990. So as far as saying lets pump billions into medical research, this assumes that the problem is one of money. The problem is more like we did not know it existed, and in comparison to SARS the speed in which the scientists have developed a test for it is incredible. The next task is to actually develop a vaccine. Now this is going to be tricky because normally the vaccine would go through a lengthy trial period which could take years. What happens now, I don't know. My take is that governments are trying to get to 60% contagion and survival without causing mass hospitalisation. Some people will be given the choice of being human guinea pigs. As for rebalancing the economy that will take courage and vision. The free trade between nations will continue but with a partially protected manufacturing sector which can be switched over to increase production or change products depending one the emergency. What happens to aviation and tourism? So many countries have been pushing the tourism sector as a way of employing large numbers of people. And finally, Hendra virus is our own uniquely Australian virus from fruit bats. Fatal to humans and we don't even eat them.

We did close our borders vert effectively, but only to China. There's no way politically, that we could have closed our borders in December to US and Europe even though that was the public health recommendation. The Border Force mindset is not really focused on protecting our borders from white christian people, it has been fashioned that way over 10 years by successive governments, look at the number of visa overstayers that have arrived by plane and attract little interest from Border Force. Most public sector agencies have been run down and de-skilled over 30 years under successive Governments - they are there to do what the Minister, or the Minister's flunkey tells them to do. Rubi Princess was a logical conclusion of that process and it has certainly made things more difficult. The effective contact tracing teams that could have salvaged the situation have also been run down since the Abbott Government, it's called small Government and excessive bureaucracy - until we need it. There's no problem allowing potentially infected people into the country as long as we quarantine them and as long as our medical system isn't overrun, right now, we are handling this well. The Government has been reactive in this crisis and always one step behind because they'd deliberately chosen to dismantle many of the structures that would have been helpful. It's not like they didn't know, there has been many global pandemics since SARS, doctors have warned them repeatedly, they chose to provide little weight to the warnings. I know that the Government response to TeleHealth has been chaotic and poorly implemented. It's caused enormous anxiety in the medical profession, after years of Medicare audits where they insist on full repayment of all fees for the minor technical breach of the regulations (ie accepting a referral with technically incorrect wording, even if it's clinically appropriate) doctors are more worried about a cost recovery compliance breach after all this is over, than we are about providing Telehealth. In the last 2 weeks I've had 3 different fees and 3 different compliance requirements for each Telehealth consult, and next week I will get a 4th different one!

It's not just a question of money. sure, we need more ventilators but so does every country and they are very hard to source. Then there is the staffing issue. Optimal ICU practice has a 1:1 staffing ratio, one nurse per patient, but that's 3 shifts a day. Add in medical staff, supporting hospital staff, then allow for up to 30% absence with SARS-Covid-19 and the big issue becomes staffing. If even 60% of the population becomes infected, maybe 5% of those will need ICU level support, that's 480,000 people! Then, if you look at the illness itself, the problem isn't just viral pneumonia that requires ventilation, the problem is something called a cytokine storm, a super aggressive immune response where the body ends up destroying itself, sort of like 'friendly fire'. This is what kills people and we currently have no effective treatment for it. The wider problem is not just Chinese wet markets, it's factory farming, swine flu epidemics and bird flu epidemics have their root cause in intensive farming, whether in China or in the rest of the world, so we'll need a whole world response to this after it passes. Bats have amazingly powerful immune systems, they protect bats from becoming ill with all sorts of viruses that have the potential to become zoonoses, infective agents that cross the species barrier and infect humans. As we increase deforestation and push into previously uninhabited areas, we increase our exposure to all these infective agents

Personally im happy for them to take the last couple of payments. I know the CFG cloud looms over us, but as a whole sports clubs need our support now more than ever if they are to come out the other side.

Just checking in on Mombaerts performance. The loss to Newcastle was shocking. We need to give him an ultimatum. If the team doesn't win a game in the next month he has to go! cheers Peter