The Coronavirus Thread (We nearly didn't see City in the 2021 Grand Final)

[haz]

48 minutes ago, thisphantomfortress said:

Another year, another Grand Final only I can attend. I'm playing 5D chess here 

COVID-19 wasn't developed in a Wuhan lab... It really originated from @thisphantomfortress's garage. 

[Shahanga]

6 hours ago, thisphantomfortress said:

Another year, another Grand Final only I can attend. I'm playing 5D chess here 

Doesn’t claim to be the smartest bloke in the forum, just quietly makes everything happen how he wants, without anyone being any the wiser.

[jw1739]

Don't think any of us are going anywhere fast - completing the season, finals, anything much at all. 12 new coronavirus cases overnight and we're going into lockdown very soon - details to be decided today.

[jw1739]

The main thing that pisses me off about the way this is being managed is not actually the lockdown, although I agree it should be more finely tuned to target areas and not all 7m/4m depending whether it's Vic or Melbourne. What hurts is that I don't see either the Feds or the State making any "structural" changes to the way we live. There seems to be a bland assumption that if we just put various restrictions on people for long enough then somehow this virus will go away and we will then return to "normal."

As an example, call any organisation (government department or private) and almost every call will be answered automatically by something like "Due to COVID-19 we're experiencing a higher than normal number of calls and wait times are longer than usual" usually followed by a comment  "the current wait time is...." and then not even offering a call-back facility. Well fuck it, do something about it, not just offer an excuse for shit service.

There are many, many examples of this sort of thing. In a perverse way I am experiencing my own "wait time." I just feel that my life has been placed on hold for the past 18 months.

 

[belaguttman]

3 hours ago, jw1739 said:

The main thing that pisses me off about the way this is being managed is not actually the lockdown, although I agree it should be more finely tuned to target areas and not all 7m/4m depending whether it's Vic or Melbourne. What hurts is that I don't see either the Feds or the State making any "structural" changes to the way we live. There seems to be a bland assumption that if we just put various restrictions on people for long enough then somehow this virus will go away and we will then return to "normal."

The anxiety around exponential spread and the Indian variant(s) meant that we were only one day away from not even being able to contact trace effectively with a 2000+ person tracing workforce, the decision to shut down and isolate allowed tracing to ring fence the transmission and should get us back to reduced restrictions and open community by Thursday. This will keep happening from time to time until enough people are vaccinated and we move high risk travellers out of hotel quarantine.

Unlike overseas, our risk/ benefit equation is different, we can realistically aim for a greater benefit (aggressive suppression leading to no community Covid. There's no 'living with' option with this infection, although most people won't become seriously ill, it will quickly infect enough people that the seriously ill people will overwhelm the hospital system and nobody will be able to get any hospital based care for anything. This is all a result of exponential growth in infections, it seems that the rate of doubling has increased from 3-4 days to 1-2 days. This, in itself isn't surprising, natural selection pressures generally result in greater infectivity but lower morbidity for infectious agents, the problem in this case is that the rate of exponential rise in infections will quickly overwhelm any health system.

If only the Federal Government had put the effort into getting us all vaccinated by March as they initially had 'promised'

 

4 hours ago, jw1739 said:

There are many, many examples of this sort of thing. In a perverse way I am experiencing my own "wait time." I just feel that my life has been placed on hold for the past 18 months.

Our lives aren't on hold, this is our life, make the most of it!

[Shahanga]

If only I didn’t live in the state with the most incompetent government in Australia 

Edited June 7, 2021 by Shahanga

[kingofhearts]

All levels of government have been hopeless as this has gone on and on but jeez, the victorian labour government is clearly king of the nuffies.

The most frustrating aspect for me personally has been the lack of accountability by the state government. For example, they want to have control over hotel quarantine and do their own quarantines standards but the second when things go bad "the federal government should've done blah blah blah". You can't have your cake and eat it too!

Even just implementing simple things such as having hotel quarantine in a rural or less populated area hasn't been implemented yet.This is a crisis that we've been going through for nearly 2 years now and what changes have we really made to the way we do things? Adding QR codes? If the state government's policy is to lockdown the minute it seems that the virus is getting out of control, why have they not organised some type of payment that small business owners can access when needs be? The state policy seems as follows:

1)Continue with hotel quarantine

2)Pray the virus doesn't get out again

3) If virus gets out, blame the federal government and lock everything down

It's just very disheartening that every other state/territory seems to have some type of normalicy (and maybe a bit of better luck) and yet we're constantly having to go in and out of lockdown due to state government incompetence.

 

[belaguttman]

Both levels of Government have some responsibility for this. Both State and Federal Governments , Coalition and ALP, have spent the last 40 Yeats stripping Health administration of clinical expertise, replacing experts with managers, outsourcing and privatising services. What this means is that bureaucracies are very poorly equipped and resourced to deal with situations like this because it isn't the sort of problem you can solve by privatising and outsourcing (hotel quarantine). Its the reason why the Victorian DHHS went into the pandemic with 12 contact tracers, one phone line and one fax machine, and why Federal Aged Care had 3 public servants in charge of pandemic preparation, nobody who made decisions knew any better, they sure know how to cut services, even if they did know better there wasn't the expertise or the personal to act competently.

These are the joys of neo-libetralism.

[jw1739]

@belaguttman @kingofhearts We could write a book on this. All three levels of government are to blame for this, and indeed so are many other people. In the past 40 years we've seen a steady decline in the standards required in government and the public "service" and indeed in how the population behaves. We've become pre-occupied with political correctness, social engineering and self-interest, perhaps best illustrated by a former Prime Minster who listed his finest achievement as the legalisation of same-sex marriage. We're hampered by an outdated constitution that might have been appropriate in 1901 but isn't 120 years later, to the point where Scotty from Marketing started popularly by banning Chinese students from entering Australia and then found to his annoyance that he became largely irrelevant, and has had temper tantrums regularly after that. State politicians' favourite pastime is to try to score points off one another, and the main requirement for appointment as a senior bureaucrat is to have defective recall ability. (Hi there Kym!) Moving on to allocation of resources I note in passing that we here in Victoria have $58m for a "truth commission," $15m for a feasibility study into a quarantine facility, but nothing for the facility itself. Anyway, what's the use of a 500-person facility - three flights into Melbourne and it's full - what do we do next? The guy who owns Avalon offers us his airport and land, so VicGov decides on Mickleham... Not long after the completion of a basketball stadium at my local primary school (read that again to believe it) my local council wants to spend $15m on a netball centre at the secondary school next door. You get my drift.

I could go on and on (I already have) but basically the structure of our government, and the command structure therein, is out-dated and works against us have any sort of national plan, whether it be for health, education, industry, transport, and indeed fighting a pandemic.

[jw1739]

I hope we throw the book at this bloody couple who left Melbourne during lockdown and went through NSW and into Queensland via Goondiwindi. Self-interest.

[NewConvert]

I am not sure why people are picking on local councils when they have nothing to do with quarantine. But part of the problem is that Australia have not had a quarantine problem since 1921 and so we fell into the epidemic Kondratiev wave or in other words we have no memories of epidemics. And economists (and I am quickly reaching the point where genociding the whole lot of them is the only way forward) have reduced all the safeguards against epidemics (one of the four horseman of the apocalyse btw) to zero.

To me the first thing to do is to re-think the concept of quarantine. For a long period of time secluded quarantine stations were there to let people die (survival was luck) in quarantine. These days people would be upset over that. Secondly, genocide economists but I already said that.

[belaguttman]

I'd also say to this Government's credit, they have learned to an extent from their mistakes:

DHHS has been separated into 2 departments, health and human services

The Minister and top bureaucrats have been replaced, the head bureaucrats in an ex obstetrician

we have a decentralised force of 2,500 contact tracers and, this time, they have done a great job - 5 rings of contacts traced for each case

[jw1739]

47 minutes ago, NewConvert said:

I am not sure why people are picking on local councils when they have nothing to do with quarantine. But part of the problem is that Australia have not had a quarantine problem since 1921 and so we fell into the epidemic Kondratiev wave or in other words we have no memories of epidemics. And economists (and I am quickly reaching the point where genociding the whole lot of them is the only way forward) have reduced all the safeguards against epidemics (one of the four horseman of the apocalyse btw) to zero.

To me the first thing to do is to re-think the concept of quarantine. For a long period of time secluded quarantine stations were there to let people die (survival was luck) in quarantine. These days people would be upset over that. Secondly, genocide economists but I already said that.

Merely demonstrating that there's actually plenty of money sloshing around this State and spent on fripperies, but when we need something then suddenly there isn't. 

[NewConvert]

1 hour ago, jw1739 said:

Merely demonstrating that there's actually plenty of money sloshing around this State and spent on fripperies, but when we need something then suddenly there isn't. 

Noted your point. Mine was that the money should have been spent before the pandemic hit. In other words make sure the house is in good nick before the storm hits. And the reason why it wasn't was because economists created the environment that enabled the house to rot.

[belaguttman]

30 minutes ago, NewConvert said:

Noted your point. Mine was that the money should have been spent before the pandemic hit. In other words make sure the house is in good nick before the storm hits. And the reason why it wasn't was because economists created the environment that enabled the house to rot.

It's not like the pandemic came from out of the blue, epidemiologists and ID physicians have been talking about it's inevitability for years. They've actually been expecting (and still are) something far worse, a bird flu with 60% mortality - it's just a question of when, not if.

[Shahanga]

This continued fucking lockdown for barely a handful of cases in people who are already isolating is completely pointless and complete bullshit.

[jw1739]

13 hours ago, Shahanga said:

This continued fucking lockdown for barely a handful of cases in people who are already isolating is completely pointless and complete bullshit.

As you know I've been a supporter of the lockdowns. It's a known effective method of curtailing and then stopping the transmission of the virus. But it is a very blunt weapon, and it does now seem that here in Victoria it's being used as the weapon of choice, and I'm likening it to carpet-bombing. We now know a lot more about this virus and its mutations than we did at the start - as an example genomic sequencing. Our other weapons, such as contact tracing, have been improved, although some such as signing in to premises are not so effective because the compliance rate is pretty weak.

IMO by now our response to outbreaks should be far more targeted. We seem to have just two classifications - "regional Victorians" and "metropolitan Melbourne." The latter should be divided up in to regions - I don't know how many, but say 10 to start with based on postcode or Local Government Authority, and any lockdown applied selectivity according to where the cases are. It doesn't make sense to have people on the edge of the Mornington Peninsula locked down when the outbreak is way north of Epping somewhere in the boondocks - or vice versa. At the moment, some "regional Victorians" live closer to the contact centres than I do. They can drive to the airport and go interstate whereas I cannot go further than 25 km from my home even if I don't get out of the car? Absurd.

The virus is not suddenly appearing out of nowhere in Australia. It is being imported. By people many of whom went overseas during the pandemic, some relatively recently, and some to the most highly-infected and affected destinations - India for example. Even if we are obliged to have them back - which is only a common law right and not a statutory right - our governments have simply failed us on quarantine. The detention period is not long enough, and the facilities are too close to population centres. And an expensive single 500-person facility somewhere won't help much - three flights into Melbourne and it will be full, so what then? If masks are an effective control measure, then airborne particles are an an infection route, so how come it took "experts" almost a year to think about air-conditioning? Other protective measures are also failures - hospitals are still not equipped with the best PPE available. The vaccination program is at last gaining some momentum, but even there the governments get a fail. The Health Minister continues to refer to "vaccinations" when he means "doses" - only about 0.5m people have actually been "vaccinated." Overall, "communication" has been poor.

IMO what is needed now is a roadmap out of the situation we're in. And it won't be just "opening up" as Scotty from Marketing would have it be. But I believe within Australia we can return to our pre-virus life if we do the right things in a timely manner. Carpet-bombing "metropolitan Melbourne" isn't on my list.

 

[n i k o]

The government is incompetent. People flying into Victoria that can just walk completely free into the state. Draconian policing by vicpol gathering together in large groups, no home visitors pushing people to go out to pubs and restaurants that are packed to the brim. The state of Victoria is a shambles in many ways. 

[jw1739]

20 minutes ago, n i k o said:

The government is incompetent. People flying into Victoria that can just walk completely free into the state. Draconian policing by vicpol gathering together in large groups, no home visitors pushing people to go out to pubs and restaurants that are packed to the brim. The state of Victoria is a shambles in many ways. 

Yes, it's completely inconsistent. No more than two visitors to your home, whoever they are,  but 100 people a day can go to a brothel. I went to the Asian supermarket in Clayton on Sunday - absolutely chokkers. 

[NewConvert]

9 hours ago, jw1739 said:

As you know I've been a supporter of the lockdowns. It's a known effective method of curtailing and then stopping the transmission of the virus. But it is a very blunt weapon, and it does now seem that here in Victoria it's being used as the weapon of choice, and I'm likening it to carpet-bombing. We now know a lot more about this virus and its mutations than we did at the start - as an example genomic sequencing. Our other weapons, such as contact tracing, have been improved, although some such as signing in to premises are not so effective because the compliance rate is pretty weak.

IMO by now our response to outbreaks should be far more targeted. We seem to have just two classifications - "regional Victorians" and "metropolitan Melbourne." The latter should be divided up in to regions - I don't know how many, but say 10 to start with based on postcode or Local Government Authority, and any lockdown applied selectivity according to where the cases are. It doesn't make sense to have people on the edge of the Mornington Peninsula locked down when the outbreak is way north of Epping somewhere in the boondocks - or vice versa. At the moment, some "regional Victorians" live closer to the contact centres than I do. They can drive to the airport and go interstate whereas I cannot go further than 25 km from my home even if I don't get out of the car? Absurd.

The virus is not suddenly appearing out of nowhere in Australia. It is being imported. By people many of whom went overseas during the pandemic, some relatively recently, and some to the most highly-infected and affected destinations - India for example. Even if we are obliged to have them back - which is only a common law right and not a statutory right - our governments have simply failed us on quarantine. The detention period is not long enough, and the facilities are too close to population centres. And an expensive single 500-person facility somewhere won't help much - three flights into Melbourne and it will be full, so what then? If masks are an effective control measure, then airborne particles are an an infection route, so how come it took "experts" almost a year to think about air-conditioning? Other protective measures are also failures - hospitals are still not equipped with the best PPE available. The vaccination program is at last gaining some momentum, but even there the governments get a fail. The Health Minister continues to refer to "vaccinations" when he means "doses" - only about 0.5m people have actually been "vaccinated." Overall, "communication" has been poor.

IMO what is needed now is a roadmap out of the situation we're in. And it won't be just "opening up" as Scotty from Marketing would have it be. But I believe within Australia we can return to our pre-virus life if we do the right things in a timely manner. Carpet-bombing "metropolitan Melbourne" isn't on my list.

 

Statutory or common law does not make a difference, if its law then the government is obliged to obey. Common law can be overwritten by statutory law and between 1986 and 2007 Victoria undertook a project to eliminate all common law rights established prior to the 20th century. As far as teh right to return it has not been tested in courts but many believe it is actually statutory law due to international law agreement signed post WW2 by Menzies (indeed Sir Paul Huslack helped write a few).

Experts knew about air con from the beginning (my youngest brother works in the field) the problem is retro fitting the correct type into existing hotels. With regards to quarantine a complete rethink is required. 100 years ago most travel was by ship and how many people would have arrived? compared to 2018 it would have been minimal. Travel within a city would have been slow and no Ubers/Delivaroos/couriers etc. The issue about locating quarantine facilities relate to if teh person falls ill and need hospitalisation - we are not going to build a hospital in the middle of nowhere waiting for pandemics to start. My take is that the government ought to contract hotel chains so that they can be retrofitted to behave like genuine quarantine facilities or alternatively when permits are issued that they have to be built to quarantine levels. Can't work out what to do with people who travel and have mental health issues as in my day they would not have travelled other than to a sanitarium or loony bin but apparently that is no longer acceptable.

Everything else the governments have been incompetent - messages, availability of vaccines, PPE gear, untrained staff, poor logistics. This has been raging for over 12 months by now they should have nailed it. They could and should have requested expertise from logistic companies, the supermarket chains and listened.

But the other problems are us, not wearing masks, not getting tested, not getting vaccinated, not registering with the QR codes.

And if I could get my hands on the prick delivery driver who had symptoms for 10 days before getting tested.

[jw1739]

From today's ABC (Australia) "Ronablog" at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-16/covid-live-update-latest-news-nsw-hotel-quarantine/100218512

Consistent with the evidence that it takes some time before a new pathogen can be recognised as such.

Analysis suggests COVID-19 was in US by Christmas 2019

A new analysis of blood samples from 24,000 Americans taken early last year is the latest and largest study to suggest that the new coronavirus popped up in the US in December 2019 — weeks before cases were first recognised by health officials.

The analysis is not definitive, and some experts remain sceptical, but federal health officials are increasingly accepting a timeline in which small numbers of COVID-19 infections may have occurred in the US before the world ever became aware of a dangerous new virus erupting in China.

“The studies are pretty consistent,” said Natalie Thornburg of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There was probably very rare and sporadic cases here earlier than we were aware of. But it was not widespread and didn’t become widespread until late February."

Such results underscore the need for countries to work together and identify newly emerging viruses as quickly and collaboratively as possible, she added.

AP

[Shahanga]

I’m hearing a few stories of people with strange breathing conditions picked up in China in late 2019. I wonder when it really got out of that lab? As early as September perhaps?

[jw1739]

59 minutes ago, Shahanga said:

I’m hearing a few stories of people with strange breathing conditions picked up in China in late 2019. I wonder when it really got out of that lab? As early as September perhaps?

The alternative explanation that some favour is that it arrived in China as a consequence of the World Military Games held in Wuhan in late October 2019. Many countries took part in these Games (including the USA.) Of course all these things are good fodder for conspiracy theorists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

While it may be interesting to find where the bloody thing originated, IMO the important thing is to work collaboratively to overcome it. Political rhetoric doesn't assist that. The longer it persists the more mutations will arise. I suspect that we are in for annual booster injections for the foreseeable future, and I don't see any practical alternative to quarantine for people who have not been inoculated. We're buying time with lockdowns and other control methods, but we must use that time productively or all that we have gone through will be wasted.

Edited June 16, 2021 by jw1739

[Shahanga]

1 hour ago, jw1739 said:

The alternative explanation that some favour is that it arrived in China as a consequence of the World Military Games held in Wuhan in late October 2019. Many countries took part in these Games (including the USA.) Of course all these things are good fodder for conspiracy theorists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

While it may be interesting to find where the bloody thing originated, IMO the important thing is to work collaboratively to overcome it. Political rhetoric doesn't assist that. The longer it persists the more mutations will arise. I suspect that we are in for annual booster injections for the foreseeable future, and I don't see any practical alternative to quarantine for people who have not been inoculated. We're buying time with lockdowns and other control methods, but we must use that time productively or all that we have gone through will be wasted.

There’s as much chance of that as the moon landings been faked. I’m surprised you’re taken in by that simplistic communist propaganda.

If the Yanks gave wuhan Corona it would have been all over the US first. Totally devoid of all logic or sense. There’s as much chance as it originating in Melbourne.

As to where this came from I’m surprised you don’t see it as important. Clearly the first step to fixing a problem is identifying the cause. If this was indeed caused by military research in China, which now seems more likely than not, then it would be best if that work was outlawed under a new or updated Geneva convention to say “it doesn’t matter now” will doom us to repeat it.

[jw1739]

Oh, not taken in by any propaganda, Communist, US, Australian or otherwise. If you refer to my post earlier today you will see that there is emerging evidence that the virus had appeared in the US before the world became aware of the outbreak in Wuhan. Possibly if the same sort of blood sampling were undertaken in countries such as Spain and Italy, which were hit hard and early, then the same might be found?  These things travel in all directions - they don't have a one-way ticket. I'm fairly certain that a number of countries carry out research into biological weapons. China is not the only bad guy in the world. 

[Baka1]

You’re a donkey if you believe in this shit show. No offence 

[NewConvert]

8 hours ago, Shahanga said:

There’s as much chance of that as the moon landings been faked. I’m surprised you’re taken in by that simplistic communist propaganda.

If the Yanks gave wuhan Corona it would have been all over the US first. Totally devoid of all logic or sense. There’s as much chance as it originating in Melbourne.

As to where this came from I’m surprised you don’t see it as important. Clearly the first step to fixing a problem is identifying the cause. If this was indeed caused by military research in China, which now seems more likely than not, then it would be best if that work was outlawed under a new or updated Geneva convention to say “it doesn’t matter now” will doom us to repeat it.

Let start by identifying the source of the "theory" that it was manufactured in a lab and leak - where did that begin from? The same people that told us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? You know, Baghdad to London in 45 minutes, human mincing machine? Or was it D J Trump? A man whose sterling reputation has been upheld throughout the decades by the US courts ?

It helps to know people who work in the field, who can tell you that the leap in scientific development to artificially mutate a virus is pretty f*cking large and that humanity is several decades away from being close to that.

The most likely explanation is that it was a bat. And then what? Exterminate all bats from Earth?

More likely is that because of international travel it is quite likely that an earlier version of the virus was already travelling around the planet before it became pandemic. After all in 2018 it is estimated that Australia alone had 42.8M people traverse its international borders. The USA had ~80M and Italy had 215M. So yes, pandemics are going to be harder to contain because of all the travelling. How did governments respond to the emerging pandemic is a bigger concern. And how well did economic theory help out? Or have I mentioned elsewhere that economists need to be genocided?

Having said that I remain open to Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe' s theory of life originating outside of Earth. In 2018 the solar system was visited by an extra solar system asteroid "Oumuamua" which spewed gases as it traversed the solar system. And viruses are pretty hardy things. And that is my contribution to the space cadets conspiracy theories.

[malloy]

10 hours ago, NewConvert said:

Let start by identifying the source of the "theory" that it was manufactured in a lab and leak - where did that begin from? The same people that told us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? You know, Baghdad to London in 45 minutes, human mincing machine? Or was it D J Trump? A man whose sterling reputation has been upheld throughout the decades by the US courts ?

It helps to know people who work in the field, who can tell you that the leap in scientific development to artificially mutate a virus is pretty f*cking large and that humanity is several decades away from being close to that.

The most likely explanation is that it was a bat. And then what? Exterminate all bats from Earth?

More likely is that because of international travel it is quite likely that an earlier version of the virus was already travelling around the planet before it became pandemic. After all in 2018 it is estimated that Australia alone had 42.8M people traverse its international borders. The USA had ~80M and Italy had 215M. So yes, pandemics are going to be harder to contain because of all the travelling. How did governments respond to the emerging pandemic is a bigger concern. And how well did economic theory help out? Or have I mentioned elsewhere that economists need to be genocided?

Having said that I remain open to Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe' s theory of life originating outside of Earth. In 2018 the solar system was visited by an extra solar system asteroid "Oumuamua" which spewed gases as it traversed the solar system. And viruses are pretty hardy things. And that is my contribution to the space cadets conspiracy theories.

Just to make a point of distinction, it doesn't have to be man made if it did indeed leak from the Wuhan lab. It seems that when ever anyone wants to refute the lab leak theory they jump to the full blown conspiracy theory version of a biological weapon manufactured by China.

Edited June 16, 2021 by malloy

[NewConvert]

7 hours ago, malloy said:

Just to make a point of distinction, it doesn't have to be man made if it did indeed leak from the Wuhan lab. It seems that when ever anyone wants to refute the lab leak theiry they jump to the full blown conspiracy theory version of a biological weapon manufactured by China.

And the alternative, less full blown theory is? DJ Trump nor the American intelligence agency are not pushing anything else.

[jw1739]

3 hours ago, NewConvert said:

And the alternative, less full blown theory is? DJ Trump nor the American intelligence agency are not pushing anything else.

I'm assuming that the less inflated theory is that the Wuhan lab was experimenting with a naturally-occurring virus that it had isolated from somewhere. One source I've looked at says that there are around 10 to the power 31 of these things floating around our world (National Geographic?). I confess to having no idea of how you might either isolate or manufacture a virus, but I don't think I'm far off the mark when I say that various countries are researching biological weapons.

This is interesting: https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6258758621001. Note the point about the funding of the Wuhan research facility.

[malloy]

2 hours ago, NewConvert said:

And the alternative, less full blown theory is? DJ Trump nor the American intelligence agency are not pushing anything else.

That whilst studying the coronavirus, having been isolated from bats, one of the researchers was unintentionally exposed to it and got sick from it. 

Mind you, I am not asserting that this did or did not happen, but it seems your response is more fixated on Trump and those who support him.

[jw1739]

1 hour ago, malloy said:

That whilst studying the coronavirus, having been isolated from bats, one of the researchers was unintentionally exposed to it and got sick from it. 

Mind you, I am not asserting that this did or did not happen, but it seems your response is more fixated on Trump and those who support him.

That's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. I presume that that was one of the possible explanations looked into by the WHO team, such as they were able to do so.

I don't object to continuing investigation into the ultimate source of the pandemic, but I maintain the view that the most important thing now is to try and halt it.

[jw1739]

Our vaccination program is in a deeper shambles now. What happens to those 50-60 year-olds who have had their first injection and are waiting for the second? No-one seems to know.

[Shahanga]

54 minutes ago, jw1739 said:

Our vaccination program is in a deeper shambles now. What happens to those 50-60 year-olds who have had their first injection and are waiting for the second? No-one seems to know.

You mean me? 

Look I reckon if you’ve survived the first one you should be ok for the 2nd. If I cease posting though, you’ll know I “may have been mistaken”.

[jw1739]

1 hour ago, Shahanga said:

You mean me? 

Look I reckon if you’ve survived the first one you should be ok for the 2nd. If I cease posting though, you’ll know I “may have been mistaken”.

Yes, lot's of people like you. I think this is a bit like the restrictions. Two people have died following the injection of a vaccine out of something over 4m doses. And the deaths "likely" caused by the vaccine. There's no "zero risk" in life, and aren't we being overly cautious here? I have my second dose tomorrow. Actually, I think I prefer to have a "traditional" vaccine rather than one that monkeys (no pun intended) around with my DNA. As far as I know mRNA vaccines aren't really proven safe over the longer term.

[Shahanga]

34 minutes ago, jw1739 said:

Yes, lot's of people like you. I think this is a bit like the restrictions. Two people have died following the injection of a vaccine out of something over 4m doses. And the deaths "likely" caused by the vaccine. There's no "zero risk" in life, and aren't we being overly cautious here? I have my second dose tomorrow. Actually, I think I prefer to have a "traditional" vaccine rather than one that monkeys (no pun intended) around with my DNA. As far as I know mRNA vaccines aren't really proven safe over the longer term.

I hear you.

part of the problem is the state government’s have gone done the “zero risk” path and now we are seeing some of the consequences.

Nothing in life is zero risk, but plenty of the naive public are expecting it as their right, at least in relation to Corona.

[Shahanga]

@jw1739, professor Kelly is saying (paraphrased) if you lived through your first AZ, no worries mate for your second. She’ll be right.

[jw1739]

9 minutes ago, Shahanga said:

@jw1739, professor Kelly is saying (paraphrased) if you lived through your first AZ, no worries mate for your second. She’ll be right.

That was my clear understanding from my previous reading. But why put out the revised recommendation first and spook everyone in the 50-60 age bracket and then add the further information later? The Feds have completely botched their information program.

[NewConvert]

8 hours ago, malloy said:

That whilst studying the coronavirus, having been isolated from bats, one of the researchers was unintentionally exposed to it and got sick from it. 

Mind you, I am not asserting that this did or did not happen, but it seems your response is more fixated on Trump and those who support him.

But then that could happen anywhere. And China have repeatedly stated that no one got sick. And then there is the question how did it get from the lab to the market?

And my fixation stems from the hammering that China keeps getting by politicians that had a bit of warning and then did very little. In effect I see it as a deflection technique.

[malloy]

5 minutes ago, NewConvert said:

But then that could happen anywhere. And China have repeatedly stated that no one got sick. And then there is the question how did it get from the lab to the market?

And my fixation stems from the hammering that China keeps getting by politicians that had a bit of warning and then did very little. In effect I see it as a deflection technique.

It could happen anywhere, but I don't see that as relevant in determining the origins of a virus whose epicentre appears to be Wuhan.

China state alot of things that aren't true (more so than most governments), so forgive me for not holding much faith in their assertion that no one at the lab got sick.

Regardless of where your fixation stems from, it is still a fixation, the result of which is that you are arguing points with people who do not hold the countering view that you are trying to best.