Covid19 Reflections #3

Today’s Insight

Several people have asked me about how we should compare ourselves to Italy. There are quite a few ways, and I’m going to go through them.

• Yesterday (22 March) the number of confirmed cases in Australia was 1,363. In Italy, the point where that number was reached was between 1 and 2 March. So that would make us three weeks behind Italy.
• Yesterday the number of deaths in Australia was 7 (which happened on March 21). In Italy, deaths got to 7 on 25 February. So that makes us 4 weeks behind.
• In Italy, 20% of the population is over 65, and in Australia, áround 16% of the population is over 65 (so our death rate from the same number of infections would be expected to be lower) – perhaps that means that the number of deaths and cases is more consistent than first appears (although the Australian numbers are probably still too small to be sure).
• Australia has tested 25% more of its population (right now) than Italy – 4,500 per million population compared with 3,500 per million for Italy, so we can expect that our case numbers capture a higher percentage of the total infected people than Italy (although there are almost certainly people in the community who are infected who don’t yet know).
• The doubling time for number of cases in Italy is now 6 days. Here in Australia it is now 4 days (the total cases has increased 2.3 times in the last 4 days). That rate of increase has really not changed in the last week.
• Italy implemented a partial lockdown on March 9th (pretty similar to what happened in Australia today except that all schools were also closed) which is two weeks ago. Although they had previously locked down and quarantined the worst hit parts of Lombardy towards the end of February.
• There isn’t a definitive source on healthcare systems that I could find. I found one that ranked Italy at number 2 in the world (with Australia 32nd) and another that ranked Australia as number 10, with Italy 37th. My sense from a quick look at a variety of indices is that Australia might be slightly better (it is mentioned more often in the top 10) but the difference isn’t really that much.
• According to this article, Italy is the second healthiest country in the world (after Spain) – Australia comes seventh on this measure.

So my conclusion is that we are between 3-4 weeks behind Italy in terms of the Covid19 outbreak, or, to put it another way, we have implemented serious measures to flatten the curve 1-2 weeks ahead of them, and our health care system is probably in a similar state of readiness. Right now, 1-2 weeks ahead doesn’t feel like as much as I would like.

Check out the source of all these statistics (and lots more) by clicking on the graph below – I’ve just pulled out one of the many graphs I used.

Best Links

In this thoughtful article, John Daley, the CEO of the Grattan Institute, makes the case that we need to choose a different track that he describes as “stop and restart”. Effectively this means going all the way to a full shut down (as China did, and Italy is now), so that we limit the infections to (close to) those already infected. Then we get to restart with very careful contact tracing and immigration (much easier for us than most given our natural sea border) Worth reading the whole thing, but his conclusion is sobering:

Each of the endgames are unpleasant. COVID-19 is the real-life “trolley problem” in which someone is asked to choose between killing a few or killing many.

When any of us are presented with the trolley problem, the all-but universal response is to refuse to choose.

That is what we are doing at the moment, and it will just make our problems worse.

We should recognise this psychology, and decide to choose the least-bad endgame.

The faster we do it, the less bad it will be.

It does appear that this is what New Zealand has done today.

Life glimpses

Today Australia started closing all cafés, restaurants, pubs, clubs, cinemas, casinos etc, having announced these major steps yesterday. While that felt pretty momentous, we’d been watching the rest of the world do the same over the past week, so it was really a relief to me when it happened.

But in this house, confusion reigned about whether the schools were open. We watched the successive press conferences this morning ( at 8 am! most mornings our school student would have left the house) from Daniel Andrews and Gladys Berijiklian (Vic and NSW premiers) and the upshot is that in NSW school is optional, it is preferable if you stay home and do it online, and Victorian schools are closed. It is easier for Victoria – their school holidays start in a week, whereas in NSW we have three weeks to go, so their decision isn’t (so far) as long term – and they are using this week for the teachers to go in and prepare how to teach online next term. But I really feel for the teachers in NSW public schools. The email from my local state member of parliament said:

Because nearly 30 per cent of children are already being kept out of school, for practical reasons NSW is encouraging parents to keep their children at home. This will ensure there is only one unit of work, whether the student is at home or at school.

For those poor teachers who have one third of their class at home, and two thirds at school, with no time for preparation of how to teach online, their work has just doubled, at least in the short term. It is a meaning of the world “practical” that I haven’t seen before.

Bit of Beauty

Today’s bit of beauty comes from some flowers near our house. We managed to go for a walk without touching anything!