Today I’m looking in depth at singing – how risky is it, and how does it compare with other activities? It seems to be slightly more risky than speaking at the same volume, but a much more important question is how well ventilated the space is, whether you are speakingContinue Reading
Has anywhere in the world reached herd immunity? Some communities may have, but at terrible cost. Today I’m looking the level of population (or herd) immunity around the world. Early on in the pandemic, there was a talking point, which is creeping back occasionally, that we should just stand back,Continue Reading
In this time of worldwide pandemic, it seems easy to be quite negative about human nature. Especially when watching just about anything on the news at the moment. But the reason these stories are news is that most people aren’t like that. So today I’m reviewing two very hopeful booksContinue Reading
Did more than 60,000 cases of Covid19 go undetected in Australia before the second wave in Victoria? It’s possible. But I don’t think the new widely-reported study adds any strong evidence for it. You’ve probably seen reporting of this (not yet peer reviewed) study, suggesting that perhaps 60,000 people in AustraliaContinue Reading
In NSW, after the home, the most likely place for transmission of Covid19 is a café or restaurant. NSW publishes a weekly report on the Covid19 pandemic – you can read them all here. Since 1 July they have been reporting on their analysis of each of the clusters inContinue Reading
There is increasing evidence that in a pandemic, public health measures (including lockdowns) help the economy compared with the alternative of not locking down – countries which reduced deaths from Covid19 also had better economic (GDP) outcomes in the quarter ending June 2020. Increasingly, studies are looking at the linksContinue Reading
Total death rates in Australia up until the end of May are lower than recent averages. But there was a peak of deaths in late March and early April, which seems to have been a bigger peak than the reported Covid19 deaths (which peaked in the same weeks). In myContinue Reading
In Victoria, if you are over the age of 85, you are around three times more likely than the average person to have tested positive for Covid19. I’ve been following the Royal Commission into Aged Care quite closely as it examines some quite horrendous stories about the experience of manyContinue Reading
How effective have Victoria’s lockdowns been? The research shows that they’ve meant a reduction of between 9,000 and 37,000 Covid19 cases up to 31 July, so the lockdowns have probably saved between 100 and 500 lives that would have been lost without them. And that’s just so far. One veryContinue Reading
Can contact tracing reduce or remove the need for physical distancing? Contact tracing, when done quickly and effectively, removes some transmission, but not all of it. And the more cases there are, particularly in an environment without much physical distancing, the more the chances of a superspreader that will causeContinue Reading