Insight – Air pollution I have read a lot of people recently talking about how clear our skies are, given how few cars there are on the road. Sydney has had some beautiful days lately. So are we managing to reduce pollution (and hence improve our chances if Covid19 getsContinue Reading
Insight Today I’m going to talk a bit about why random testing is important, and why in my view, we need to have the ability to do random testing in order to relax the lockdown. I now know of three countries where they are doing testing that is closer toContinue Reading
Insight The possibility of reopening schools in Term 2 continues to be debated in the press (and here at home). As I mentioned in my last post, here in NSW, Gladys Berejiklian announced that schools would reopen to students in the third week of Term 2 (that’s May 11 –Continue Reading
Insight Today the Australian Government talked about more modelling that would start to inform its strategy for lifting the lockdown. One particular piece of research informing that is well worth reading – this piece from the Doherty centre which talks about two key issues – how many symptomatic cases ofContinue Reading
Insight There are an increasing number of data points showing that the deaths being counted for Covid19 around the world are a serious undercount of the actual deaths caused by the disease. Today I’m showing two fairly dramatic ones. First, in England and Wales the total deaths in a weekContinue Reading
Insight One of the key numbers that many people use to track how well we are going on containing Covid19 is the number of confirmed cases. I obsessively watch it myself. Today (14 April) there are 6,400 confirmed cases in Australia, which is only a 0.5% increase on the dayContinue Reading
Insight Covid19’s death rates are higher at higher ages. In all the outbreaks so far, the case fatality rate for people over 80 is well over 10% (there’s a table below with more detail). Some of the commentary urging early reopening from lockdown implicitly suggests that those people will dieContinue Reading
Continuing with my New Zealand theme, here is Jacinda Adern letting the children of New Zealand know that the Easter Bunny is definitely an Essential worker. The first time I saw this concept was the Premier of Western Australia (who put out a press release), but as usual Jacinda AdernContinue Reading
Insight Today I’m looking at New Zealand. First, this Washington Post article admiringly describes what has been happening there – New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve it’s squashing it (this article may be paywalled, it wasn’t the first time I saw it but it seems to be now) andContinue Reading
The Australian government has released modelling about the Covid19 pandemic and its possible impact on the health system (for some reason they have been quite reluctant to do so). I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so I’ll be blogging about it tomorrow. But if anyone would likeContinue Reading