Latest Posts
How does Australia’s 2021 Covid19 wave compare to Winter 2020?
How does Australia’s 2021 Covid19 wave compare to 2020? So far, cases are around three times higher and deaths are around a third of last year.
Today’s analysis is a quick graph. I’ve seen this graph from lots of other countries, but now here in Australia our latest wave is big enough to categorically show that vaccination has made a difference compared with the Victorian wave last year. As you can see, in 2020, deaths lagged cases by around 2-3 weeks. This year, the death rates compared with numbers of cases is substantially lower, and the rate also looks as if it is slightly improving.Continue Reading
Are hospitals rationing care for sicker Covid patients?
In NSW in this wave of Covid19, are hospitals starting to ration care and send more sick people home as they run out of space? The statistics suggest that hospital in the home is being used more and more to take the pressure off hospitals. But some of the reduction in hospitalised cases could also be vaccination starting to reduce the seriousness of Covid19 illnesses.Continue Reading
Doherty Institute vaccination assumptions – a closer look
Are the Doherty Institute assumptions about vaccine effectiveness optimistic? And does it matter? Yes and yes. So we should monitor the spread of Covid19 closely as vaccination rates increase, and use 70% and 80% adult vaccination rates as guides, rather than stick to then as rigid rules to decide how to ease restrictions across Australia.
A reminder that the Doherty Institute report makes it clear that to control the Delta variant, ongoing public health and social measures such as contact tracing, isolating, and restraints on social mixing (compared with pre virus days) are needed no matter what vaccination rate is achieved, so a gradual guided relaxation of measures is what is recommended anyway.Continue Reading
How can we stop the NSW Covid outbreak growing? The Doherty modelling says 80% adult vaccination
The Covid19 outbreak in NSW continues to grow despite a gradually tightening lockdown. The current doubling time is about 11 days, meaning that my simple model is projecting 1,000 cases a day by the end of August. It seems the only way out is vaccination. How much vaccination? The DohertyContinue Reading
Climate Reflections – the IPCC report and extreme weather
Today the IPCC released its sixth assessment report, and I’ve had a look at what it says about extremes – weather and climate. In this land of drought and flooding rain, extreme weather is already damaging, and the IPCC report makes it clear that it is going to get worse – the extremes get more extreme faster than the medians move. Continue Reading
What factors seem to lead to higher or lower vaccination rates in NSW?
What factors seem to lead to higher or lower vaccination rates in NSW? I’ve adjusted the NSW location vaccination rates for the age mix of each location. The strongest correlation is with income levels – the higher the income, the more likely the population is to have had at least one dose of vaccine. Surprisingly, the percentage of the population who speaks a language other than English doesn’t seem to make much difference. Continue Reading
When can Australia open its borders? We’ve got a lot more vaccination still to come
With the delta variant widespread, Australia needs to aim for around 80% vaccination of the whole population before widespread opening of international borders to avoid lockdowns and unacceptably high deaths from Covid19, based on my use of The University of Melbourne’s Covid19 modelling. We could open up in a limited way at earlier levels (at least 50% of the population vaccinated), but to avoid frequent lockdowns, we would have to limit international arrivals until vaccination is close to population wide. And even when opening up happens, many of the non pharmaceutical measures (like masks, contact tracing, regular testing etc) we have grown used to since Covid19 came to Australia will still be with us.Continue Reading
Can Sydney learn anything from Taiwan’s outbreak?
As Sydney grapples with the Delta virus and our second week of lockdown, I thought a look at Taiwan might be instructive. Taiwan is nearly two months ahead of Sydney with its first real Covid19 outbreak of the whole pandemic. And while everyone is looking at Melbourne, other places inContinue Reading
Updates on vaccination rates and population mortality rates
At current rates, the Australian population will be fully vaccinated in June 2022, and death rates in Australia continue to be appreciably lower than previous years. Some updates on some analysis I’ve looked at previously.Continue Reading
Modelling the opening of Australia’s borders
Australia has had very little Covid19 compared with the rest of the world, due to very strict border controls and lockdowns. But with the rest of the world opening up as their populations are increasingly vaccinated, how does Australia do the same? I look at some initial modelling from the Burnet Institute. My key takeaways? The better the vaccine efficacy (particularly against any form of infection and transmission) the more we can open up without serious Covid19 disease. And waiting until a reasonable proportion of the population is vaccinated (say 40%) makes a real difference to the incidence of severe disease and death.Continue Reading