On 14/08/21 00:25, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 18:14:40 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> That certainly explains why in countries where the political classes
>> don't care about their population it does tend to back off once the
>> situation gets scary enough. I honestly thought we were going to see
>> that happen again in the UK with 100+k daily cases. However, I was wrong
>> and they seem to have judged it right. Cases remain at 30k and steady.
>
> It must be vexing indeed for you and your Lefty mates in the UK to
> have to admit that Boris has done a superb job of managing this
> pandemic

Perhaps you would like to give numerical evidence for
that assertion. Don't cherry-pick numbers.

Looking at the UK from far away does tend to make it
look rose-tinted.

On 14/08/21 04:48, Rick C wrote:
> On Friday, August 13, 2021 at 1:14:50 PM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
>> People in the UK have been remarkably tolerant of restrictions and
>> mostly compliant with mask wearing. The exceptions here are rare.
>
> That's not how it has been portrayed here.

That wouldn't make a good news item.

Martin is right, although there are always the small
minority that are contrary, especially when it gets
people to pay attention to them.

On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:24:21 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

>
>Of course the UK government was grossly complacent, and did too little too late.

Only because they're Conservatives. If it had been Labour, you'd have
been showering them with praise, even if they'd been utterly useless.
--

Britain: do the right thing and hand Australia back to China.

On Sat, 14 Aug 2021 09:27:15 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

>On 14/08/21 04:48, Rick C wrote:
>> On Friday, August 13, 2021 at 1:14:50 PM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
>>> People in the UK have been remarkably tolerant of restrictions and
>>> mostly compliant with mask wearing. The exceptions here are rare.
>>
>> That's not how it has been portrayed here.
>
>That wouldn't make a good news item.
>
>Martin is right, although there are always the small
>minority that are contrary, especially when it gets
>people to pay attention to them.
>

For once I must agree. My informants back in England tell me that mask
compliance and whatnot is pretty much 100%.
--

Britain: do the right thing and hand Australia back to China.

On Monday, August 16, 2021 at 1:10:38 AM UTC+10, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:24:21 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
> <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>
> >
> >Of course the UK government was grossly complacent, and did too little too late.
> Only because they're Conservatives. If it had been Labour, you'd have
> been showering them with praise, even if they'd been utterly useless.

Cursitor Doom seems to think that everybody else is as willing to ignore reality as he is.

The UK has lost 1,918 dead per million to Covid-19, which makes the government utterly useless. The Australian national government is also conservative, and Australia has lost 37 per million dead to Covid-19. They've screwed up from time to time, but much less often than the US and UK governments.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Sun, 15 Aug 2021 15:26:12 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

>On Monday, August 16, 2021 at 1:10:38 AM UTC+10, Cursitor Doom wrote:
>> On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:24:21 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
>> <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >Of course the UK government was grossly complacent, and did too little too late.
>> Only because they're Conservatives. If it had been Labour, you'd have
>> been showering them with praise, even if they'd been utterly useless.
>
>Cursitor Doom seems to think that everybody else is as willing to ignore reality as he is.
>
>The UK has lost 1,918 dead per million to Covid-19, which makes the government utterly useless. The Australian national government is also conservative, and Australia has lost 37 per million dead to Covid-19. They've screwed up from time to time, but much less often than the US and UK governments.

Even if I accept your figures - IF - this whole thing is a marathon,
not a sprint, and the judgements made along the way can only be
properly compared between countries at least a year or more from
today. At least. There is always the possibility of another variant
arising which can evade your wonderful vaccines entirely and put us
all back to square one.
--

"In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things. In all of these
movements, they bring to the front, as a leading question, the issue of
private property ownership."

- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

On Monday, August 16, 2021 at 9:26:53 AM UTC+10, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Aug 2021 15:26:12 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
> <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>
> >On Monday, August 16, 2021 at 1:10:38 AM UTC+10, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> >> On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:24:21 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
> >> <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> >Of course the UK government was grossly complacent, and did too little too late.
> >> Only because they're Conservatives. If it had been Labour, you'd have
> >> been showering them with praise, even if they'd been utterly useless.
> >
> >Cursitor Doom seems to think that everybody else is as willing to ignore reality as he is.
> >
> >The UK has lost 1,918 dead per million to Covid-19, which makes the government utterly useless. The Australian national government is also conservative, and Australia has lost 37 per million dead to Covid-19. They've screwed up from time to time, but much less often than the US and UK governments..
>
> Even if I accept your figures - IF -

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

> this whole thing is a marathon,
> not a sprint, and the judgements made along the way can only be
> properly compared between countries at least a year or more from
> today. At least.

Australia has done 52 times better than the UK. If this were a 26 mile marathon, the UK would be half mile down the track when Australia had got to the finish line.

> There is always the possibility of another variant arising which can evade your wonderful vaccines entirely and put us all back to square one.

There are lots of different vaccines. The Chinese killed whole virus vaccine seems to being evaded by new strains already. The vaccines used in the west all seem to use a couple of different tricks to persuade our cells to churn out copies of same version of the highly conserved Covid-19 spike protein.

The new strains do have small differences in their spike protein, but not enough to let them evade the vaccines used in the west. Eventually some fully vaccinated people may get sick enough from a new strain of Covid-19 that we have to move to a vaccine that will get our cells to churn out a new version of the spike protein - Fred Bloggs seems to be claiming that this has already happened, but he does seem to be good at getting the wrong message from the stuff he manages to read.

Even then we wouldn't be back at square one - we got effective vaccines against Covid-19 within a year. Before that the four years it took to get a working vaccine against mumps had been a record.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On 16/08/21 00:26, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Aug 2021 15:26:12 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
> <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
>
>> On Monday, August 16, 2021 at 1:10:38 AM UTC+10, Cursitor Doom wrote:
>>> On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:24:21 -0700 (PDT), Anthony William Sloman
>>> <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Of course the UK government was grossly complacent, and did too little too late.
>>> Only because they're Conservatives. If it had been Labour, you'd have
>>> been showering them with praise, even if they'd been utterly useless.
>>
>> Cursitor Doom seems to think that everybody else is as willing to ignore reality as he is.
>>
>> The UK has lost 1,918 dead per million to Covid-19, which makes the government utterly useless. The Australian national government is also conservative, and Australia has lost 37 per million dead to Covid-19. They've screwed up from time to time, but much less often than the US and UK governments.
>
> Even if I accept your figures - IF -

That's revealing. Those figures are astoundingly easy to
check and verify, but you *choose* not to.

That indicates either astounding incompetence or active
malice on your part.

> this whole thing is a marathon,
> not a sprint, and the judgements made along the way can only be
> properly compared between countries at least a year or more from
> today. At least. There is always the possibility of another variant
> arising which can evade your wonderful vaccines entirely and put us
> all back to square one.

Now you contradict yourself, which shouldn't be a surprise.

There is only one way in which the BoJo conservative[1]
administration has done a good job: development and
delivery of vaccines. Take that out of the equation and
they have got /everything/ wrong.

[1] conservative is irrelevant (of course), except to
those twats that mold the world to fit their political
desires

On 14/08/2021 03:14, Martin Brown wrote:
>
>>> The virus is far too infectious to be stopped
>>
>> Also unsupported.
>
> Not nay more it isn't. Watch Australia fail to control it.

That has more to do with the ideology of the party in power in the state
where the outbreak has happened this time. There were delta outbreaks in
other states and these were already extinguished successfully, so nobody
mentions them.

Now there was a delta outbreak in a state governed by a party with a
policy of "living with the virus" so they did not lock down until it had
properly got going already, and then only half-heartedly. If you listen
to their public announcements you might think that they just dropped out
of mathematics at school before the point where they would have learned
about the exponential function, but I'm sure there are very competent
advisors in their health department who are being actively overruled for
ideological reasons.

A big difference from the UK is that the vaccination rate is much lower,
due to bungled vaccine purchasing by the federal government - allegedly
at least one minister personally held shares in the local company that
manufactures one vaccine, and they seemed to be reluctant for the nation
to purchase from its competitors - at least not until they had time to
adjust their share portfolios.

The fact there have been repeated quarantine escapes would appear to
also be caused by crooked politics - the party in federal government
(which had views on Covid fairly close to those of Trump, but which has
mostly learned not to mention them in public) is responsible for the
quarantine system. The Australian Hotels Association are major financial
donors to that party, and coincidentally the quarantine contracts go to
hotels, even though they are not well equipped to prevent
cross-infection of an airborne virus between sick and healthy
passengers, and to staff. There are more suitable facilities (even a
caravan park would be better) but those presumably are not so generous
with their political donations.

Transport from the plane to quarantine was not deemed to be part of
quarantine, so the driver did not require any PPE for that part!
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/24/police-probe-into-sydney-limousine-driver-expanded-as-health-minister-seeks-tougher-mask-rules

Here is a podcast that provides some more background:

https://thejuicemedia.simplecast.com/episodes/why-do-we-keep-having-outbreaks-with-dr-david-berger-_KjLwk76

On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:57:50 PM UTC+10, Chris Jones wrote:
> On 14/08/2021 03:14, Martin Brown wrote:
> >
> >>> The virus is far too infectious to be stopped
> >>
> >> Also unsupported.
> >
> > Not nay more it isn't. Watch Australia fail to control it.
>
> That has more to do with the ideology of the party in power in the state
> where the outbreak has happened this time. There were delta outbreaks in
> other states and these were already extinguished successfully, so nobody
> mentions them.
>
> Now there was a delta outbreak in a state governed by a party with a
> policy of "living with the virus" so they did not lock down until it had
> properly got going already, and then only half-heartedly.

NSW hasn't got a policy of "living with the virus". What it had was experience of being able to lock down tightly enough to eliminate the early Covid-19 strains, and it thought that that much lock-down would work against the delta strain. It didn't. The R-value never got down less than one. It's not much over one - about 1.2 - so the doubling time is about two weeks, and the politicians are now busting a gut try to get people to be more careful.

I suspect that the real problem is that delta is infectious enough that it takes very few irresponsible idiots to sustain the epidemic. With the early strains about 20% of the infected were responsible for 80% of the new infections.

>If you listen to their public announcements you might think that they just dropped out
> of mathematics at school before the point where they would have learned
> about the exponential function, but I'm sure there are very competent
> advisors in their health department who are being actively overruled for
> ideological reasons.
>
> A big difference from the UK is that the vaccination rate is much lower,
> due to bungled vaccine purchasing by the federal government - allegedly
> at least one minister personally held shares in the local company that
> manufactures one vaccine, and they seemed to be reluctant for the nation
> to purchase from its competitors - at least not until they had time to
> adjust their share portfolios.

Don't forget that Australia had eliminated the virus from the community several times in the last year. There wasn't the same desperate need to get the population vaccinated as there was in places where the death toll from Covid-19 was fifty times higher.

> The fact there have been repeated quarantine escapes would appear to
> also be caused by crooked politics - the party in federal government
> (which had views on Covid fairly close to those of Trump, but which has
> mostly learned not to mention them in public) is responsible for the
> quarantine system. The Australian Hotels Association are major financial
> donors to that party, and coincidentally the quarantine contracts go to
> hotels, even though they are not well equipped to prevent
> cross-infection of an airborne virus between sick and healthy
> passengers, and to staff. There are more suitable facilities (even a
> caravan park would be better) but those presumably are not so generous
> with their political donations.

Caravan parks might work better at quarantining people, but they aren't luxury accommodation.
> Transport from the plane to quarantine was not deemed to be part of
> quarantine, so the driver did not require any PPE for that part!
> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/24/police-probe-into-sydney-limousine-driver-expanded-as-health-minister-seeks-tougher-mask-rules

Transporting potentially infectious air-crew was definitely part of the quarantine system.
The driver should have been vaccinated and should have worn PPE, but he wasn't a regular driver and got slotted in at the last minute. It was one more human error - we've had quite a few of them. Clearly everybody should have been more fanatical, but the system had been working well enough for a year before the more infectious delta strain meant that we should have raised our game.

<snipped podcast link>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On 17/08/21 16:23, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
> Caravan parks might work better at quarantining people, but they aren't luxury accommodation.

The hotels here aren't luxury either! At least in a caravan
you could cook decent meals for yourself.

On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 1:35:02 AM UTC+10, Tom Gardner wrote:
> On 17/08/21 16:23, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
> > Caravan parks might work better at quarantining people, but they aren't luxury accommodation.
>
> The hotels here aren't luxury either! At least in a caravan you could cook decent meals for yourself.

If you could get out and buy food worth cooking. That's not an option when you are being quarantined.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On 18/08/21 03:38, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 1:35:02 AM UTC+10, Tom Gardner wrote:
>> On 17/08/21 16:23, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
>>> Caravan parks might work better at quarantining people, but they aren't luxury accommodation.
>>
>> The hotels here aren't luxury either! At least in a caravan you could cook decent meals for yourself.
>
> If you could get out and buy food worth cooking. That's not an option when you are being quarantined.

I was presuming that you could receive goods you have
ordered over the phone or net. It doesn't take much to
be able to make a nutritious palatable meal.

ISTR reading about pizza deliveries here, but that may well
be wrong.

On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:38:57 PM UTC-4, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 1:35:02 AM UTC+10, Tom Gardner wrote:
> > On 17/08/21 16:23, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
> > > Caravan parks might work better at quarantining people, but they aren't luxury accommodation.
> >
> > The hotels here aren't luxury either! At least in a caravan you could cook decent meals for yourself.
> If you could get out and buy food worth cooking. That's not an option when you are being quarantined.

Does the quarantine prohibit outside goods from being brought in? No newspapers or magazines? No clothes? No soap?

--

Rick C.

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