Coronavirus 4 - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

[stui magpie]

^

Funny enough, the Australian state with the lowest Vaccination rate is WA.

Had a bastard of a busy day with Covid today, not what I needed. Where I work has a residential care program for young people, one of the staff members went home last week feeling unwell, got tested and result came back yesterday as positive. Mayhem ensued.

Sending people home to isolate and get tested. Primary contacts are easy to identify but secondary contacts of contacts make shit messier, convincing adolescents that they have to get tested and isolate, organising staff to stay with them in full PPE, the Teams Chat on my laptop has been pinging like a pokie paying out.

Trying to get clear info on who has to isolate for how long is ridiculous. Tier 1 and 2 are simple but if you spent 15 minutes with someone who spent 15 minutes with someone who tested positive????

Spent the arvo ringing people who are isolating at home, checking in, making sure they're OK and trying to identify if they were in contact with any staff we didn't know about yet. So far all good, they're all well and have all tested negative.

Beers going down well tonight.

[Dave The Man]

I am tipping a Spike on Covid Cases next few days as Parks and Beaches be Packed Today

[pietillidie]

This might interest. You can usually snag a few free Bloomberg views a month.

[eddiesmith]

[Pies4shaw]

A couple of "state of knowledge" pieces for those who are interested:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/covid-delta-variant-what-the-science-says/100497804

This one indicates that:

- Delta is between 2 and 5 times as contagious as the original variant;
- Delta is (at least modestly) more likely to lead to hospitalization and death than earlier strains; and
- although the vaccines provide good coverage against Delta, breakthrough infections are more common with Delta than with earlier strains. By reference to this US report https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm?s_cid=mm7037e1_w#T1_down it suggests that you are ten times less likely to die of COVID if you are fully vaccinated.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-29/why-a-small-number-of-fully-vaccinated-people-have-died-of-covid/100497770

This one tries to identify (from a very small sub-population of fully vaccinated people who have died in NSW) why some people that have been fully vaccinated still get severe illness and some of those who do die.

[Pies4shaw]

In Victoria:

[Dave The Man]

[Pies4shaw]

^ The number is high but at least the R(eff) is dropping, again. It's still higher than NSW's - but it is going to remain so until the low levels of double-vaccination in the Northern and Western "hot spots" are massively improved. One positive aspect of this, so far, in Victoria has been that the regional numbers have been very low (both in numbers and as a percentage of all daily cases), compared to NSW. Now that La Trobe is in lockdown and things are spreading in the South-East of Melbourne (I presume those two events are connected), I wonder whether that can be maintained.

[Pies4shaw]

From NSW Health twitter:

[roar]

[eddiesmith]

[stui magpie]

Had an interesting meeting earlier with DFFH getting some clarity around our situation.

Good news is, apart from the positive case (who is fully vaccinated) everyone is is testing negative.

The few people who were primary contacts of theirs have to do the full 14 days, despite testing negative but the staff who were secondary contacts are free to leave as both the young people and themselves have tested negative.

We've basically done all the contact tracing on this ourselves, no one from the contact tracing people have spoken to the positive case yet and, apparently, they aren't likely to. The ideal is to do it with 48 hours of a positive test but they're currently being smashed with numbers.

[Pies4shaw]

[eddiesmith]

[stui magpie]