December 2021

Workers compensation cases for Covid, NSW. Reality is biting. Politicians win popularity with slogans like ’we have to live with this virus’. But you can’t live with Covid, and business has realised that because the government won’t eliminate Covid in the community, they now have to. By law. It’s against the law for them to allow people to become infected with Covid. If they let people ’live with the virus‘, they can and will be sued. Government wanted Covid off its desk, and so flicked it to business to solve. Business lobbied to ‘open up’. They made this bed, now they have to lie in it.

A medical friend made a great comparison yesterday. We like to think of Covid as 'like the flu', because flu and colds are part of our normal life. But medically, infection with Covid is much more like concussion head injuries, from playing football. Accumulative damage, over time. Every time you're infected, it does more, potentially lasting damage.

How’s your graph literacy? (Tip: up is bad. Steeply up is very bad.)

Time to end the fantasy of democracy and elected representatives, in emergencies. Get them out of the way. We don’t ‘vote’ on how to put out bushfires or fix floods.

What this graph shows is that some people have had Covid 3 times in 2 years. Have you ever had the flu 3 times in 2 years? Remembering also that Covid is much more dangerous to your body than flu. Have we reached a trigger point yet where ordinary people realise 'living with Covid' is a really, really bad idea?

Omicron in schools. No links to travel. Community transmission is underway. Watch and learn as they come up with new excuses every day to do nothing, as they did with Delta.

My bet. Australia will be under restrictions again before Christmas.

‘Helping’ put up the Christmas tree.

The latest Omicron data suggests it will make a double-vaxxed person as protected as an unvaxxed person was when this all began, in 2020. In other words we could be right back at the beginning, all over again. Except now many people like this have had lobotomies, and what we did in 2020 will be increasingly impossible. Say your prayers.

One of the world's leading infectious disease experts said late last week that the world may be closer to the beginning of the pandemic, than the end. You wouldn't know it, with the idiot pre-Christmas Hopium orgy, as we saw last year before hundreds of thousands died after sharing the Christmas bon-bons.

So sick of the bullshit. Parliament in Canberra shuts down because of one Covid case. Primary schools in Sydney get Omicron cases, and they only send a few classes home.

Society is a high school. Not by analogy - literally. It's where we learn our social models. Great piece here on the US that shows it in a way that can't be missed.

The people who really understand democracy don't support it. And the people who support it don't understand it.

The US: 305,114 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 482,581 Covid deaths since. The UK: 62,130 Covid deaths before vaccinations. 83,744 Covid deaths since. Both libertarian governments which our NSW and federal governments aspire to be like. Both have killed more people after they had vaccines available than before. Because of one thing. They won’t control the spread of the virus, because ‘the Economy’. They use vaccines like Panadol.

In today’s Covid news, data out of Israel shows that the 3rd booster vaccine dose fades in effectiveness as fast as the 2nd dose did. And this is with Delta - early signs are Omicron is 4 times as infectious. We’re closer to the beginning of this pandemic than to the end of it. To be the same broken record, this will be over when we control the spread of the virus. Anybody who wants to ‘live with’ it is condemning all of us to living in a permanent pandemic.

Happy Birthday :)

Anti-vax British doctor gets banned from social media. Gets the ban overturned. Goes on British right-wing nut job channel to talk about his persecution. Gets message from his prostitute mid-interview, on screen. Leaves social media again.

Swastika guy and Hey Donald Grab My Pussy Girl are particular highlights.

Happy Birthday Pen :)

That's going to be a lot of Mt Panorama Covid tests.

Omicron data from the rest of the world is dire. But the Dom is on top of it. We can’t fight it, because it will be too onerous for all of those small businesses selling cafe lattes and scented candles. And he’s still waving to Covid in the next supermarket aisle, as it politely sits ‘alongside’ him. Of course, the alternative as Dom describes, of LOCKDOWNS FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES, is untenable. Like saying ‘we can’t just lock up people who speed on the roads forever, so let’s do nothing.’ Nobody suggests locking up people who speed on the roads forever.

How dumb are we? How many cycles of ‘we have to live with this virus’ Groundhog Day will it take for YOU CAN’T LIVE WITH COVID to penetrate our thick skulls?

Happy Birthday Inez! Have a wonderful day.

Have you noticed that almost none of the leaders who urge us all to live with Covid, ever catch Covid? No accident there, as the evil leader says in Shrek, ‘many of you will die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m happy to make’. Barnaby takes one for the team.

Zooming out can give a very different view. This is an age of extreme and growing wealth inequality. At the same time it’s an age of populism, where increasing numbers of people reject democratic due process in favour of leaders that are much more regal or royal. The big picture? Democracy is dead. It was always a stupid idea, or rather just a holding pattern between the old monarchies, and the new ones being created right now. People want Kings and Queens, they want to be led, they want to aspire to the status of hierarchies. Nobody actually believes in a world where everybody’s opinion is the equal of everybody else’s. That’s our instinct, to say and defend that - we don’t believe it.

Ah, our Gladys. She heard your love Australia, she heard you say ’get a lucrative job in the private sector’. That’s what her Covid strategy was always about, keeping that private sector lucrative. She looked after them, now they’re looking after her.

Highly recommended, a chilling horror story. Michael Palin is wonderful. I streamed it on BritBox.

Happy birthday :)

A tremendous NSW Premier vs Reality show coming, before Christmas. NSW Premiers of recent times have had tenuous grips on reality. But a good grasp of lots of cash.

The new Premier won’t allow NSW Health to say much in public. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. So here they are, trying to tell you that Christmas parties, incuding work ones, and pubs and clubs, are giving people Covid for Christmas. Despite what the Premier says, you don’t want Covid for Christmas.

Omicron doubling every 2-3 days in the UK. 1 million infections expected by Christmas. The government there in meltdown, leadership knows desperate action needed, its own backbench in revolt against it. Politicians should never lead emergency responses, ever. Here in NSW the same variant is being allowed to spread, by a Premier with the same political philosophy as the UK. NSW Health tries to warn us, in the tiny amount of airtime the Premier now allows them. Look after yourselves people, listening to the politicians will be very bad for your health. You don’t want Covid for Christmas. Wear a mask, even though the rules say you don’t need to. Those rules were written by business, not NSW Health.

Stephen Reicher is an expert on human behaviour. Watch this short (40-second) clip, where he explains how the use of the terms ’restrictions’ and ’lockdowns’, instead of words like ’support’ and ‘protection’, make people oppose action against the pandemic. All deliberate framing and spin by politicians in this pandemic, to make people feel like support and protection are oppression, and letting the virus run is ‘freedom’.

Happy Birthday to you!

Vaccine effectiveness against Omicron infection. 2-doses Pfizer - 30% 2-doses AZ - 0%

I do understand FB is the place people come now to pretend we’re still in 2018. Sorry that my posts probably spoil that, if anybody even reads them.

In today’s Covid news, why a fast-spreading but ‘mild’ version of Covid is far more lethal than a slower-spreading, more severe variant. (Note that nobody actually knows if Omicron is mild - that’s just political spin for now. They know it spreads incredibly fast, if it turns out to be severe too, pray. Pray even if it’s mild.)

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle. And then a second hierarchy, where people do more or less well at school, academically. Expertise and knowledge, which determines your position in that hierarchy. The two hierarchies coexist, in school and life/work. And they overlap, (very) often in work for example hierarchy is determined by status rather than expertise. Populism, our current political model, is when the social status hierarchy replaces the expertise hierarchy completely. Elected representatives start to make decisions without expertise at all, everything is 100% popularity-based. Experts get called ‘unelected elites’. Which is just the jocks from school trying to win again, they hate that popularity isn’t the thing that wins, like it always did at school.

Today’s Covid tip. Avoid all Christmas drinks and parties, except with family. Stay clear of pubs, clubs and restaurants. Wear a mask.

Denmark, already up shit creek because they thought they could ‘live with the virus’, has just discovered it can get even worse, when that virus is Omicron. Straight up.

Not a Grinch by the way. Just look at the UK, one of the most immune populations in the world. Check that x-axis, we’re talking days here, not weeks. Don’t be distracted by the ‘Omicron is mild’ stuff, that’s just political spin to keep businesses open for Christmas.

Omicron in Canada. You can see the pattern here. Days, not weeks, astronomical infection growth. The news is all dumb euphoria about travelling to Queensland for holidays. No doubt if this all ends up badly, the same people will trot out the 'hindsight is a fine thing' BS.

Vote for libertarian conservatives (US, UK, Australia), this is the nonsense you get. The UK government, facing a 'tsunami' of Omicron infections (their word), is reverting to script. 'Get vaccinated'. It's less than 2 weeks until Christmas, with millions still to get a 3rd dose, and it takes 2 weeks to even get the 75% immunity from the 3rd dose, which won't stop infections. All because they don't want to damage the 'Economy'. Of course, as it has the past 5 or 6 times they've done this, it will smash the Economy. The Economy is just people. But zealots won't see it. Control the virus to get your Economy back. It's one job. Not two.

In today’s Covid news, the supposedly ‘mild’ Omicron variant. Hospitalisation rates in Denmark about the same as for other variants. Overwhelmingly the Danish being infected in the early days are 20-29, which will partly explain why it appears mild, the young tend to get less severe disease. Breakthrough infections in the fully vaccinated *and* booster vaccinated about double that for Delta. Omicron is likely going to smash us. (Delta may still too, in NSW, which has its biggest growth rate in 4 months, and is about to relax almost all restrictions, exactly as Denmark did.) The NSW and Australian governments are, again and as always, asleep at the wheel.

I assume the 'live with the virus' crowd have unwavering faith in their death cult.

"...clusters linked to nightclubs and pubs threaten to push daily cases into the thousands by the end of the year...A NSW Health spokesperson said they were unable to confirm how many people were now considered close contacts." The NSW Government will not protect you. Protect yourself.

200,000 Omicron cases per DAY, in the UK.

News from Canada...

Wheeee, isn't this fun NSW? The Health Minister said no changes needed, he wants 'normal' life back in NSW. We're all in a bus on the Jenolan Caves road, driven by psychopaths high on meth.

Yeeeouch. Test positivty rate is a measure of how many Covid cases you're missing, in your testing. NSW is testing about 90,000 people a day at the moment, huge. And positivity is skyrocketing, meaning we're still missing lots of cases out in the community. She’s gonna blow.

Perfect in every detail.

Living in populist times (where people think what’s popular is what’s true) means having almost no attention span or memory. Take the ‘Omicron is mild’ story. Who remembers what happened when Delta arrived in Australia, only a few months ago? I do. Have a look. Exactly the same ’seems to be mild’ stories. Then look what happened next.

This diagram is standard WHS, applied to Covid. Australia is doing 6, just. 1-5, nothing. Really highlights how populist idiot politicians have hijacked a standard public health response.

Freedom Day NSW! Get those masks off, suck up that Covid so you can share it with family over Christmas, and possibly do long-term damage to everyone's internal organs. Let's drink to the Economy - Cheers!

Over 100,000 tests yesterday. Huge jump in test positivity (highest it's been). This means despite cases almost doubling from the day before, very many people out there are infected and haven't been tested. I stand by my bet we'll have new restrictions before Christmas, and/or they'll change the 5-month wait for a booster to 3-4 months. (The latter won't work, but it's about as much as the loons in NSW Cabinet might manage.)

NSW Health Minister predicts 25,000 cases per day by January. Nobody seems to care.

NSW Health says wear a mask. The Premier says don’t. Who do you choose?

Listen to Kerryn Phelps for a few minutes. We've gone barking mad in NSW in these past 6 months.

Christmas cracker jokes, can you beat this one. A guy has jelly in one ear, and custard in the other. He says 'you'll have to speak up, I'm a trifle deaf.'

'Only hospitalisations matter'. Just one example of the stupidity of that statement. People who get infected are just like people with the flu - out of action. Multiple that by the tens or hundreds of thousands, and society grinds to a halt. Multiply that by 52 weeks a year, year after year, and...totally unworkable.

You won’t find a better picture to sum up what’s happening right now. The ‘health advice’ at the front, stressed, trying to save us from catastrophe. The boring conservative middle-aged blokes who make the decisions at the back, not even listening, sharing blokey jokes.

Again I apologise for those who find Covid discussion distasteful. Plenty of things for you to scroll past and look at instead. But think of it this way, if the government has given up keeping you healthy (which it explicitly has), what you understand about what’s happening right now may save your life and/or the life of people you love. And only the public ends a pandemic, in how they act. And how they act is based on what they understand. This graph *should* inspire all of us to really pay attention for once, not just rehash deadly, empty slogans like ‘live with the virus’, or ‘only hospitalisations matter’. Near-vertical growth. Very, very bad news. At a minimum, wear a mask. And avoid public crowds, particularly inside.

Happy birthday!

One for the mathematicians. With a doubling time of 2 days (same as the rest of the world), how many Covid cases per day, by Christmas Day?

Support Health Workers. Wear a mask.

Bear with me, with Covid. Cat pictures available upon request. This is a big reason 'live with the virus/only hospitalisations matter' (a mass infection Covid strategy) can't work. Society shuts down, just as it would if hundreds of thousands of people caught flu every week. You don't go to work with the flu. Why has this not occurred to people cheering on mass infections?

The idea we could all swim in some vast ocean of always-present Covid, protected by vaccines, is pure fantasy. Wonderland, as Adrian calls it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/17/our-leaders-are-living-in-wonderland-if-they-think-covid-case-numbers-dont-matter

So bloody frustrating. So inevitable, and so avoidable. Easy to blame the government (who should wear most of the blame), but the public has been hopelessly indifferent to the emergency right under their noses. Pretending they’re back in 2018, wallowing in bullshit political slogans with no meaning, celebrating as if it’s all over.

I’ll just put this up here. Kinda speaks for itself. Happy Christmas from Domicron.

Again, this was known a long time ago. And we still decided it would be a good idea to infect millions of people in the ‘live with the virus’ homicidal fantasy. New research showing Covid may also trigger a big increase in Multiple Sclerosis.

But the paramedics didn’t need to go to hospital, so all good. Living with the virus.

Happy Birthday Nancy :)

Over 25,000 kids were deliberately infected with Covid in the last 6 months of 2021, in NSW. Just saying. Living with the virus. It’s not the flu, not even close.

Love isn’t the one you haven’t met. Love’s the one you can’t forget.

There are a lot of cloth masks out there, often quite stylish. They’re pretty hopeless though, for protection from Covid. Like wearing cling wrap instead of a condom, but actually even worse than that. The blue surgical masks are also not great at this stage of the pandemic if you’re sharing a lot of indoor air. Buy P2 masks. N95, KN95, KF94 - all excellent. What’s not advertised much is these masks can also be reused multiple times, to offset the initial cost (they’re about $2-$3 each, for the good ones, but the KN95 and KF94 are often only about $1-$1.50). If you rotate them every 5 days, any virus they carry will be dead. You should get at least 5 re-wears out of these better masks, even if you wear it all day. N95, KN95 and KF94 are all quite similar. KN95 is the Chinese equivalent of N95, and KF94 the same for Korean. Any KF94 labelled ‘Made in Korea’ should be fine. KN95 are sometimes faked, but you can buy them locally now from reputable retailers. The N95/P2 masks you can buy at Bunnings are excellent. The best I’ve used are the 3M N95 masks. But my favourite to wear are probably KF94, fantastic design and comfortable. (P.S. sanitise your hands before and after putting on a mask, and after taking it off. Avoid ever touching the side of the mask that goes against your face.) There are good instructions online for ‘donning and doffing’ masks i.e. putting them on and off safely.

Dan is an immunologist who works for NSW Heath, who together with other experts there felt compelled today to sound the alarm. Spend the minutes watching this, please, he’s wonderfully articulate and explains the nightmare coming our way very clearly. Dan and others in the medical community anticipating a total catastrophe in NSW in January, unless we act now.

If you watch daily Covid case numbers, it can be easy to miss the actual trend. When you use the moving average, it becomes clearer.

So...kids do better, the longer they're NOT at school. It's actually very important we understand why that is (I co-wrote a book and a few research papers on that). And also that we continue to ignore the Henny Pennys who say kids missing school is a disaster.

If you're not sure who to vote for at the federal election, I recommend trying to get your 3rd vaccine dose before Christmas. That should decide it for you, once you see the monumental cock-up that is. We never learn, they got it wrong the first time, why would we think they'd get it right this time.

Have we noticed the shift, from leaders ‘following the medical advice’, to the medical advice now having to write letters to leaders, pleading to be listened to? Does it make us all nervous? It really should, I find a lot of people assume what politicans are doing must be based on what expert advice tells them to do. That hasn’t been the case for most of the pandemic.

Cases don't matter, only hospitalisations matter. Now try it as 'leaks don't matter, only your roof collapsing matters'. The analogy is exact.

4 days for my prediction of more restrictions by Christmas to come true.

Here's a projection of NSW cases, from one of the prominent modellers, based on current numbers. And the quote below is from Professor Adrian Esterman, a leading Australian public health person who has worked for the WHO and was also South Australia's principal epidemiologist (remember 25,000 cases a day was the estimate from the NSW Health Minister, who is doing nothing about it): "If we have 25,000 cases a day in January, the NSW health system will not be able to manage. It will be in a complete crisis. That's all there is to it. It's that simple."

If you got AZ as your vaccine, get your booster as soon as you can. (The government doesn't give a shit, it urged all of us to get AZ, often only 3-4 weeks between doses.) These graphs show risk of severe disease and death for those catching Covid in Scotland and Brazil, for people who had 2 x AZ. For example, those who had AZ in Scotland were about 7 times more likely to be hospitalised or die with severe disease after 5 months. This is for Delta, not Omicron. Brazil slightly better because they had much less Delta. Do NOT take your advice from politicians, who continue to tell everybody the vaccines protect you from severe disease and death. They definitely do much better than no vaccine, and Pfizer and Moderna better than AZ, but all show waning protection against severe outcomes and death. We don't even know how bad Omicron is yet.

It’s going well. Apologies again to those who use FB as a ‘positive’ escape from reality. When I post, I think ‘do I want to post something that might help save somebody’s life, or do they want a picture of my cat?’ I know, should have gone with the cat.

Why 'living with Covid' will never work. You can't live with Covid, it shuts things down whether you want it to or not.

PM after National Cabinet: "stay calm, use common sense, get vaccinated. Now I'm going on holidays."

Israel just made 4th vaccine doses compulsory for some groups. For those taking comfort in the propaganda that Covid will become ‘just like the flu’ by allowing mass and repeated infection, remind yourself the last time you had 4 flu vaccine shots inside one year. Anybody?

Not that anyone actually bet, but a win. Important for people to know that the Chief Medical Officer stressed yesterday is that people should wear a mask indoors too. The government simply refuses to mandate it. Personally, i think you’re insane if you don’t follow the medical advice on this one.

Your ideology runs really, really deep when you won't make a mask mandatory. We already do for tradies in workplaces. Covid is much more dangerous than dust. Kids have to wear hats for the sun at school. https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/rapid-antigen-tests-to-become-free-and-qr-checkins-to-return-as-nsw-fights-covid/news-story/6b6bbc8f2fbd5a30fffad9b586794155

Nearly 3 weeks to the day. At the time I posted this, NSW was in the euphoria of 'freedom' and Christmas. The data and common sense (something the PM has none of) said way back then already what a disaster that would be. Many will now be infected for Christmas, all avoidable. Some will die. Your best chance of not losing family members and friends in this pandemic is to back the only way out. Elimination of Covid. Everything else has always been bullshit. (If you still think btw, after 2 years, that 'elimination of Covid' means no or zero Covid, get off your arse and do some learning. It might keep you alive.)

The regions are very exposed, virtually no ICU capacity out here.

Christmas takes everything that’s appalling about FB and magnifies it by 100. Enjoy these lip-syncing nurses performing for President Biden, I’m avoiding the platform entirely for a few days.

Denmark shows one way we can stop cars destroying where we live.

For those drunk on the hopium of ‘lots of infection will make us more immune and make the pandemic go away’, Omicron is happily reinfecting people who catch it, sometimes only weeks later. It’s so infectious it may surge and fall very quickly. But it won’t leave an immune population in its wake. Covid is still coming for all of us, because we refuse to stop it. That’s not a good thing. (It’s in my family, and ruined some Christmas plans, like thousands of others.) Maybe 2022 will be the year we sober up on the hopium and realise ‘let’s all get infected, to stop us all getting infected’ is exactly as stupid as it sounds. Latest research (as just one example) still showing brain damage from even mild infection. It’s not a cold.

What those who argue against lockdowns haven’t understood for 2 years. They’re not a choice. You do them, or people will do them for you. You can’t function as a society with masses of people infected.

A Christmas miracle. Shout out to the nurses the government is about to force to work when possibly infected by Covid. Living with the virus.

How it started. How it’s going.

The James Webb telescope launched yesterday. Jaw-dropping images and discoveries to come.

The Health Minister needs a dictionary. Everybody compulsorily catching Covid isn’t ‘health’. I didn’t vote for him. I suspect millions of lemmings still would.

From inside NSW Health. Worth a few minutes. Insight into what’s happening inside pathologies and hospital For the past few days there has been a huge amount of misinformation regarding COVID testing and as a healthcare worker I’d like to shed some light on the process and possibly answer some questions. Turnaround times for PCR tests are getting longer every day for a few reasons. PCR is a complicated, lengthy, multi step process that requires trained staff to complete all the way through. The equipment used for PCR testing was not meant for the volumes that are required at the moment, and as such, we have had to find ways around these limitations. First of all, pathologies started batching samples to cope with the frequency of testing that was required during the lockdown a few months ago. This method essentially boils down to mixing multiple samples together and testing them as one unit. If the test comes back negative, all samples in the batch are resulted accordingly. If the batch comes back as positive, we can run each sample individually to single out the culprit(s). This is all well and good when the percentage of positive results is low, however it all starts to fall apart when this percentage increases and every other batch we test is positive and requires individual testing, deleting any further testing until the positive samples are identified. Anyone working in healthcare will know that at any given time, the staffing situation is dire. Most wards have enough workers to just get by, and anybody calling in sick or even taking their annual leave can spell trouble for the remaining staff, requiring them to take on extra shifts, double shifts and overtime. This is no different in pathologies. As the pandemic grew, so did the strain on clinical services. Many of my colleagues quit due to the impossible workload, stress, poor compensation and inhumane treatment by our management. Pathologies had barely just gotten over the hurdle that was the prior lockdown, with very few resources and dwindling staffing. New hires are not yet up to speed, and are expected to process double the amount of specimens with the same amount of resources. We are currently at the absolute limit of testing, there is literally no more equipment available, let alone staff, in the country to process more samples. Let me emphasise that the largest analysers that I’ve come across can hold maybe a few hundred samples at any given time, which need a few hours to actually process those specimens. Data entry and resulting are huge time sinks that cripple some labs. Labs that don’t use measures like QR codes that allow you to enter your details before you get tested are spending DAYS just manually entering handwritten information into laboratory systems. I know for a fact that some pathologies are at least a full day behind on simply entering specimens into their system. This also goes for reporting results, by now, most labs should have some sort of automatic verification system for negative results, however positive results need to be carefully overlooked by a trained staff member before they’re allowed to be released. This is a time consuming process, and it’s very likely that the person who sets up multiple hundred samples a day is also the one who has to deal with each positive result. Private labs are scum. Do not trust any lab that tells you results will be available in x hours, that is not the word of the workers but that of the management which want to leech off of the healthcare system. As far as I’m concerned the only reputable labs are NSW Health Pathology which is what you’ll come across in public hospitals. Profiteering is running rampant and private labs will never admit that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, especially when the quality of their service has no impact on the amount of money they’ll make. On that last point, please be mindful of pathology staff at the moment. I can guarantee you that no amount of phone calls will speed up the process. We are being bombarded with work and cannot make things go any faster, not for you or anybody else. My own PCR test has been sitting untouched for probably 2 days now, along with BOXES full of swabs that have yet to be run. And now for the real shitshow; what’s happening in our hospitals. Hospitals and some clinics offer an alternative to the regular COVID PCR test, which we call rapid PCR. These tests have been reserved for extremely urgent screens against COVID and influenza, and they’ve mainly been used to allow patients to be transferred between wards, into surgery and other procedures such as birth. They’ve also been used to identify positive cases in the emergency department. This test takes between 20 minutes to an hour but the available volume of tests is minuscule in comparison to full, 3 step PCR. Most analysers can only process 1 sample at a time. The rhetoric so far has been that the number of hospitalisations is the key indicator of the severity of the current “wave” of COVID. This is wrong. Yesterday, 1 in every 4 patients who presented to the emergency department and were tested with rapid PCR at the hospital which I work at returned positive for COVID. You read that correctly, 25% of patients who presented to ED and were tested yesterday were positive. We had to omit utilising our rapid PCR for inpatients who required urgent medical intervention in order to screen ED patients. There were 3 of us running 4 pathology departments in a >500 bed hospital. We were falling behind. As I finished my shift, another 3 positive results had just come out, which immediately had to be notified to ED. We are running out of supplies to operate our rapid PCR analysers, inpatient needs are being set aside so that we can identify positive cases in the emergency department because other testing sites are no longer reliable. People are panicking and flocking to hospitals. As a result, those who are in need for other reasons are being neglected. We cannot cope. Healthcare staff have been left a burden which we do not have the resources to manage. The quality of patient care is suffering. I cannot speak for nurses or doctors on these wards, they must be going through unimaginable stress and hardship. What I witnessed yesterday has left a terrifying impression on me. The hospitals are not equipped for this.

How living with the virus is going in the UK.

By the way, had a lovely Christmas, except for part of the family suffering from Covid. So let’s talk about Covid! That thing infecting your friends and loved ones, in the pet and Christmas pictures. (It’s even infecting the pets.) Libertarian politicians strategise new spin every single day. Blame for the mounting disaster in NSW is cleverly being shunted home to the Queensland Premier. Libertarians love blaming women, it’s their favourite thing, and if they’re Labor women, they tap into both spin and misogyny. They’re also blaming pathology labs. NSW is facing a disaster because the NSW Government made no plans for surges in infection and testing leading into Christmas, and created those same surges by idiotically opening up the State to Omicron, at a time when it knew everything was shutting down for Christmas. The middle-aged conservative blokes blathering on about ‘personal responsibility’ never take responsibility, for anything. (Notice the PM has disappeared on holiday, as he did in the bushfires.)

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US, the most prestigious infectious disease institution in the world. It understands you can’t ‘live with’ Covid. The next steps in our denial of this will be governments: - deliberately suppressing data, so we lose visibility of the pandemic - suppressing testing (already underway), so we lose sight of how bad things are - undermining the experts (already underway), as the same politicians do with climate change - completely ignoring all experts (already underway) - shifting hospitalisation into the home, to suppress hospitalisations (already underway) - forcing people back to work while infected (already underway) - re-normalising ‘normal’ infectious disease as 1000 people dead per week (already happened).

Here you can watch the massaging of Covid data in real-time. Spot the difference between the NSW Health message on 23 December, and the one from 1 hour ago. (If it focuses attention, remember this could be you, within weeks.)

What’s the difference between the English cricket team and a Covid test? You have to wait 5 days for a result with a Covid test.

Those who say they want Covid to be ‘just like the flu’ forget that we try to get rid of flu, every year. They have this bizarre idea that we all happily live with flu, rather than do everything in our power to make it go away forever.

Stadiums are an excellent example of how little space people need, and how much space their cars need. Our cities are big car parks, cars have taken them over.

‘Live with the virus’ will plummet in popularity as the virus makes it way into the more affluent parts of the State.

John is an American friend who works as a computational biologist, applied mathematician and software engineer. Here pointing out the ridiculous perversity of the idea that we’ll all stop being infected by Covid, by being repeatedly infected by Covid. Getting Covid doesn’t stop you getting Covid. And it doesn’t stop Covid repeatedly damaging your internal organs. Some experts now saying average life expectancies in developed countries may drop into the 70s.

I’ve wanted one of these for a long time, an OLED TV. This one specifically, the LG C1. So I went and got one, finally. It’s jaw-droppingly amazing, especially in 4K, pictures can’t convey it well. I think back to the old cathode-ray tubes of even my early adulthood, and how far TVs have come in such a short time. Those old TVs are almost unwatchable now, you wonder how we ever put up with them.

Maybe the world has run out of Covid tests because everybody is getting infected? Maybe we need to stop people getting infected with Covid? Maybe (try this one on for size) to end a pandemic, you actually have to stop people getting the fucking virus. People will still argue with you every day, that the way to stop Covid, is to let people get Covid. I’ll say that again - they think the way to stop Covid, is to let people catch Covid. Wtf is wrong with us. Today National Cabinet will meet to massage definitions so that testing queues will be shorter, so that they look less incompetent. It will do nothing except make the pandemic worse.

Happy birthday you :)

Yesterday’s numbers a bit unrepresentative because there was a lot of catch-up from Christmas. Compare today with 2 days prior. Cases doubled in 2 days. Hospitalisations going up by more than 100 per day. Huge positivity rate, meaning we’re missing lots of cases in testing. Anybody who’s tried to get a test recently knows the truth of that.

Loving the new National Cabinet uniforms. If you missed it, today they approved that you can’t catch Covid at work. Only at home.

Governments now not even bothering to do testing. You can do it yourself. Also a brilliant way for the government to hide the true number of Covid cases, because if they’re not doing the testing, they don’t know the number of positives. Unless you bother to tell them. As a prominent doctor says, Australia’s Covid strategy is now: ‘Do what you like. Survive if you can.’

Remember ‘hospitalisations are what matter’? Predictably, now they’re trending up, suddenly that spin has gone a bit quiet. Also predictably, social media is still pretending we’re all living in 2018. As Covid inches closer to your front door, how much do you really understand about what’s going on? The government is furiously suppressing information, trying to hide how bad things are. Soon we won’t even know roughly how many cases there are every day, as they remove much of their own testing. Your kids won’t be fully vaccinated before school goes back in 2022, and there is no ventilation or other safety preparation happening in schools in the holidays. You can pretend it’s 2018, bathing in faux ‘positivity’. It won’t stop Covid coming for you. And Covid isn’t mild.

[Re-posting, because NSW Health had the wrong hospitalisation figure, they’ve updated it now.] The NSW Health Minster (I use those terms loosely) said we’d get over 20,000 cases per day by the end of January. It’s the end of December. Test positivity also up again, meaning many cases are being missed. (The government responds by slashing testing, at the same time, using the principle of ‘if we can’t see it, it isn’t happening’.) Cases have almost doubled, in a single day.

Stupid beyond words. They’re doing this because NOBODY ORDERED THE TESTS. Brought to you by the same federal government who didn’t order any vaccines. Do your best to survive, it’s literally all on you now.

Living with Covid.

Christmas prediction - ✅ New prediction: NSW will be forced to lock down within a week.

Straya!

Welcome, 2022. People used to have resolutions at the beginning of a New Year? My FB resolution is to continue to share words and thoughts, which are me. I find I don’t really know anything much about people who share mostly pictures of themselves, doing things. Maybe the world would have fewer problems if we spent more time telling each other what we think, and a bit less time showing how we look and what we’re doing. I have a very happy life, btw. Because I post about serious things, some have wondered if my life is unhappy. I live my life off FB, not on it. I mostly come here to chat.

We’re ‘moving on to the next phase’ of ‘living with the virus’, our very own local member said today. Try substituting ‘TB’, ‘Ebola’ or ‘cancer’ for ‘the virus’ in that sentence, to bring out the absurdity of it.