September 2021

Also if SARS-Cov2 becomes endemic, the current debates around ‘living with’ need to talk about the consequences of different levels of endemicity, and those varying across the world? Triangulated against generation of strains with varying morbidity and mortality? /2

It feels like there’s an assumption of a comfortable, low endemicity with minimal morbidity and mortality, when the outcome could be wave upon wave of global surges with varying strains? /end

@OrinCordus @RichardfromSyd1 not even pretending we have partial TTIQ in NSW now. Not tracing at all, just letting people know they’ve been infected.

Modern conservatives are not political parties. They're the old conservative parties captured by their previous donors. Regulatory capture. Easy to spot - they have no public policy agenda. They respond to all issues the same way - cut taxes, regulation and government. /2

Exactly what the vested interests who have captured the parties want. Faced with even semi-difficult public policy questions, the cupboard is completely bare. The federal LNP spent most of 2020 creating donor-led economic strategies for *after* the pandemic. /3

Never waste a good crisis, as they say. The NSW Government now using its criminally negligent Covid response as cover to ram through all of the noxious anti-pubic health policies it desperately wanted to use last year. /4

Twitter spends much of its time turning it into sport between the LNP and ALP. Both exist in name only, as in the UK and US regulatory capture has swept away the purchase most parties had on populations, via populist strategies. /5

Michael West said it well about NSW, but it applies to most of the West now. Government is now business, for business. 'Open for Business', as the NSW Government motto says. If that means Open for Covid too, so be it, nothing can hinder the 'Economy'. /end

...all you need to know is that the results for schools, as the NCIRS also point out, were majority collated *while schools were closed for both lockdowns and school holidays*. I kid you not. Last year during the national lockdown, NCIRS.../2

..did similar work for the NSW Government, to assure the public sending the kids back to school was nothing to worry about. Again, using data for locked-down schools with barely a soul in them. A sample size of 18 students. /3

This time, the sample size is 59. But only 8 were in high schools, and I count 8-9 for primary schools. The rest are all in early childhood, which remained fully open during this time. /4

How is it that there isn't national laughter that this is the 'data' that will prove it's safe to send kids back to school? NCIRS certainly make it clear when this data was extracted. /end

The Economy began only as a measure of national income. Talking about it as ‘the Economy’ makes as much sense as describing your family as ‘our weekly income’. Somebody who talks about ‘the Economy’ is really only describing the income going to successful people. /2

This is all quite deliberate. By inventing this statistical homunculus as a substitute for society, conservatives can bypass all of the usual social and political problems, in favour of a handful of statistical indicators. Indicators that are themselves…/3

…just a tool for the rationalisation of income already flowing to successful people. Unsuccessful people don’t even register in economic numbers, they have no job, no income. An Economy replaces a citizen with a job, and an income. /end

It's important to first note that from Day 1 of the pandemic, there have been 2 competing political approaches towards it. One the traditional Australian way, of allowing our public health institutions to manage the outbreak. The other the 'live with the virus' idea. /2

As soon as the pandemic began, the PM established a National Cabinet, almost certainly to deal the federal government into the pandemic conversation, where it has very little constitutional role. States manage most public health activity. /3

The federal government's use of National Cabinet has mostly been as a wrecker, a disruptor, playing States off against each other, inserting live with the virus rhetoric into the national conversation, and then using it as a mechanism to close parliament itself. /4

It then also established the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission as early as March 2020, a committee comprised predominantly of representatives of key industry lobby groups. To plot the 'economic' way out of the pandemic, even though it had only just begun. /5

From a political strategy point of view, this was clearly 'never waste a good crisis'. An attempt to use the pandemic as cover for sweeping economic changes. Of course we know the rest, Covid quickly asserted itself and the country swept into national lockdown. /6

But the 'live with the virus' folk never went away. Live with the virus is a slogan used to basically protect the economic status quo. After some brutal battles between the Economy crowd and the traditional public health/State model, particularly over the large 2020 outbreak.../7

...in Victoria, the live with the virus folk finally seemed to surrender to traditional public health thinking, with the July 2020 National Cabinet announcement that Australia was now committed to eliminating community transmission. /8

The PM insisted this be called 'aggressive suppression', an invented term, to save face, but the country now was locked into an elimination strategy. Basic public health. This went fine, until Delta arrived in 2021. /9

We forget that Delta was first spotted in Australia in Sydney, in May 2021. It caused no major problems, the State eliminated it quickly. Victoria did the same in June. It wasn't until late June, the beginning of the current NSW outbreak, that the new Delta story began. /10

NSW immediately adopted a strategy against this new outbreak that had been proven not to work even with less infectious variants, by Victoria in its large 2020 outbreak. It ring-fenced. It tried to localise measures to LGAs and suburbs. Lines on a map, no barrier to spread. /11

As the weeks wore on and the virus continued to spread and cluster, and the State lost control more each day, the NSW Govt launched 'Delta is like nothing we've seen before', a covering-narrative/slogan for its lack of success. Of course most forgot.../12

...that it had in fact beaten Delta just a month or so before. But political strategists love nothing more than to turn defence into offence, and it quickly dawned on them that Delta could be a Trojan Horse for re-introduction of their beloved 'live with the virus' strategy. /13

'Delta is like nothing we've seen before' became a daily mantra from the NSW Premier. Softening up the public for the abandonment of elimination strategies, 'hey., we can't stop this beast, we need to learn to live with it'. Over time, this became explicit, with.../14

...the two appearing shoulder-to-shoulder in the daily press conferences. 'Delta is like nothing we've seen before' was then immediately followed with variations of 'we need to learn to live with this virus'. The genius of the strategists is that the inevitable explosion.../15

...of cases that then followed the lack of commitment to reining them in confirmed in the public's mind how nasty Delta was. Ring-fencing is still employed to this day, a strategy everybody should have remembered had failed in Victoria. But it gets even sneakier. /16

Many point to Victoria's struggle now against Delta as well as evidence that we're dealing with a new invincible viral foe, and NSW has been vindicated etc. So, we need to understand why NSW and Vic now seem powerless to stop Delta, above and beyond NSW's deliberate.../17

...selection of an underpowered ring-fencing strategy. And this is where I think we can see that economics and politics really both generate and prolong pandemics. It's about the money. Australia's great elimination success in 2020 was predominantly about JobKeeper. /18

JobKeeper allowed the majority of the country to isolate at home, buffering their employers from losses. Think back to that national lockdown, and how it turned towns and cities into tumbleweed junctions. It worked, it absolutely smashed Covid. /19

Compare that to current 'lockdowns' in NSW, for example. I live in a stay at home area. It's nothing like last year, there's prodigious amounts of social and work activity going on. Why the change? We need to see what the strategists did with the funding schemes. /20

Treasury nicely summarises the differences in this table. I've put a red box around the key bit. JobKeeper was paid to the *employer*, on *projected* losses. This allowed them to close and send staff home, safe in the knowledge they could still pay them. /21 https://t.co/BNupizQIkZ

The 2021 support measures on the other hand, extracted from the feds like cutting out an ingrown toenail, are paid to the *individual worker*, AFTER they have already lost work. This means businesses need to keep operating, while the virus rages, until.../22

...this smashes their cashflow, forcing them to lay off staff and/or staff hours. Add to this that the business must also already be in a Commonwealth-declared 'hotspot'. In other words the virus must ALREADY have significant inroads into the area, before support kicks in. /23

See how it works? It's genius strategy, support that actually drives infection and viral spread. Forcing businesses to remain open, driving infection in staff who then take it home and infect their families. 'Live with the virus' is back, under cover of a support scheme. /24

This is why Victoria can't defeat Delta now either. Employers can't pay people to stay home and stop getting infected at work. New Zealand, which is having great success against Delta so far, never abandoned its JobKeeper wage subsidy program, based on projected losses. /end

Live with the virus politicians focus on hospital capacity, because the idea of preventing infection isn't important to them, you're supposed to live with the virus i.e. getting infected is expected. They'll therefore also focus a vaccination strategy on.../2

...harm minimisation, rather than infection prevention. Get the vulnerable vaccinated, up the ICU capacity, open up. Pretty much their strategy from the beginning. There are more strategic vaccination options, to prevent actual infection.../3

...which experts such as @MarylouiseMcla1 and @Globalbiosec have mentioned regularly, such as vaccinating the most mobile (younger) members of society as a priority, ring-vaccinating etc. Some of that has now been grafted onto the vaccine rollout, very late in the day. /end

The entire family now Covid positive. The mother admitted to hospital with related pneumonia. /end

They don’t control spread of the virus, but get it to some lower number and then announce ‘we can’t stay closed forever’, open up, and the virus smashes them. Every. Single. Time. Then they re-close, repeat ad nauseum. /2

Vaccines have emboldened these ‘are we there yet?’ adults further, now they think what failed every other time, will now succeed because of the vaccines. You can usually spot the ‘are we there yet?’ crowd because to them the enemy is lockdowns, not the virus. /3

But it’s also reputable experts, like the Doherty modelling group, who seem to not be testing assumptions against basic evidence. Other countries have tried the same vaccination thresholds as are proposed under Doherty, for opening up. All have so far failed. /4

Why has that not triggered greater scepticism about the 70% and 80% fantasies in circulation? Why do we not notice that the virus goes wherever opportunity presents itself, like into hundreds of thousands of children overseas? /5

I’m a bit over modelling and R numbers. It’s truly not rocket science that while a highly infectious novel pathogen is allowed to circulate, the pandemic isn’t over. No amount of graphs or calculations will change that basic fact. /end

Societies are too mobile, in fact hyper-mobile. Both internally and externally. Ludicrous amounts of transport and travel. Climate change requires that to be changed as well. And we miss what that hyper-mobility means, at root. /2

It means dislocation, of lives. The gloss we get on it is about fabulous overseas and local tourism. But it means communities with very little resilience, fed by fragile supply chains. Communities whose physical footprint serves more as a car park for mobile workers. /3

We know fifo communities, but all of ours are now didos - drive-in, and drive-out. If we feel we need to balance ‘economic’ considerations with people’s health, then economics is doing the wrong job. It’s rationalising displacement and dislocation. /4

Easily seen in so many ways. Our agricultural lands are so degraded as to be at the point of almost total dysfunction. Communities are not even remotely self-reliant with basics like food, and increasingly also not water. /5

Employment is siphoned off to the major metropolitan areas, where housing in turn is unaffordable for most, and people can’t shelter from a virus at home for a few weeks without starving and defaulting on mortgages. /6

Not a call for some new self-sufficiency lifestyle. But definitely for greater community-sufficiency, where a community once ‘locked down’ can still function, even for an extended time. /end

And what National Cabinet decided about it. https://t.co/ZBM17O9nd6

Not because we need to respect anti-vax loons, but because a pandemic’s behaviour is a collective phenomenon. You can’t turn individuals into a sort of walking and talking public health gated community, using vaccines. It’s not even about fairness - it just won’t work. /end

‘Living with’ an epidemic or pandemic means the epidemic or pandemic IS NOT OVER. When we ‘live with’ flu, it’s because it’s not epidemic or pandemic flu. The measure for this pandemic being over will be non-epidemic numbers of infections, not hospitalisations. /end

Correct in your more advanced knowledge, @OrinCordus ?

@Globalbiosec I think I have this right?

Comparing with Doherty projections for child deaths under the planned 80% re-opening strategy (highlighted). This is for the first 6 months, so in the ballpark of the annual pertussis deaths a century ago. Unknown morbidity. /2 https://t.co/tFccIL4vf3

For nearly every infectious disease on our current childhood immunisation register, the story is the same. Mortality (without vaccines) not dissimilar to the above, in the hundreds at most across the entire population. You could say ‘most children were fine’. /3

And yet, we vaccinate for all of those diseases today. It was deemed unacceptable that children be allowed to become infected with them. But today, even some experts are arguing that Covid is somehow distinct. That allowing children to become infected is the sensible course. /4

How did we become that society? Why should we bother with most of the childhood vaccines we currently administer, if this is our new benchmark of care? /end

@normanswan think my logic and numbers are sound here? Checking all diseases on our annual immunisation schedule, none historically created significantly greater mortality than Covid might, amongst children.

The gated community can be used to keep the unwashed out, or to lock them in. The NSW pandemic strategy is the latter, locking down much of the West of the city to keep the virus there, though it arrived there from the East. We need to think a bit harder about these trends. /2

The big libertarian push of the past 50 years has been to deny the collective element of social life, and pretend society isn’t real. Just a bunch of separate individuals. I’ve Tweeted before about how I think this actually created and now prolongs the pandemic. /3

The pandemic is a tug-of-war between what’s left of our old collective structures, trying to do basic public health work, and the new libertarian push, which describes that public health work as oppression. Every gain is quickly erased by a new libertarian ‘opening up’. /4

Perversely, the ‘freedom’ the libertarians want us to open up to is social life. A collective thing. They’re already individually free to do whatever they like at home. The social life they want back is created by a collective effort they reject in their core beliefs. /5

The ‘live with the virus’ fantasy to escape the pandemic is pure libertarianism. Vaccines have been repurposed as personal Covid-shields. If you get Covid now, it’s your own fault. A ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, where a vaccine magically transports you out of a pandemic…/6

…that continues to swarm around you. A vaccine is just a tweak to a collective, complex ecosystem of people and microbes. It succeeds collectively, not individually. Via an integrated public health strategy. You can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic. /end

Every day I'm lost for words, that we can have a pandemic exit strategy that says 'we will infect hundreds of thousands of people'. I'm sorry, but by my reading, people being infected in their millions worldwide = a pandemic. Doesn't matter that some may be vaccinated. /2

How do reputable public health experts get away with enabling this madness? Will their reputations ever survive the outcome? At what point do Doherty, for example, say 'um, we don't think it's a good idea to infect hundreds of thousands of people, especially kids'? /3

What stops them - loss of access to the juicy government-funded teat? Please educate me, somebody, about how an epidemic or pandemic can ever be over, with hundreds of thousands of people being infected? Please give me just one example of an epidemic disease we do this with? /4

Where do we think all of those hundreds of thousands of infected people will go every day? To work? To school? To the shops? Some may because they may not realise they're infected. But since when do we allow people infected with nasty pathogens to just wander in the community? /5

The reality is, they will need to isolate. What does hundreds of thousands of people isolating equal? it equals a LOCKDOWN. The thing we're opening up to get out of. How is it that we've become so stupid that this isn't obvious? /6

How do we not look at the many places who have tried exactly this overseas, and who have been forced into hasty retreats, smashed by infections? What would be the issue in waiting a few more months, to get large total population vaccine coverage? /7

And this nonsense, 'we can't live like this forever''. Idiots who say that are the REASON we are currently living like this, because their lethal impatience keeps driving up infection numbers. /end

It’s no coincidence that the same people who set up and fund think tanks to flood our public discussions every day with new slogans and ideas, also gut universities of funding. They know the true source of power in society. It’s not wealth. It’s ideas. /2

Churches know this, they have a genuinely magnificent understanding of how to work with ideas, how to persuade. But even they fall victim to ideas themselves, such as in the Reformation. Ideas are the true, active, eternal beings throughout history. Plato said it. /3

Step back from the daily conversational wars and reframe them in your mind’s eye as competing ideas, battling each other. That’s what you’re actually seeing, people are just the current soldiers different ideas co-opt. /4

It takes enormous discipline to tame ideas, to not be seduced and enslaved by them. They’re not ‘our opinions’, again if we could own an idea, how could others share them? How could they reappear throughout centuries of history? /5

The pandemic is the outcome of libertarian political ideas. Beating the pandemic is about understanding and targeting those ideas. But it takes decades, even generations, to shift ideas. The libertarians have been working hard to shift beliefs for 70 years. /6

It’s too late to turn that shift around, during this pandemic. We’re observers of our fates at this point. It’s not conservatives or socialists or Left or Right in play here, they’re just the ideas’ current foot soldiers. All we can do is just chip away at these beliefs. /end

The political libertarians worldwide are succeeding in re-normalising the Covid catastrophe each day, in new ways. Like comparison with a standard flu season. When you’re killing as many people every week as you normally do in a year with flu…/2

…it’s clear this lethal nonsense is utterly dependent upon just total ignorance in many of what is happening. They don’t know how many people flu kills, annually, they don’t know that Covid is an epidemic disease and our normal annual flu isn’t, etc. /3

The NSW Treasurer yesterday openly declared what belief system drives these libertarian fantasies. He spoke of the need to give people ‘freedom’ back again, and that “it’s not the government’s role to provide freedom”. /4

For political libertarians, government is a restriction on individual freedom, which we are ‘born with’ (another phrase he used yesterday, standard libertarian belief). Individuals are born free, and government and regulation needs to be constantly stripped away to restore it. /5

Of course this is all more nonsense. Humans invented governments to free themselves from the constant bickering between individuals, and to delegate vast numbers of tasks to free them up to live better lives. Building roads, providing health care, education, defence etc. /6

Some libertarians genuinely believe all of this, often because they come from privileged backgrounds, where daddy would rail against bureaucracies and taxation and regulation over breakfast each day, getting in the way of his untrammelled pursuit of wealth. /7

It’s the grown up version of a teenager railing against having to do chores like helping with the cleaning and gardening, for the collective benefit of the household. The reality is, there are no individuals, without society. You have zero ‘freedom’ as an individual. /8

Try setting up your own society, as an individual. Your entire day will be swamped by the basics of keeping yourself alive, growing your own food, providing your own water supply, trying to repair any health issues you have, yourself, keeping your dwelling intact etc. etc. /9

No freedom there, didn’t people read Robinson Crusoe? The freedoms these libertarians argue for are *social* freedoms, provided by society. Travel, entertainment, fine dining, even commerce itself. They’re just freeloaders, wanting all of that without doing the collective…/10

…work to bring it about. They want you to do all of that for them. You’re the servants. Remember they represent privilege upstairs, you’re the downstairs people keeping their lives running. We need an end to this political ideology calling the shots in this pandemic. /end

With the finishing line of population-level immunity via vaccination in sight, only months away, the economic dries in the NSW Cabinet decided to use Delta as a Trojan Horse to ram through the ‘live with the virus’ strategy it had always wanted. /2

Put this in perspective. Tax cuts mostly to the wealthy that the federal government spent much of 2020 organising (when thy could have been ordering vaccines and fixing quarantine), are going to cost more than TWICE as much as JobKeeper. /3 https://t.co/0FSLS0HKmW

In 2021 the big Delta outbreaks in NSW and Vic are mostly the result of massive reductions in federal government support to business, to allow people to not go to work. They absolutely refused to continue with JobKeeper, seeing it as too expensive. /4

Always remember that $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy coming in the next few years, in that context. Only a few more months of JobKeeper, even better targeted, would have seen the whole nation vaccinated with minimal infection. /end

Conservative parties historically have not really been parties in the sense of putting forward policy platforms towards creating a different sort of society. They've been reactionary, a way to protect the status quo from challenge. /2

In the modern Coalition, there's almost no point of agreement between the Liberals and the Nationals. What unites them is dislike if not hatred for the ALP, and particularly for the unions underpinning the ALP. A coalition of reaction. /3

John Howard would reference Edmund Burke, who actually was a giant of political practice and theory, in his understanding of conservatism as meaning respect for the institutions that have evolved through generations. /4

Very little that the LNP does however relates to Burke's ideas at all. Modern conservatism has become even more viciously reactionary, and now iconoclastic, smashing institutions with abandon. The LNP, like the Tories in the UK and Republicans in the US, have been 'captured'. /5

Regulatory capture, the technical term for when regulators become puppets to the interests they supposedly represent. You can see this in modern conservative policy platforms, which almost exclusively revolve around only 3 basic ideas. /6

Cut taxes. Cut regulation. Cut government. All the things interest groups who support conservative parties have historically been passionate about. You'll see these same 3 trotted out in some variant for just about every issue. /7

Which is consistent with the beginning of this story, about the origins of conservatism in Australia at least, which were about protecting vested interests, rather than a policy platform for a different Australia. /end

What does isolation of hundreds of thousands of people produce? Social and economic shut down. See the sleight of hand here? Open to escape lockdowns, infect to bring them back again. The UK tried this, and failed in the same way. 2/2

NSW and any other States who follow the 70-80% re-opening plan in Australia will likely follow the England path from here. As with modelling, this is one possible future, but it rhymes internationally. It's empirical. /2

The re-opening will cause an explosion of infections. Not even denied by the National Plan, it's actually built into it. Mostly it will be kids being infected, their infection-immunity is mostly what bends the Doherty curves. /3

(Just a heads up to the Doherty folk, well done you, modelling the infection of an entire younger generation with barely a murmur of caution about doing it. As Oppenheimer quoted when observing his work, I Am Become Death.) /4

The infections will quickly overwhelm any sort of meaningful TTIQ, which in NSW is overwhelmed already, so tracers can have some time off at last. Never mind functioning TTIQ is essential to the Doherty modelling and National Plan, pffft, details. /5

Some hare-brained semi-automated mobile phone-based replacement to tracing will be developed, to 'ping' people who have been close to a known infected person. They can then isolate. Little will be traced though, to prevent further infections. See it as a holiday. /6

This will trigger a 'pingdemic' (what the Brits actually called it), as infection numbers continue their orgasmic exponential growth. Government will be forced to enable users to turn the ping system off, because of its inconvenience to their lives. /7

Kids will be infected in the hundreds of thousands in schools with only minimal mitigations in place. In the beginning (remember, this is all what actually happened in England, it's empirical), this will lead to many classes and schools being closed. /8

Kids and staff will isolate, schools will be cleaned by Hazmat aliens, etc. But then this will begin to happen so often, that the 'Covid is mild in children' sociopaths will demand that infections no longer be notified to others in the school community. /9

So schools will be forced to remain open, with unknown infections rampant. Infections nationally will be re-normalised in the tens of thousands per day, and deaths in the high hundreds per week. /10

Just to remind folks again, this isn't a new dystopian novel draft, this is what actually happened in England, and is continuing right now. Staff in schools were even threatened if they attempted to introduce any Covid mitigations. Face masks gone. No ventilation investment. /11

It's like long distance running. Remnants of decency will fight for a while, trying to do the basic public health work. But the country can run through that pain barrier! Just let the infection go, infect the whole nation, vaccinated and unvaccinated. /12

Call me old-fashioned, but if you have epidemic levels of infection, you're in an epidemic. You might have vaccinated lots of people. You may have washed a lot of windows too. The epidemic is still there. Maybe, to end a pandemic, you have to stop people becoming infected. /13

Let's end on that revolutionary thought. To end an epidemic, you have to stop people catching the virus. Just like giving people umbrellas won't stop a flood, vaccinating people won't end a pandemic, if you don't control infections. /end

There was a time and there may be some regions in the world now, where lack of mobility and interdependencies in social life mean Covid can be contained by geographic area. That isn’t true for most nations now, particularly those who see themselves as ‘economies’. /2

What’s little understood is that the borders we use between nations, and also between regions within countries, were applied *after* they were already deeply inter-connected with the world around them. The Westphalian carve-up which created the world map we know…/3

…has only existed since the 17th century. We tend to have this backwards, assuming countries came first, the ‘international community’ second. We were international long before we were national. The point being, borders and internal geographic and administrative boundaries…/4

…like LGAs are not barriers in that physical sense we like to think. They’re entirely legal and administrative instruments to regulate flow of people and goods, a flow that pre-existed them. ‘Sovereignty’ is a contractual agreement across borders, not a property of regions. /5

(This is more of the genius of political libertarians, whose economic reframing of social life is about continuously destroying barriers to ‘free trade’, while at the same time weaponising the resultant dislocation people feel electorally by pitching the idea of sovereignty.) /6

Back to Covid. You can’t restrict Covid inside any of these barriers, because they all exist only on maps and in regulations. Where we’ve tried to ring-fence infections or use ring-fencing to prevent them, we’ve always failed. The barriers are not physically real. /7

This is also true for age, for demography. We can’t restrict Covid to a particular age group, and where we’ve tried, the virus always finds its way to other age groups, using the path of least resistance. Yesterday I Tweeted that the UK is the strategic model NSW and Canberra…/8

…most closely imitate for Covid. There vaccination of the older members of society meant the virus simply decamped into younger age groups. Quite deliberate strategy, the belief is they are less damaged by infection, so this is a legitimate sacrifice. /9

For that reason (thanks to @juliette_io for these graphics), I think we need to always focus on total population vaccine coverage if we really want to end this pandemic. As seen here. Still quite a long way off anything like control of Covid, on that metric. /10 https://t.co/AQZebVqRd8

We’re vaccinating fast, but the 70 and 80% marks we’re all focusing on are both only really about half of the job done. The only people who argue against that are those willing to infect children en masse. Total coverage is the metric we need to use to end the pandemic. /11

And we’re going like gangbusters in those younger age groups. This is for 12+ (2 doses). Under-12s still don’t qualify for vaccines, but I’m sure the rates of vaccination there will also be explosive, once approved. This is the Covid front-line, not 70 and 80% adults. /12 https://t.co/pj3QVLbocW

‘It’s not over for anyone until it’s over for everyone’ reflects the deep interdependencies in modern societies. It’s not a moral thing as much as a simple practical truth. Ignoring any of the demographics or regions or nations, means the virus will set up camp there instead. /13

Epidemics are defined by number of infections, not by how many get sick. The only way to control the infections is to address all of our actions to all regions, and all age groups. Not sacrifice some in the belief the rest can live in a Covid-free gated community. /14

The worst projections for Covid will only come true if we don’t try to end the pandemic for all people and all regions, all at the same time. Within regions, countries, and internationally. I’m hoping Oz will vaccinate kids fast, despite their absence in national roadmaps. /end

You can check it yourself, case numbers in countries below that mark are all rising. Hospitalisations also trending up, where countries are below that 80% total population level. (Exception - countries maintaining strong restrictions, like China). /2 https://t.co/AttKfCQriv

It's vital to understand that Australia, like the UK, is trying to fast-track re-openings by doing one main thing. Infecting children in the hundreds of thousands. Seen to be low risk of severe disease, so therefore (apparently) expendable. /3

It's not vaccines so much that drive the projected hospitalisation numbers down in countries using that strategy. It's that the vast numbers of projected infections are young people. This is the National Plan in Australia, not a conspiracy theory. /4

You can see the projected child infections in the Doherty modelling. (And this is just symptomatic infections, multiply that by 3 or 4 for asymptomatic.) /5 https://t.co/0YQfzcpLpP

In the meantime, Australia has started vaccinating kids, nearly half the 12-15 year olds in NSW for example have already had one dose. Vaccines for under-12s are pending, but are likely to show the same pattern of rapid vaccination. /6 https://t.co/uluAjJFwAF

We can 're-open' before the kids are vaccinated, but the cost will be infecting many thousands of them. Some will also die and some will have lifelong health issues. It's possible rapid escalation of the young will meet the re-opening from the other direction.../7

...mitigating the number of infections. But why not just use the total population 80% figure, from the start? Hands up if you're an Australian who chooses 'infect the kids' instead? /8

There are only 6 weeks left of planned in-person schooling in NSW in 2021. Given schools and students are already in a routine of remote learning, why not just make that the model for 2021, while we vaccinate the kids? We'd have the summer holidays to finish the job. /end

Have Tweeted before about how the large 2021 outbreaks in Australia are mostly not due to some biological characteristic of Delta, and nearly everything to do with the refusal of the federal government to reinstate JobKeeper. People were forced to work and get infected. /2

The underlying belief here is that there’s only a finite amount of money we have to work with. We have to borrow money, place our children in debt etc. More slogans (the pandemic has been awash with slogans.) We fetishise money, we see it as a source of wealth. /3

It’s a medium of exchange, it has almost no intrinsic value. It’s bits of plastic and small amounts of cheap metal. Or it’s bytes in a computer. Society invented money to facilitate exchange between people. Exchange of goods, and services. /4

As the article I shared above shows, governments have been ‘printing’ money with abandon for years now, to keep economies afloat. They didn’t have to borrow it, they’re not households. They issue it. Trillions have been printed to save the Economy…/5

…with lots of positive effects, no rise in inflation as traditional money fetishists worry about (in fact deflation is the bigger risk, still). I won’t go into the arguments between Modern Monetary Theorists (MMT) and traditional economics, but the basic fact is, ‘printing’…/6

…money works. Nearly everybody has been so brainwashed by the Economy crowd that you ‘can’t just print money’, because they bizarrely think money has intrinsic value. Again, it has none at all. What we exchange using money has value - goods and services. /7

We’ve been printing it with abandon for years. In the pandemic we have as well, to rescue livelihoods. It doesn’t have to be ‘paid back’, the government doesn’t need to borrow it. It makes it. The same politicians and business people calling for cuts to Covid support…/8

…have happily sat back for years and watched money being printed to save their beloved Economy. Always look at the politics. They’re not actually bothered about fiscal rectitude, they just don’t support people not aligned with them getting the same support. /9

In a pandemic, social and ‘economic’ (just a subset of social) activity is dramatically curtailed. Those goods and services stop being exchanged, because money to do it dries up. Customers aren’t earning wages, companies aren’t getting sales from those wages. /10

The government can ‘print (actually they do it on computers) as much money as it likes, and flood the society with it, to fix this. It doesn’t have to pay it back, it printed it. Goods and services can then flow again, until the virus is defeated. /11

The government knows this, as above it’s already been doing it for years to bail out the people who tend to vote for them. Their theatre of fiscal responsibility now is bollocks, it’s politics. They’re happy to print money for mates, but not for ordinary working people. /12

Money is the best vaccine. Printing money could have ended this pandemic early in 2020, by paying everybody to stay home until the virus ran out of people to infect. Australia did that in 2020. In 2021 the ‘live with the virus’ economic folk decided ‘common-wealth’ was over. /end

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus isn't it revealing what senior public health staff say, when they can get away from NSW Cabinet?

NSW is leading the Australian charge, cheered on by the federal government, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Two years of national struggle pissed up against a wall, in the space of a few months. A few lessons I see in this. /2

For political libertarians and the vested interests they represent, there is no emergency important enough to cease prosecuting the causes of those vested interests. Their parties have been captured by those interests, and the interests themselves have done a sort of calculus…/3

…that says we are wealthy and privileged enough to separate ourselves off from the fate of wider humanity. They already did it with climate change, we shouldn’t be surprised they’ve now done it in a pandemic. This idiot, so often unchallenged, idea, that vaccines…/4

…mean we can ‘live with’ hundreds of thousands or even millions of infected people wandering around in the global community, is the complete debasement of public health wisdom won over millennia. So obviously a ‘technological’ pseudo-fix to a complex social event. /5

Maybe vaccines will end this pandemic, but they sure as hell won’t do it in the 2 weeks between 70 and 80% of adults vaccinated, as the NSW fantasy roadmaps assume. It took a couple of *decades* to do it for smallpox. /6

Time after time in this pandemic, libertarians declare victory, only to have the virus reef their pants down in full public display weeks later, as everybody scurries back into lockdown. If the RFS said ‘we’ve put 64% of the big fire out’, wouldn’t we say…/7

…‘so what about the other 36%’? Reality is self-correcting here, it doesn’t matter what the libertarians or other live with the virus loons WANT to happen. If you only half-defeat Covid, you’ll be forced back into the cave, under the doona. /end