Quote Originally Posted by retrospect View Post
I can tell you the entire health system and and health workers at all levels right now are very tense. What is coming is something no one, no matter how experienced and expert, has ever experienced. Everyone knows it but no one will say it because no one believes it.

There is no reason that what has happened in Italy will not happen here. Can some one give me a good reason why it won't happen?

When we look at China, well, China happily sacrifices lives for political reasons. Iran also. So there is good reason to believe we would do better. But not Italy. Italy's case fatally rate is getting up towards 10%. People are dying not because they are too sick, but because there is not enough treatment to go around.

France, Germany, Greece and the rest of Europe will be next. The USA is fucked. They don't have the health system to cope and the horse has bolted there. I think they will be overwhelmed in a few weeks. I hope I am wrong.

Australia is not magically immune. We need to close our borders tomorrow. All the government is talking about is the economic cost. How do you value the lives lost economically? What is the trauma of watching people die that you can't save because there are just too many people dying worth economically? The cost of shutting down everything, literally everything, will be more than the cost of closing the borders now, anyway.

There is still a reasonable chance that we can contain or at least slow the outbreaks we have. Not with open borders. We need wider test criteria and more testing. We need a better, more reliable, validated test. We need to give the infected and isolate them until they are well. South Korea is an example we could follow here.

Today the nsw chief medical officer said we can expect 1.5 million people in nsw to be infected. That is the most optimistic forecast. It could easily be twice that. But that forecast still equates to 180k serious cases requiring ICU level of care to survive. If those cases are spread out evenly over a year, that's 500 new ICU admissions a day. They won't be spread evenly and we have no chance of coping anyway.

This is not the flu. The flu never hospitalises 15% of those infected. Many of those require ventilation and even heat lung bypass to survive this infection.

I really hope there is some secret plan that I don't know about right now. We are all in for some very hard times ahead. But the pm goes on TV tonight to feed us bullshit about how his economic plan will lead us to prosperity. Please. Eventually, we will all be rich if we survive, and that will be worth losing our loved ones. We won't be rich anyway.

I was really hoping he was going to make a sombre speech to prepare us, the Australian people, for the battle ahead that we have to face. But no he's all 'everything is great, we'll just get some apprentices. Let's not talky about the casualties'

Eh. Fuck. I am ranting.
Europe, USA, Italy even here will have huge numbers of infected. Simply because there is no policing for sick or potentially sick ppl to isolate themselves. So many people have returned from infected countries like Iran, Korea, etc who are supposed to "self isolate" goes right out to work or into the crowds, etc.

While we may slam China for their political harshness. They have shown that strong policing to isolate people is effective in controlling the spread. For a country that has 1.3Billion ppl to have only 80k infected is no mean feat. Look at Italy, while it's closed its borders, people who may be potentially sick are still free to roam around everywhere inside its borders.