Blog Day 419 - Saturday 22 May 2021

Interesting walk this morning, chilly but turning into a lovely autumn day with a top temperature around 19 degrees.  Given the temperature this morning methinks it is going to be a bit chilly camping next week at Lake Eildon, lucky us campers are made of pretty stern stuff, and I am letting my beard grow.

Incredible amount of traffic around, traffic banked up in all directions at the intersection of East Boundary and Centre Roads.  Nothing special on that I am aware of, or maybe I wasn't invited, but most likely people going about their usual Saturday morning business.  It is days like this that make you long for the good old days of lockdown, when you could cross the road without even looking.

I am usually not easily impressed but I was impressed by the lady I saw multi tasking this morning, she was pushing a double decker pram with a toddler on the upper deck and a baby on the lower deck, she was drinking a take away coffee and talking on the phone all at the same time, very impressive I reckon.

I have started to check my camping gear for the upcoming camping trip.  My lifejacket is well out of date and it is cheaper to buy a new one then have my current one tested and re-certified.  Looks like a trip to Anaconda this arvo.  I am looking forward to pulling the ripcord on my old jacket and see how quickly it inflates, if at all.

I just checked the Anaconda website it looks like a new inflatable life jacket is going to cost me $59.99.  That is the club member price, full price is $99.99, I wonder if anybody pays full price?

I think that there are two repatriation flights into Australia this weekend, one bringing Australian citizens from Turkey and the other bringing Australian citizens from India.  I know that the passengers from at least one of these flights are going to Howard Springs for their quarantine period but I don't know what is happening to the passengers from the other flight.

Instead of arguing about where, how and when each state builds a purpose built quarantine facility why don't we send all of the ROTs to Howard Springs and each state and the Federal government pick up their share of the bill.  If the facility needs to be expanded to cope with this lets get on with expanding it.  It must be easier to to expand an existing facility than build brand new ones from scratch.

With the Victorian government's track record on these things we will still be discussing it and doing deals with the unions in 12 months time.  Remember the contact tracing and QR code stuff ups in this state.

In the last 24 hours Australia wide we recorded three new infections all ROTs and no local infections.  Currently there are 96 active cases Australia wide and 95 of these are ROTs.  There are 20 Australians in hospital due to Covid and one in ICU.

It is interesting given the lack of community transmissions that the testing regime is still testing reasonably high numbers each day with Victoria receiving the results of 15,000 tests in the last 24 hours and NSW nearly 13,000 test results.

The vaccination numbers finally appearing to pick up a little momentum with close to 100,000 doses administered per day in the last two days.  The total number of doses administered to date is 3,494,000.  This included both 1st and 2nd doses.

Worldwide some of the figures are starting to show a slight improvement.  In the last 24 hours India reported 259,000 new infections which is a definite improvement on the 400,000 daily infections previously reported.  The Indian death rate is holding steady with 4,209 deaths reported in the last 24 hours.  India accounted for 41% of the worldwide new infections in the last 24 hours and 33% of the deaths.

Brazil's daily new infection rate has blown out again with 82,000 new infections reported in the last 24 hours and 2,403 deaths.  Brazil doesn't seem to have any idea or any capacity to deal with this, they appear to be just letting the virus run its course.

All the other countries on my little table appear to be doing OK with reducing daily infections and the death rates if not decreasing at least holding steady.

Although the Japanese figures are remaining steady they do not appear to be improving with 5,700 new infections in the last 24 hours and 106 deaths.  This is of concern given the olympic games are due to start there fairly shortly.

You will notice in the table below I have added two new columns, one is a percentage per country of its share of the worldwide daily infections and likewise each countries percentage share of the worldwide daily deaths.  Hence you can see that India had 41% of the worldwide daily infections and 33% of the worldwide daily deaths.