Blog Day 420 - Sunday 23 May 2021

I see that Australia's elite team in the three by three women's basketball has been delayed in leaving Australia for their Olympic qualifying tournament because somebody at Basketball Australia forgot to obtain their travel exemptions.

Now, I am the first to admit that I may not know much about sport but has anybody ever heard of 3 x 3 basketball.  It sounds like something you would play in your driveway not an elite Olympic sport.  Four teams have already qualified, Russian Olympic Committee, China, Mongolia and Romania. 

The Russian team has to call themselves the Russian Olympic Committee Team because Russia has been banned from international sport, including the Olympics, due to drug taking.  So instead of sending your doped up athletes to the Olympic games as the Russian team you rename them the Russian Olympic Committee Team and send them anyway.  Way to go Olympic committee.

I wonder if drug taking is rife in  3 x 3 basketball.

This story is farcical on so many levels it is a gift to blog writers rapidly running out of ideas.

Now to the facts (as I see them) and figures.

Australia wide there has been 3 new infections reported in the last 24 hours, including one in Victoria, all ROTs.  There are 93 active cases Australia wide, 92 of whom are ROTs.  

Even though there hasn't been any local infections in Victoria for the last 80 or so days the testing numbers remain relatively high with 17,500 test results received in the last 24 hours.  This may be as a result of a bit of a scare in the Northern suburbs that appears to be petering out to nothing.

I have added two more columns to my table.  I have included a figure for each country showing the % of total infections for that country for the pandemic against the worldwide total and a similar % for deaths for each country compared to the total number of deaths worldwide for the pandemic.

India while reporting 41% of the daily infection numbers has reported 16% of the infections for the entire pandemic.  In the last 24 hours India reported 33% of the daily worldwide deaths but has only reported 8% of the deaths for the pandemic.  The variation in these figures is because India avoided high infection and death rates in the 1st and 2nd waves of the pandemic and most of their infections and deaths have been in the 3rd wave.

The US has reported 20% of the infections for the pandemic and 17% of the deaths.  Brazil has recorded 10% of the infections and 13% of the deaths.  

The position in Brazil continues to worsen with infections rising again, deaths are remaining steady but these will rise as a consequence of the increasing infection rates.