Blog Day 496 - Tuesday 10 August 2021 - Day 5 of Covid Lockdown V6.0

One of my many readers from down the Peninsular way has pointed out that given my new found love for Spam I should attend the Spam Fest in Honolulu next May.  I am thinking that the way things are going I will be lucky to be frying Spam at a campsite near Lake Eildon by May next year, let alone travel to Hawaii.

Just in case some of the many food snobs who read this blog have forgotten what Spam looks like.

My ISP is iiNet and they have done a very clever thing.  They recently upgraded my NBN speed to "Home Superfast" for six months for free.  This six months has now expired and they have offered and permanent upgrade from the standard 50Mbps (whatever that means) to the faster connection (200Mbps) for an extra $10 per month instead of an extra $30 per month.

Now, this is the clever bit, by giving me a free upgrade for 6 months I got used to the faster speed without realising it and when they took it away from me I realised how much I missed it, a bit like when they took me off morphine at the hospital, but that is another story.

The crux of the matter is, if they hadn't given me access to the faster speed in the first place I wouldn't have missed it when they took it away and I wouldn't have upgraded to the faster speed connection which I am now paying for.  Clever eh?  (Wish I could do the same for the morphine).

Now for the big question, what are the chances of Melbourne coming out of lockdown on Thursday night?  I would suggest with 20 new infections in the last 24 hours breaking out of the lockdown is looking very unlikely.

The Shrine has reintroduced the weekly Zoom meetings for volunteers.  I think that indicates that we won't be back there for some time to come.

As noted above there were 20 new virus infection cases reported in Victoria in the last 24 hours, all around the existing clusters in the North and North Western suburbs and many of the 20 were circulating in the community whilst infectious.  

Currently Victoria has 108 active locally acquired cases and of these two are in hospital.

Although the virus numbers are increasing we have only received the results of 35,000 tests in the each of the last two days.  Compare this to NSW who are testing around the 100,000 mark each day for the last few days.

Talking of NSW they recorded 356 locally acquired cases in the last 24 hours, bringing their current number of active cases to 4,984.  Currently NSW has 357 patients in hospital due to the virus with 60 in ICU and 28 on ventilators.  Unfortunately 4 more people have died in NSW in the last 24 hours bringing the total number of deaths for this wave of the virus to 33.

To date there has been 13.8 million doses of the vaccine applied Australia wide.  Based in the average number of vaccinations applied in the last seven days we are forecast to achieve 80% of the population aged 16+ being inoculated with one dose in 79 days and 80% inoculated with two doses in 122 days.  

Using my trusty HP-12C calculator I have determined that 80% will be vaccinated with one jab by 28 October this year and with two jabs by 10 December.

Worldwide the figures are demonstrating their post weekend fluctuations and are therefore unreliable. However, Indonesia is still proving to be problematic with daily infections in the 25,000 to 30,000 range and daily deaths of approximately 1,500.  

The UK, whose figures tend to be more reliable than most, reported 27,000 new infections in the last 24 hours and 45 deaths.  So far the death rate in the UK does not appear to be following the increase in the infection rate.

Corona Virus Daily Stats – 10 August 2021 – Day 5 of Covid Lockdown V 6.0

Date	Aus Infected	Aus Increase	Aus ROTs Increase	Vic Infected	Vic Increase	Vic ROTS Increase	*Aus Active Infection	*Aus ROTs	Vic Active Infection	Vic ROTs
01/08
02/08	34,612	230	8	20,950	2	0	3,338	100	134	?
03/08
04/08
05/08
06/08	35,698	308	0	20,967	6	0	4,252	129	75	7
07/08
08/08	36,328	290	15	21,010	13	2	4,730	121	100	4
09/08
10/08	37,010	383	4	21,041	20	0	5,335	121	111	3
11/08