Blog Day 564 Tuesday 19 October 2021 - Day 75 of Covid Lockdown V6.0 Extended

We continue to wend our weary way towards 11.59pm Thursday night when the rules of this current lockdown are to be significantly relaxed.

The newspapers today are leading with photos of fresh faced kiddies returning to school for the first time in some months and after nearly two years of disrupted learning and many many months of absence from face to face teaching.

To be honest if I had been told that I wasn't allowed to attend school for a couple of years it would have been the best years of my school life, apart from the three years I spent in grade two of course.

Although a lot of the state is opening up on Friday retail businesses are only allowed to operate outdoors until sometime in November.  What this means is that a store like Harvey Norman can operate from their carpark but I really can't imagine that they will be carting all of their stock out into the car park every day and putting it away every night.  The local bookshop can operate on the footpath, probably in accordance with local government rules and permits and availability of space.  Will they bother?

Can anybody else see how impractical this is?  Probably designed by a government minister and his tax payer funded staff who have only worked inside the ALP party machine, and we are all finding out how that works courtesy of IBAC, or as a union lackey.

To further emphasise how ridiculous this all is pubs and restaurants can have up to 20 people indoors, subject to vaccination and social distancing rules.  Why couldn't retail operate in the same manner?

The other interesting thing will be how many people who claim to be fully vaccinated will be found to be wanting when being checked to enter any facility that is requiring people to prove their vaccination status.

Victoria is still tracking to achieve 70% of the eligible population to be double dosed vaccinated by 21/10, 80% by 31/10 and 90% by 9/11.  

In the last 24 hours Victoria recorded 1,749 new infections, this continues a general pattern of declining infections.  What is going to happen when we open up on Friday and people start to circulate and mix?  

As a bit of an exercise I had a look at the peak figures for Victoria for the lockdown last year compared to the figures today:

    Daily infection 18/10/21    1,903

    Daily infection 19/08/20      725

    Total in Hospital 18/10/21    851

    Total in Hospital 19/08/20    675

    Total in ICU 18/10/21            155

    Total in ICU 19/08/20             44

    Total on Ventilators 18/10/21    103

    Total on Ventilators  19/08/20    29

    

    Deaths   19/10/21        11

    Deaths   19/08/20        12

So currently we have a daily infection rate of about three times the peak daily rate last year.  Our current hospitalisation rate is about 25% higher than last year's peak; the number in ICU is currently nearly three times last year's peak and and the number on ventilators is over three times last year's peak.

The only place we are winning this time around is the daily death figure which, in Victoria, are ranging between 5 to 13 per day.  August last year the daily death figures were ranging between 4 to 24 with figures of 41 and 59 daily deaths appearing to be anomalies on two days during this period. 

Therefore we have more daily infections, more hospital admissions, more people in ICU and more people on ventilators.  The only place we are winning at the moment is the number of deaths due to the virus, in the week 13/10/21 to 19/10/21 in Victoria we recorded 60 deaths, in the week 13/08/20 to 19/08/20 we recorded 96 deaths.  This was the peak week for deaths in the lockdown in the 2nd half of last year.

Although deaths are lower than last lockdown it will be interesting to see what this looks like in a couple of weeks.

Is this how suppression is supposed to work? 

Getting late in the afternoon so an update on the local figures over the next couple of days.