24 out of 28 yesterday were in aged care so actual "community" number was 4. Will probably be similar again today.

Just saw that. Sucks for those in aged care, but good signs for the community at large.

Are aged care workers + customers not part of the community? 

Wow great news.

Seems as though the lockdowns had this strange effect of drastically driving cases down. But I could of sworn Sky News said Daniel Andrews was only doing it because of his last for power?

Shame we can't be like Britain eh AJF?

Mole just got slammed with defamation suits lol.

-PB

You know this is a deadly pandemic when the death rate amongst the general population and the most vulnerable (the elderly) is lower now than same time last year.

To put it into perspective, UK had 4,926 new cases, 37 deaths and new restrictions are pubs, bars and restaurants have to close at 10pm, you should work from home if possible, face masks in shops and taxis, indoor sports banned and you are only allowed to have six people over to your house.

Compare that to the draconian measures in Melbourne for 15 cases and without doubt I would prefer to be in the UK right now.

The UK are in the process of tightening up. Melbourne however is moving towards the end of its wave.

When they are clusters centered in aged care homes, then no they are not part of the general community and continue to highlight the negligence of the Andrews government. The most vulnerable are constantly exposed to COVID, driving up infections and deaths whilst the general population is locked up. Not a great strategy but considering the clusterf... that hotel quarantine is, its no surprise.

Yep must be a conspiracy. The only explanation. 

I mean it couldn't just be that the measures to curb COVID spreading have effectively stopped influenza and other infectious diseases that kill old people.

That would just be boring. It's far more fun to imagine we are moving towards a dystopia where you can grab your V for Vendetta mask and scream and yell over the indignity of having to wear a facemask.

First human challenge trials to take place in the UK, but not until January: https://www.ft.com/content/b782f666-6847-4487-986c-56d3f5e46c0b

Some Australia v Sweden analysis from ScoMo and the ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-25/coronacheck-scott-morrison-sweden-coronavirus-deaths/12698478

Basically, our economy shrank 7%, Sweden shrank 8.3% in the same quarter. However, Sweden had a death rate 16 times higher than Australia. I think we win on both counts.

Just a copy paste from another place I frequent,

Last day on the hotel fiasco coming up and it’s been set up beautifully.
No one knows who is responsible for issuing private security one of the most important tasks in the fight against this virus.
A process of elimination would suggest that Dan Andrews himself is the person who made this call. All so far have set the stage for the man himself to say, it was me.
Even if it wasn’t it’s the last card to play. Another “ I don’t know” should result in the Victorian governor stepping in.
It’s is of course the wrong focus. The who doing what isn’t as important as the oversight failure from with in. A responsible person within the organisation need to monitor and react at the first signs of trouble especially given the noted reference to the industry’s being pretty horrific.
If there is another denial of responsibility tomorrow, anything this government claims going forward has to be taken with a huge amount of skepticism. Continued acceptance of what would amount to systematic dysfunction, would simply be unacceptable.
Meanwhile, NSW there is a strategy that’s working. Further restriction releases means the NSW people must continue to do the covid responsible acts.

Just addressing this point in isolation, I am not sure how this would be legal.

none of us here would know the legalities per say, I recall a certain Governer General sacking Whitlam Fed Gov - is it able to be done State wise ? wouldn't have a clue but it would be good popcorn times.
All this I don't recall is pretty damn pathetic - talk about a good job covering your tracks,  so no one is responsible ????? being one of the main reasons you guys have been locked down for so long, wouldn't you like to at least see someone stand up and be honest after all you've gone through.
2020 - and people go on about so many leaders or below them baying for blood, the orange man what he spits out, etcetc and no one in Vic recalls who's on 1st whats on 2nd where's on 3rd.

The one good thing this pandemic has done, is highlight how utterly moronic, pathetic, greedy and selfish (or a mix of all) people in your own social network, social circles or even across politics and media.

Once we had to rely on things like a person wearing Ed Hardy to know we were dealing with a complete and utter knob. Now we just have to hear them say Plandemic, think they're the only ones affected by this or that they believe some inconievebly retarded conspiracy theory that millions of health professionals across thousands of languages are all in on some plot.

As I understand it, Whitlam was sacked because the Liberal controlled Senate was blocking supply, which means they were stopping the budget from passing. Whitlam didn't want to call a double dissolution election (like when the Senate refused to pass Turnbull's union busting bill which triggered the 2016 election) so Kerr sacked him and appointed Fraiser as caretaker ahead of fresh elections to break the deadlock.

Looking into it a bit more, it is theoretically possible I guess for a Governor/Governor-General to sack a Premier/Prime Minister for whatever reason they want, but this would be hugely unprecedented, controversial and an outright attack on democracy. I would find it pretty unlikely Linda Dessau (who was appointed by Andrews) would want to do that, and Andrews could just have her replaced if he thought she might.

All this I don't recall is pretty damn pathetic - talk about a good job covering your tracks, so no one is responsible ????? being one of the main reasons you guys have been locked down for so long, wouldn't you like to at least see someone stand up and be honest after all you've gone through.

I for one am looking forward to seeing the inquiry's results, I'm watching Andrews giving his testimony right now (so I am seeing someone standing up and being honest) but I am sure the results will be politicised no matter the result.

I would expect that Health Minister Jenny Mikakos may be required to "fall on her sword" regardless, but looking at the polls I am confident that the Andrews government is still popular with Victorian voters, and have every chance to be more so in November 2022.

Excerpt of an article written by Nina Feldman. It appeared in WHYY (from PBS/npr) on 18 September, 2020.

Some doctors think they’ve found a cheap, generic drug which treats COVID-19. So why hasn’t anyone heard of it?

For three nights in April, Heather Coutts listened through the door as her husband lay awake in bed, gasping for air. He told her later he’d strained to remember the details of his life insurance policy —  had he signed all the documents? — in case he didn’t make it. Coutts cared for him from a distance, while minding their 11-year-old and 1-year-old.

After two weeks of belabored breathing, extreme fatigue and a trip to the emergency room, her husband started to feel better. But Coutts felt like she’d been hit by a truck. She had a sore throat and a fever.

Hoping to avoid the hell her husband had just endured, Coutts called her close friend Alexis Lieberman, a Philadelphia pediatrician, to ask if there was anything else she should be doing. Lieberman and Coutts are like family — they met years ago volunteering at a camp for kids with queer parents and have stayed friends ever since. So when Lieberman suggested that Coutts try ivermectin, a cheap, safe drug designed to treat parasites that had almost no known side effects, Coutts trusted her.

“We kind of thought, well, there’s no negatives to taking this,” said Coutts. “It’s not going to have any really bad side effects. If it could help, why not?” 

Within 24 hours, her fever was gone. After two days, Coutts felt completely herself again.

...

https://whyy.org/segments/some-doctors-think-theyve-found-a-cheap-generic-drug-which-treats-covid-19-so-why-hasnt-anyone-heard-of-it/

The whole article can be found via the link.

I don't think the article mentions the antibiotic, Doxycycline, or zinc. There's an idea floating that the combination of the three (in safe levels) is very effective. It's unproven. And it won't be a silver bullet. But it's worth a go.

There's correlation. But causation hasn't been proven yet.

In April, Kylie Wagstaff, from Monash, tested Ivermectin (an antiparasitic) on SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory setting. She found that it totally killed the virus within 48 hours. The question was whether it would work in vivo (i.e. when human beings take it). It was unclear how to dose while ensuring safety and efficacy. I think it's believed that the dose which completely cleared the virus in the lab is too high for human beings. I've also heard that Wagstaff's research has been misinterpreted and that she actually tried all sort of doses/dosages and people are focusing exclusively on the high dose.

Maybe it's not necessary to take such a high dose to kill enough of the virus to give the immune system a big help?
Maybe a perfectly safe dose of Ivermectin, in combination with other drugs, will be efficacious in treating COVID-19?

The drug is generic and a profit can't be easily made off it. The way to prove, in empirical terms, that a drug works is to do so with a randomised control trial (RCT) which involves one group of patients taking the drug while another group takes the placebo. RCTs cost a fortune to run. So how do pharmaceutical companies make a profit when the drug is cheap but the trial is expensive? They don't.

To date, there's been no RCT on Ivermectin in the developed world that I'm aware of. But in the developing world, they've run with "observational trials". They've added Zinc and doxycycline. And they've reported lots of success. Thomas Borody, an Aussie gastroenterologist (different field but meh) has been pushing for RCTs.

Borody has been following it up at federal and state level. Greg Hunt's department have granted permission to prescribe it off the label. But, apparently,  the Victorian equivalent hasn't responded.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/genetic-immune-defects-may-impair-ability-fight-covid-19

A significant proportion of patients who develop life-threatening forms of Covid-19 have genetic or immunological defects that impair their ability to fight the virus, research has found.In papers published in the journal Science, the Covid Human Genetic Effort international consortium describes two glitches in severely ill Covid-19 patients that prevent them from making a frontline immune molecule called type 1 interferon.The patients would have carried these glitches for years before the pandemic, or in the case of the genetic errors, all their lives. The discovery may help to explain a mystery surrounding the coronavirus: why it leaves some sufferers sick or dying in intensive care, while others remain barely affected or asymptomatic.The consortium sequenced all or part of the genomes of 659 severely ill Covid-19 patients from around the world, as well as those of 534 people with asymptomatic or mild infection, and found that the severely ill patients were more likely to carry a type of mutation leaving them unable to make interferon. Though each such mutation is rare, collectively they occurred in 3.5% of severe cases.In the second study, involving nearly 1,000 severe Covid-19 patients, they found at least one in 10 patients carried antibodies to their own interferon, which block its action. No such auto-antibodies were found in asymptomatic or mild patients, and they were detected in only a tiny fraction (0.3%) of healthy controls. These findings were described by one scientist as “astonishing”.

Together, the two types of error account for about 15% of life-threatening Covid-19 cases, according to the immunologist Jean-Laurent Casanova of the Rockefeller University in New York City and the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, who co-directs the consortium.AdvertisementCasanova suspects human genetics will end up explaining the majority of such cases, however, because the consortium has only looked for mutations in 13 of the 300-odd type 1 interferon-related genes so far – already a huge undertaking. Many other genes, including ones not related to interferon, could affect a person’s response to the virus.Type 1 interferon is a molecule produced by the immune system as soon as it detects infection. It works by stopping a virus from replicating. If this first-line defence is effective, a person may not even feel unwell. Even if it is not, it buys the body time to mount an immune response that is more targeted to the virus in question, involving antibodies and immune cells.Without interferon, severely ill Covid-19 patients rely solely on this second defence mechanism, which may take several days to reach full strength – giving the Sars-CoV-2 virus a head start on damaging the body’s tissues.Casanova said the finding of inborn genetic errors in severe Covid-19 patients came about serendipitously: “We have a two-year-old girl from Angers in France to thank for it.”The toddler turned up in the Necker intensive care unit in 2011 with life-threatening flu. Doctors saved her life but, wondering why she was unable to shrug off the infection like most children, Casanova sequenced her genome and found she carried two copies of a recessive genetic trait that meant she could not make interferon. Vaccinated annually against flu, she has thrived ever since because her antibodies work normally.The auto-antibody finding is especially exciting, said the consortium member and infectious diseases physician Vanessa Sancho-Shimizu of Imperial College London, because 95% of severe patients who carry the auto-antibodies are male and over 50. “It explains the age and gender bias that we’re seeing in the severe patient population,” she says.It is not clear why those patients have such antibodies, but the cause could also be genetic. Another mystery is why the patients with genetic errors survived earlier infections, though the researchers have a theory about this: “We propose that Sars-CoV-2 is a particularly virulent pathogen that imposes a much greater requirement for type 1 interferon than, say, flu,” said Sancho-Shimizu.Stephen Chapman, a respiratory medicine physician at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, who was not involved in the research, said the papers made an important contribution towards explaining why disease severity varies so dramatically between individuals. Of the auto-antibody finding, he said: “If this is true it is an astonishing result.”
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AdvertisementIt should guide diagnosis and treatment, since patients arriving at hospital and testing positive for auto-antibodies could undergo plasma exchange to remove those antibodies from their blood – potentially keeping them out of intensive care. Since the auto-antibodies spare one particular form of interferon – the beta form – these patients might also benefit from the experimental treatment inhaled interferon beta.Magnús Gottfređsson, an infectious diseases doctor at the University of Iceland, said the findings should sound a note of caution to those conducting clinical trials of convalescent plasma because if the donated plasma contains auto-antibodies to interferon it could potentially do more harm than good.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v1


Given the temporal correlation between the rise in seropositivity and the decrease in reported COVID-19 cases that occurred without a shut-down, herd immunity may be implicated. 



the rest of it
xxxxxxxxxxx

bstract

Importance: Fatality rates related to COVID-19 in Japan have been low compared to Western Countries and have decreased despite the absence of lockdown. Serological tests monitored across the course of the second wave can provide insights into the population-level prevalence and dynamic patterns of COVID-19 infection. Objective: To assess changes in COVID-19 seroprevalence among asymptomatic employees working in Tokyo during the second wave. Design: We conducted an observational cohort study. Healthy volunteers working for a Japanese company in Tokyo were enrolled from disparate locations to determine seropositivity against COVID19 from May 26 to August 25, 2020. COVID-19 IgM and IgG antibodies were determined by a rapid COVID19 IgM/IgG test kit using fingertip blood. Across the company, tests were performed and acquired weekly. For each participant, serology tests were offered twice, separated by approximately a month, to provide self-reference of test results and to assess for seroconversion and seroreversion. Setting: Workplace setting within a large company. Participants: Healthy volunteers from 1877 employees of a large Japanese company were recruited to the study from 11 disparate locations across Tokyo. Participants having fever, cough, or shortness of breath at the time of testing were excluded. Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s): Seropositivity rate (SPR) was calculated by pooled data from each two-weeks window across the cohort. Either IgM or IgG positivity was defined as seropositive. Changes in immunological status against SARS-CoV-2 were determined by comparing results between two tests obtained from the same individual. Results: Six hundred fifteen healthy volunteers (mean + SD 40.8 + 10.0; range 19-69; 45.7 % female) received at least one test. Seroprevalence increased from 5.8 % to 46.8 % over the course of the summer. The most dramatic increase in SPR occurred in late June and early July, paralleling the rise in daily confirmed cases within Tokyo, which peaked on August 4. Out of the 350 individuals (mean + SD 42.5 + 10.0; range 19-69; 46.0 % female) who completed both offered tests, 21.4 % of those individuals who tested seronegative became seropositive and seroreversion was found in 12.2 % of initially seropositive participants. 81.1% of IgM positive cases at first testing became IgM negative in approximately one month. Conclusions and Relevance: COVID-19 infection may have spread widely across the general population of Tokyo despite the very low fatality rate. Given the temporal correlation between the rise in seropositivity and the decrease in reported COVID-19 cases that occurred without a shut-down, herd immunity may be implicated. Sequential testing for serological response against COVID-19 is useful for understanding the dynamics of COVID-19 infection at the population-level.

Single digits, baby! 

👏👏👏

Great to see medical expertise and advice vindicated in the face of a hostile, evil media and noisy selfish minority who'd rather see thousands die so they don't have to wear a facemask.

Agreed. Even if, like Human Rights Watch, you have objections to some of Dan Andrews' policies and/or their application, it's obvious that social distancing and wearing a mask stop community transmission of SARS-CoV-2. And that stops thousands of preventable deaths.

The medical expert advice has been demonstrated to be correct. Hopefully, it restores public faith in their expertise.

From New York, a study led by Mohammud M. Alam who specialises in infectious diseases. It looked at treating high-risk patients who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 with the antibiotic called doxycycline. It was administered soon after the onset of symptoms.

Conclusion

Early treatment with DOXY for high-risk patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 infections in non-hospital settings, such as LTCFs, is associated with early clinical recovery, decreased hospitalization, and decreased mortality.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7419149/

Unfortunately, this study has its limitations. There wasn't a set of patients taking a placebo. So you can't draw too many conclusions from it. I guess, one could argue that it's ethically questionable to give a placebo to high-risk patients.

The theory is that this antibiotic, plus ivermectin plus zinc make a big difference and are perfectly safe to take. It wouldn't be a miracle cure, but it might well be decent. 

Any government could have a large double-blinded randomised control trial on it done within weeks. Then we'd have the gold standard of proof (for or against). Some people (but not everybody) has known this for months. And still no action.

It strikes me as incredibly negligent that pharma/govt are reluctant to look into it. In Victoria, the DHHS could surely have got the wheels in motion. We've had more than enough cases.

But no. Donald Trump had to try to get people's hopes up so he could improve his popularity rating. Contrary to expert advice, he decided to tell Americans that hydroxychloroquine was some kind of a miracle cure that would solve all of America's problems. Since then, the whole world (including many, but not all, doctors) have been extremely worried about any kind of false hope or slightly experimental treatment. This can go too far the other way.

Classic Rachel.

One million dead as of today.

#whatstheissuerachael. I swear some of the questions are bordering on ridiculous   yesterdays one about the nt  border restrictions was a doozy

Yeah but how many of those were actually car accidents?

Or from suicide. Etc etc.