Hi @timdunlop - I found your excellent article meanjin.com.au/blog/journalis… by following a link from @JoshBBornstein. The only thing I would add is that with COVID-19, the actual experts, the source of what the journalists are writing about, are also in the audience. /2
In the context of COVID-19, immunologists, epidemiologists & health workers are often some of the most dismissive critics of journalists, and again #NewsCorpse, and its fellow travellers of LNP-aligned organisations are often targeted. /3
In this case because much of what they publish is not only deeply partisan but downright dangerous.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
So: What is Wrong with COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine in Australia? A thread.
After difficulties with compliance to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders for returning travellers, Hotel Quarantine became the mainstay of infection management for these people in Australia. /2
But the efficacy of this program has varied enormously between states. Here I argue that the key difference lies in ventilation. /3
Think, for a moment, about the hotel rooms you have stayed in: Most would be serviced by one of two types of air handling: a) Natural ventilation modified by a split system air conditioner; or b) A mechanical (ducted) ventilation system. /4
Victoria COVID-19 28/09/2020
A least squares fit of the latest case data trend line generated by the sum of two Lorentizian curves, fitting the curve ALL the way down to FIVE!!!.
A story about Kennett's Melbourne. In 1993, I was working at Cambridge Uni, but my father was sick, so I flew back into Tullamarine Airport, catching the airbus to the top end of Elizabeth St, where I waited for a tram to take me & my baggage down to Flinders Street Station. /2
I waited for over 30 minutes and a single tram passed me. I looked around for a time table, but there wasn't one at the tram stop. And them I had a moment on panic: Had I arrived on a Sunday morning? Not only no trams, but virtually no cars either. /3
I pulled out my itinerary and checked the arrival date. I standing in the middle of the CBD on a Monday morning at a little after 9am, and the city was as dead as if hit by a pandemic. That was what Kennett did to Melbourne.
Two days ago, the Morrison government made an unusual addition to the list of people exempt from Australia’s travel ban on temporary visa holders: covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/critical-skill…
/2
It's an odd addition, since this is probably the only professional group that, if their claims are true, gets no additional advantage from travel. If, for example, they wanted to provide me with critical skills in a religious field, they could just pray for me to acquire them. /3
(And they have.) It occurs to me that a government so focused on their own personal benefit might conceivably have added this group because they planned to hold their own "religious" convention. Of Hillsong perhaps. <end>
COVID-19: Where are we now #6
In surgery, emergency medicine and obstetrics, a runaway situation can develop in a patient, where the medical team always seems one step behind the disease. /2
A diligent and careful doctor can find themselves only having the evidence for a pathological process – and therefore confidence in choice of intervention - once the process has evolved into a worse situation. /3
When a medical emergency triggers this sort of cascade of calamities, trying to catch up with the disease process is rarely successful. /4