[LINK] Aspen Medical Selling Smart Badges for COVID-19
Frank O'Connor
francisoconnor3 at tpg.com.au
Thu Oct 7 14:58:53 AEDT 2021
A lot of assumptions in there …
COVID is still running wild in the world. Amongst 75% of the population there is still no vaccination protection. Amongst those 75% are the densest population concentrations on the planet.
In the last 18 months four new variants and possibly more have surfaced. It’s beginning to look like, that given the opportunity, COVID will compete with influenza and the common cold for recurrence in new incarnations over a short periods … possibly shorter than the flu recurrence of one or two new variants annually.
With 75% of the world’s population currently vulnerable, unvaccinated, the scope for new variants spontaneously appearing is accelerated … new COVID spot-fires and variants will proliferate in that unprotected population (as Delta did in India, and other variants did in South Africa, Brazil and other places).
This is not a static situation that can be easily managed … it’s frighteningly dynamic. Moving all the time.
Who knows … a new 'super-powerful’ hyper infectious COVID variant might arise that only causes peripheral symptoms in anyone affected and thereby avoids killing hosts and attracting the attention of the medical and scientific communities whilst replicating successfully. (In other words a well behaved COVID virus, with minimal effect on hosts and maximum incidence across the target population.) That is the best case scenario for both us and the virus.
The worst case is more variants appear that are even more contagious, cause even more dramatic immune system reactions, affect the young worse than the old (like the 1918 pandemic), smash the adult population rather than those with weaker immune systems ... old fogies like me, and hammer our medical and scientific personnel and infrastructure with a plague so huge so that they simply cannot cope.
That’s when it gets bad. People dying in the streets bad.
When we drop the lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne, when case numbers inevitably increase, when hospitals and the medical profession are put under ever increasing pressure and ICU and other serious cases proliferate … that’s when we’ll know if ‘living free’ is viable or not. Because when people start dying of heart attacks and strokes and other medical problems that the medics were able to treat before COVID, when death rates from accidents and the like increase dramatically, when they start doing the ‘COVID shuffle' in ICU, when ventilators have to be rationed away from the elderly (who are also getting it in the head because treatments for the diseases of the aged … cancer, heart disease, dementia etc etc … ate being restricted because of the need for COVID beds) … that’s when it’s really gonna hit the fan.
The smart move from Morrison when Palacziuk made her play for more hospital funds would have been to agree. Now all he can do is wave in the breeze and hope that his call was right.
And over the last 18 months (3 years if you include the national bushfire emergency), if anything has been proved, it’s that Morrison has a distressing tendency to make bad calls.
Just my 2 cents worth …
====
> On 7 Oct 2021, at 9:36 am, Bernard Robertson-Dunn <brd at iimetro.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 7/10/2021 8:54 am, Tom Worthington wrote:
>>
>> The idea is that each person at a workplace, or entertainment venue,
>> wears a watch sized device which tracks where they go and who they go
>> near. It will beep if you get too close to someone.
>> https://www.smartbadge.com.au/
>>
> Contact tracing has had its day as a primary solution because the
> problem has (or shortly will have) changed.
>
> With a combination of high levels of vaccinations and a relaxation of
> restrictions the problem will become one of living with COVID19, not
> preventing people from getting it.
>
> The key metric will move from the number of new cases to how stressed is
> the healthcare system.
>
> Most people will get the disease but, because they are vaccinated, will
> experience minimal symptoms and after effects. They will also have a
> lighter viral load and will spread the disease less easily. And with the
> availability of viral treatments still under development even the number
> of people who have a bad experience with the disease will decrease.
>
> The same goes for vaccination passports, although they may be needed for
> international travel.
>
> Of course there will still be opportunities for governments to stuff
> things up, mostly the financial and economic consequences of the whole
> epidemic.
>
> The remaining big danger is a new variant that does not respond to
> existing vaccinations and treatment. This is unlikely to come from well
> vaccinated nations but may well come from those countries that have very
> low levels of vaccine uptake and high numbers of cases.
>
>
> --
>
> Regards
> brd
>
> Bernard Robertson-Dunn
> Canberra Australia
> email: brd at iimetro.com.au
>
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