Covid-19 times - How are you?
 

Thought I'd start a thread to see how the members here are spending their time, and how this Pandemic is affecting them.


By way of introduction I'll post an academic article I found in a journal I read on the disease and then invite those reading to give some information about how you are spending your time, whether you've contracted Covid-19, how it's affecting you and so on.


Firstly the article by Zania Stamataki, she is a senior lecturer and researcher in viral immunology at the University of Birmingham UK




I'm spending my time confined to my house, I can go out to shop and to exercise locally but not much else. I have plenty of TV movies and shows saved on my PVR from over the years that' I'm slowly working my way through.


How is everyone else surviving this?

I live by myself in a fairly rural area, and have no TV to watch, so really not noticing much different. I did watch an older documentary about the 1918 pandemic, and learned the value of masks and social distancing. I wear a mask in stores, although it's just a dust mask for work at home.

Due to the fact that I am part of a specific target group of old people. I am lonely and miss the contact with my kids. Daughter, Granddaughter, and two great grandchildren (6yo girl and 1yo boy) I could not attend the boys birthday as I am not in his social bubble. I get to email my shopping to my daughter who shops then dumps the stuff in my unit ( while I am sent 2 metres away) we get to know how long this purgatory lasts on the 20th inst. As the NZ rate of infection continues to drop I seriously hope for better things..

I spoke too soon, the 2Tb drive on my 8 year old PVR has just crashed, so much for viewing all those movies I've saved over the years. Off to try and pick up a replacement drive locally tomorrow, if not then an online search is in the pipeline.

I have a friend in Kenya. A single mom with three kids. Her goal right now is to make sure they eat everyday.

Sure puts our problems into perspective.

Ran across this song, which brought the current problem into perspective for me. Disastrous times are nothing new.

That song would be very meaningful to many people especially vets. Yesterday was Anzac Day here in Australia, quite different this year with the whole country in lockdown.

Here in NZ. The PM calls us team five million. We have had severe lock down for the past five weeks. Lost our liberty, finances and (for us oldies) family contact. Tomorrow night at midnight the restrictions ease slightly to allow non contact business to re-open in a modified form. Reason for this tiny easement is our national statistics over the Covid-19 period
Cases to date 1461
Recovered 1120
Active 325
Deaths 19
Daily new cases 4.6 average for the past week
I am not sure how these figures scale against places like the USA. However I am convinced the sticking to the rules has saved us from "the age of destruction" here in little old NZ...:wave:
Be kind to each other..

Here in Australia each state is locked down, with no travel between states permitted except for some specific exceptions where special quarantine provisions apply.

In Queensland, my state we have a similar population to NZ, just over 5 million.
Cases to date 1030
Recovered 926
Active 98
Deaths 6

Some restrictions will be reduced at midnight next Friday. Travelling with family or a friend to a park for a picnic, or to non-essential shopping within 50 kM of home, provided social distancing is maintained, will be allowed.

The Commonwealth Health department has today released a contact app for mobile phones which will log any contact longer than 20 mins and closer than 1.5 metres. Should any contacts become infected, users will be notified to go and get tested.

I've just installed this despite some reservations about privacy and misuse, but I've used an abbreviation of my name that I don't use elsewhere, to detect the source of any strange messages I may receive.

NZ has done it right, and has a much better looking leader than the US.

Neddie, contact tracing is just not something I'll up for. Read that reading blue tooth nearness app checking is really unreliable, and what about false positives? Or the scarlet letter issue.

Yes I have reservations also, but the government has said that if enough people take up the application they will consider lifting some other restrictions earlier.

A false positive will result in a covid test, which will be a drive through test and a few days home quarantine while the results are assessed, which is not much different to the current lockdown just no going out to shop or no work for those still at work. I don't know what a scarlet letter is, please explain?

Me too Jintan. Maybe Island life is too isolated:..surprised..

The Scarlet Letter, 1850 by author Hawthorne. Single woman has a child, and the court rules she must wear a red A on her forehead. Readers assume it meant Adulterous. All my life been looking for a gal with a red letter A, so I could ask her to dance.

Thanks Jintan. May we call you Yoda???

Our PM and Director General of health have just finished a one hour televised press conference (No journos abused)
To summarise I would like to quote the late great Sir Edmond Hillary as he topped Everest.
"we've knocked the ******* off Sherpa" Not quite out of the woods but feeling a whole lot better about being old in NZ. Watch this space..............:) Damn I forgot about the censor I meant to say bast----ard

I am happy to report that NO new cases of the virus occurred in this country for the first time in 49 days
We have less than two hundred cases in total. Come on over Aussie brothers the skiing is great. We have already sent our league team over to get the ball rolling (pun intended)

I'm self-employed, work from home, and am single, living alone. Essentially, I've been self-quarantined for over a decade. All this just means less dates.

I'm in a relatively small town ~30k people. And in my county (area) a total of 20 people have been diagnosed (up 4 from last week) and 11 have recovered. So.. in general, there's more panic than necessary.

But I understand concerns for the elderly or those with health conditions. I have almost zero concern about getting anything myself, but I always err on the safe side for others when I do have to go out and be among others (grocery shopping, etc).

Talking to some people, they are under the impression hundreds are infected and dying in this area. That's just not the case. In America I'm always amazed at how the bureaucracy and media seem to think the ENTIRE country is the same as New York. New York is really being hit dramatically hard... and in general... all you hear is relative to THAT area and not consistent with many other areas in the country. I don't mean to make light of anything.. I just heard today that apparently COVID has now killed more Americans (+65,000) than the Viet Nam war did.

My growing concern is about herd immunity if everyone is always locked down. Without herd immunity this could go on for quite some time.

Here's hoping you all stay safe and healthy!!!

It's not an "asteroid" yet.. but.. we'll see...

I don't want to put the wind up you, but in this country a town of ~30k people would have zero cases.

Do they know how so many became infected? Has the contact tracing been done?

The large numbers here are in the bigger cities, with clusters in some work places and others in nursing homes. It would seem that in these cases one person got it, sometimes asymptotically, went to work and infected other who passed it on to still more in the same place.

Nursing home staff are now checked as they arrive to work at the start of each shift.

Just announced in this state that home schooling to end and kids back in class in three weeks provided there is not a large increase in infections in that time.

On another tack the NZ PM Jacinda Ardern is to join the Australian National Cabinet, (Australian PM, all State Premiers, top health officials) which meets regularly, (now by video conference) to discuss tactics and plan for a concerted attack on the problems. Commentators have remarked that having her join has just raised the average IQ quite a few points.

Two further points Buzz. We do not get individual states information. The grim stats simply tell us that one million plus cases exist in the USA nothing about the various states/areas.
I thought the British PM mooted the herd immunity concept prior to his infection and Great Britain becoming the fourth most affected nation in the world.
Apologies to Joan Baez " We shall overcome"

It's actually sort of difficult to get exact local numbers. You may find individual state numbers.. but they aren't typically broken down to a specific area within the state, barring major metropolitan areas.

All you can really hope is that the local news networks are reporting that data.. Unfortunately, local news is notorious for just parroting what national news reports if something is nation-wide.

As posted, In my county, there have been 20 cases.. 11 have recovered but there's no data anywhere on antibody tests. But they are now reporting that antibodies may do nothing to prevent reoccurrence by another Covid strain. And the national news is now reporting by the end of June we could see the death tolls double or worse.

Things are starting to reopen here this week. Apparently people hate themselves so much they don't want to stay home and be alone with their own minds........ so.. yeah death tolls are going to climb.

The information on antibodies is not encouraging, tests on some people who have recovered suggest that they have very few to nil antibodies, which suggests that 1) they are prone to another infection and 2) it is going to be almost impossible to create a vaccine.

News report.

I hope they buggered up those tests and this is not the case.

There is still a steady increase in cases here in Queensland, population 5+ million, present situation:

Cases to date 1043
Recovered 980
Active 57
Deaths 6

After what seems to be an age in lock-down, here in good old NZ we have now less than 100 cases of covid-19. Our PM (the better looking one) has announced that we can now travel within the country see relatives that have been unavailable for the past seven weeks and we can congregate in groups of a maximum of ten people. We can go to restaurants, movie theatres, shopping malls, etc as long as we are spaced out. I wonder if some one close by can help me with this new concept. Ned. Do you have any spare electric pineapples left??

Spaced out? Like Benny and the Jets spaced out? Cool!

Best I can do John- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edoONcu8zaY

Many thanks Ned I feel well spaced already.....

The NZ PM has such a following here in Australia that a negative comment about her by a most objectionable radio Shock Jock, Alan Jones has cause him to lose his $4 million a year job at top Australian Radio station 2GB. He said he's resigning for health reasons. see https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/bus...12-p54s2s.html

Smiling tigers bite very hard..:hmm:

These are the news reports that I love to read.
New Zealand has recorded its third day without a new Covid-19 case.
Dr Bloomfield gave the latest figures on New Zealand's response to Covid-19.
Today's third zero case day means New Zealand's combined total of confirmed and probable cases remains at 1497, with 94 per cent now considered to have recovered from the virus.
With no additional deaths to report, the death toll remains at 21.
Only 64 active cases exist in NZ.

After five more days and one weak case of the virus
The United States and the United Kingdom could learn a thing or two from New Zealand.

Our response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been hailed the "most impressive" by public relations experts around the world.

The government's quick action in the early days of the virus' arrival into the country meant we were able to stamp out widespread community transmission, and prevent tens of thousands of people from becoming infected and dying, as was originally predicted.

The news over here just keeps on getting better six days in a row with zero cases of the virus.
Only twelve active (monitored) cases now exist in our country.
Sadly we lost twenty one of our most frail citizens who were aged and ill before the virus stuck.
I am hoping our Australian neighbours are fairing similarly on a state by state basis as our economies are going to become dependent on each other in the next period of time...

Yes Australia is doing well, NSW and Vic are the worst states. Unfortunately here in Queensland we had one more death yesterday, a strange one, Covid-19 was only determined at the autopsy. The chap was 30, the youngest in the country. Lived and died in a remote mining town where there had been no previous cases. He had not left town for over six months. The authorities are investigating.

Wow! I know the virus has a long tale but that seems a bit extreme. I wonder if there was an underlying health problem in this victim.

Yes there was, he had been off work sick for some while, he had some ongoing lung condition and he thought this was the problem, till his wife came home from work and found him dead.

The health authorities are contact tracing to see how the infection came into this remote town, no conclusive result yet.

Queensland Covid-19 Stats:
Population: Just over 5,000,000
Confirmed cases: 1058
Recovered: 1044
Deaths: 7
Still ill: 7


Australia Covid-19 Stats:
Population: Just over 25 Million
Confirmed cases: 7150
Recovered: 6566
Deaths: 103
Still ill: 481

The Queensland stats seem to be slightly better than those of NZ. That has to be a good thing. NSW appears to be getting a bit of a hammering I guess the population to be higher or more dense.

Well the NSW Premier is certainly more dense, she starts opening the place up this weekend and they have the worse figures in Australia. She wants the QLD border opened, but the QLD Premier is saying 'NO' we don't want your cases up here.

NSW Covid-19 Stats:
Population: Just over 7.99 million
Confirmed cases: 3090
Recovered: 2670
Deaths: 48
Still ill: 372

My goodness I hope she is not on the "make NSW great again" bandwagon. We all know how that works out

She certainly tends that way, getting the economy going again seems to be more important than stopping people getting sick, with her. Fortunately saner heads in other states are holding her at bay, for the moment.

Unfortunately we have here in Queensland one greedy businessman, and former politician who plans on challenging the border closures in a high court constitutional hearing. Clive Palmer is the prick, egged on by two right wing politicians, Peter Dutton and Pauline Hansen.

Fortunately with the speed the high court operates at, things may be back to normal before any hearing is held.

I posted this in the wrong forum..Sorry.
Just one sick person in the entire country. Worth a sigh of relief in my veiw.
Coronavirus outbreak — confirmed cases
New Zealand
TOTAL
1504
CONFIRMED
1154
PROBABLE
350
ACTIVE
1
DEATHS
22
RECOVERED
1481

Worldwide
CONFIRMED
5,704,736

+108,186*
DEATHS
357,736

+4363*