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@taniwharugby said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@voodoo thats cos its mean talking about the
fattiesfood challengedBut, like 'acceptable deaths' from Covid, obesity is a conversation that needs to be had.
It's not just that it's mean, doctors and nurses at GP clinics have been telling patients for decades to stop being fat (and providing various advice around that). If that was the answer, surely it might have seen results by now?
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@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
If telling people to stop being fat worked, it would have worked by now - the health and education systems here both put time and resources into that both individually and systemically and have done so for decades.
Naturally, the suggestion to ban, restrict, regulate or heavily tax bad food would not be popular, but it might do something either in terms of revenue for more health staff/facilities and/or behavioural changes. Definitions of what counts as bad food would no doubt the subject of much lobbying and debate, of course...
More broadly, more money through higher wages and more time to cook through shorter working hours and/or commutes would also assist with less terrible food choices at a population level over time.
Building up the ICU and general hospital staffing capacity will require a lot of money, time and will given there is a world wide shortage of a lot of the relevant occupations – I'm all for doubling wages, cutting hours and improving workloads if that's what it takes, but we might struggle to compete even if we do that.
In good news, only 11 cases today.
Instead of the tiresome tax it if we don't like it approach that changes nothing, how about making good food cheaper? Personal choice comes into all of this, and people can choose to be fat fluffybunnies if they want.
It should be clearly, unambiguously stated by people like Taxinda that being overweight increases your changes of a bad outcome from Covid. Educate people, and stamp out the bullshit fat is healthy woke rubbish rising at the moment.
Letting people die without the information that they are contributing to their own demise is not very kind.
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@kirwan well KFC in Whangarei is still bloody busy, coned off turning into thier entrance from one way, still having Traffic Management there a week out of L4 for the carpark and drive through...says it all really.
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@taniwharugby said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@kirwan well KFC in Whangarei is still bloody busy, coned off turning into thier entrance from one way, still having Traffic Management there a week out of L4...says it all really.
Exactly.
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Bernard Hickey's reckons about when we might open up - quite pessimistic.
https://thekaka.substack.com/p/dawn-chorus-time-to-stop-kidding
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@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
Bernard Hickey's reckons about when we might open up - quite pessimistic.
https://thekaka.substack.com/p/dawn-chorus-time-to-stop-kidding
Yeah, he's quite optimisitic about that public support. When that flips, and it will if they talk about two more years of this crap, then they lose all control. Great strategy.
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His very first bullet point
- Firstly, vaccines aren’t stopping reinfection of others and are waning in effectiveness, meaning hopes for herd immunity are gone, unless an amazing new booster is invented
is totally unproven conjecture and ignores the experience of those countries that are ahead on the vax cycle
Yes there is some truth in it but it's mainly sensationalist click bait
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@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
Yes there is some truth in it but it's mainly sensationalist click bait
Sounds like a few Bernard Hickey projections then... I think he might be the economist Bob Jones sometimes takes a swipe at for reading the property market wrong a few years back?
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@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@canefan Surely you jest. Vance is OK but the other two are probably the biggest click bait whores in NZ just aiming at a different target audience.
Plus Hosking is fucking thick. As in surprised he can tie his own shoelaces thick. To steal a @Hooroo descriptor my hatiest media personality, cause he's certainly no journalist.
So who does then?
Not saying you are wrong but if 2 of 3 named are click bait whores who actually does question Cindy hard?
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So I've been trying to think about how you could decide on an acceptable number of deaths from covid. That led me to comparing the initial estimate for the worst case of deaths (80,000) to the number of weeks the whole country has spent in lockdown (10 weeks for 5,000,000 people). If you took that lockdown time as equivalent to people not living, you'd need those 80,000 people to live an extra 12 years on average to breakeven on time. I doubt we're going to get that.
It's a fairly meaningless (and heartless) comparison, but it is kinda interesting how much value we place on keeping people alive compared with living.
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@anonymous said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
If you took that lockdown time as equivalent to people not living,
Yeah - Nah
@anonymous said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
how you could decide on an acceptable number of deaths from covid.
<1 if I was the one!
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I've read about American studies that show that vaccination + a dose of the plague is extremely effective against multiple variants, so if everyone got vaccinated and then we let her rip, we'd be sorted. That said, apparently Singapore has backed off its planned reopening after a Delta surge threatened to overwhelm the hospital system.
@Anonymous the two main methodologies are quality adjusted life years (QALY) and the statistical value of a life (around NZ$10 million).
@Donsteppa was that Bernard Hickey or Shamubeel Eaqub?
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@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
I've read about American studies that show that vaccination + a dose of the plague is extremely effective against multiple variants, so if everyone got vaccinated and then we let her rip, we'd be sorted. That said, apparently Singapore has backed off its planned reopening after a Delta surge threatened to overwhelm the hospital system.
@Anonymous the two main methodologies are quality adjusted life years (QALY) and the statistical value of a life (around NZ$10 million).
@Donsteppa was that Bernard Hickey or Shamubeel Eaqub?
So no easy answers
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@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
I think the government will be closely watching what happens in the Northern Hemisphere as they move into autumn.
For all the triumphalism of some elements up north (media / politicians and no worse than our own) the graphs are trending remarkably similarly to last year.
7 day death rate in the UK for example is 15 times higher than it was for the same week last year. I do get that the UK is a lot more open but I wonder how much of their great summer is the vax rate and how much is seasonality.
I know case numbers are high as we "burn through" this bugger, but you look at the relationship between case numbers and hospitalisations/deaths in the UK, you'd have to to say it's primarily vaccination ...
There's been a big change I have noticed in attitude in the UK press in the last two months, even my leftie Guardian. 2 months ago a switch to highlighting how many unvaccinated are the ones in hospital (plus highlighting specific cases). In the last month I feel Covid is no longer the #1 item in the news, which is a first for 18 months.
There seems to be right/left wing consensus we should vaccinated the 12-15 age group (like Europe and US etc), apart from our JCVI vaccination advisory group who seem to have drunk some leftover Australian ATAGI group coolaid.
The government won't lock down because we have 20% of the population (say) who don't wan't to get vaccinated. They may lockdown or re-introduce controls to protect the health service (NHS).
Think of it as "evolution in action". Get vaccinated or ... take the risk?
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@anonymous said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
So I've been trying to think about how you could decide on an acceptable number of deaths from covid. That led me to comparing the initial estimate for the worst case of deaths (80,000) to the number of weeks the whole country has spent in lockdown (10 weeks for 5,000,000 people). If you took that lockdown time as equivalent to people not living, you'd need those 80,000 people to live an extra 12 years on average to breakeven on time. I doubt we're going to get that.
It's a fairly meaningless (and heartless) comparison, but it is kinda interesting how much value we place on keeping people alive compared with living.
I think most governments base it upon existing healthcare capacity, which can be flexed but only to a degree.
If you have people dying at home, in the street like Wuhan, India, early on in Italy then ... you won't survive the next election, especially as we have learned a lot in the last 12-18 months.
The last I read had UK Covid cases occupying 20% of UK capacity ( I follow an ICU doctor on Twitter who is very open about the situation). I doubt it has exceeded 30-35% even now.
The problem is that NZ has a very low indeed ICU capacity per head, plus zero percent have gained "natural" immunity. Letting it "rip" like in the UK seems less practical in terms of healthcare, and of course politically?
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@kirwan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
It should be clearly, unambiguously stated by people like Taxinda that being overweight increases your changes of a bad outcome from Covid. Educate people, and stamp out the bullshit fat is healthy woke rubbish rising at the moment.
Letting people die without the information that they are contributing to their own demise is not very kind.
Sure, inform them. How long to you give them to get their BMI down 6 months, 12 months?
I think Governments worldwide have pretty much decided as a matter of public policy, that if obese people wanted to be healthier they'd have done so before now, with or without Covid.
However, don't get me wrong, I would LOVE to see more statistics published on the obesity as a risk factor in Covid.
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@taniwharugby said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@kirwan well KFC in Whangarei is still bloody busy, coned off turning into thier entrance from one way, still having Traffic Management there a week out of L4 for the carpark and drive through...says it all really.
Yup. As much as educating people to make better life choices is a worthy thing to do, there is high obesity in the western world underpinned by an unprecedented ease to source cheap high calorie food. Not just those who hang out at the takeaway, but normal people who simply eat too much. That results in general health issues, regardless of susceptibility to covid19
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@canefan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@taniwharugby said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@kirwan well KFC in Whangarei is still bloody busy, coned off turning into thier entrance from one way, still having Traffic Management there a week out of L4 for the carpark and drive through...says it all really.
Yup. As much as educating people to make better life choices is a worthy thing to do, there is high obesity in the western world underpinned by an unprecedented ease to source cheap high calorie food. Not just those who hang out at the takeaway, but normal people who simply eat too much. That results in general health issues, regardless of susceptibility to covid19
This always used to shock me when I could come home.
When we go to KFC for example, my friend (who is the same height as me and used to be the same weight when we were at HS) will order a large set and something else and hammer it. And he probably goes once or twice a week. And doesn’t exercise.
At restaurants, I was blown away at how much food was served as a main, so would often try to order it as a starter.
Even then (mainly because I'd drink too much with my old man but also because my Mum would serve me way too much as well), I'd usually put on a kg to 1.5kgs a week , so if I went for two weeks at 82, I knew I'd come back 84-85, and that's with a run every few days as well.
The States is much worse of course, but I do usually go to Texas.
Coronavirus - New Zealand