[ad_1]
Tegan Taylor: Hi, this is Coronacast, a daily podcast all about the coronavirus. I’m health reporter Tegan Taylor.
Norman Swan: And I’m Dr. Norman Swan, a physician and journalist, it’s Monday, November 9th.
Tegan Taylor: And it looks like America knows who will be its president next year, and even though Joe Biden hasn’t been sworn in yet, and there are actually a couple of legal challenges between him and the presidency, he has already reported. that his first action when he takes office is to try to keep the coronavirus pandemic under control, which is a gigantic task. They have so many cases, I think they have over 100,000 cases a day coming up right now, and also about 1,000 deaths a day.
So Norman, just to put you in place here, if he were President-elect Dr Norman Swan, what would your action be to get the coronavirus under control in the United States?
Norman Swan: Well, I’d probably say thank you but no thanks to such a difficult task. You just have to be systematic about it. And remember, what he’s going to do is take the reins on January 20 or so next year, opening day, and he has almost no power before. All it can do is actually get the plans and try to push from behind.
The transition will be messy, aggressive and inexorable, it will not be a transition like George W. Bush to Obama during the financial crisis. It will not get any help from the system. So Obama was able to influence politics before he was actually president and there was an open door for that, but it’s not going to happen here. So he is truly helpless until he comes to power, unless something miraculous happens in the Trump administration.
So you have to project yourself forward. So two things, one is in the unlikely event that he gets the Trump administration’s cooperation, what would he do? And in the much more likely case that he took over and was able to do something on January 20, what would he do?
Well, by January 20, with nothing in place and no vaccines, there will be over 200,000 cases a day and possibly double the number of deaths. There is already a high percentage of ICU beds in the United States occupied by people with COVID-19, and the situation will get worse. So there is a vaccine strategy and a non-vaccine strategy. And so the first thing I’d do is assemble a vaccine task force to figure out how to administer what the fastest and largest immunization campaign the world has ever seen will be for America and indeed Australia and other countries. . So that’s the first thing, you need to have a vaccine task force to figure out how to administer the vaccine, who will, where will you get it, will it be free? The presumption is that it is, and all that complexities, as states will likely have to administer it.
So you need to understand what your treatment strategy is because too many people are receiving shock bills as a result of having COVID-19 through no fault of their own. So will it provide some support to people being treated with COVID-19 and Covid for a long time so that the financial burden that goes on is lowered on the community from having COVID-19?
You will need to have a separate Aged Care Task Force. As if we had a problem here, they have a problem there. And then you need to look at prevention. These are the things that have to happen in parallel, it’s not you doing one, then the other.
So you need to figure out what the testing capacity is, is testing happening at maximum capacity, have you installed a contact tracking infrastructure? Why you will need this to move forward and how to actually do it, particularly in republican states that don’t want to hear about it.
And you may have to accept that you will only have partial success, as indeed they were in 1918, 1919, the United States of America suffered really badly from the Spanish flu (it wasn’t quite the Spanish flu, but you know what I mean), because it is fragmented, where there have been bolshies doing their thing, very difficult for the federal government to exercise power, and it has hit hard.
And then you are left with social distance, because the only thing that works is social distance, and how you can enact social distance that could become a lower priority if there is a vaccine and you are distributing it quickly. But a vaccine will take some time and you may see a rapid escalation of cases. So as incentives for states that want to socially distance themselves to do so, as we have here where there is financial support, where you are able to provide help to people so that they are not disadvantaged by social distances.
These are all the things you can do, but if you really want to stop it, there are only two things you can really do, one is a vaccine and the other is extreme social distancing, basically a block. You’ve seen how it works, it works very well, but it’s painful.
Tegan Taylor: Australia is a very different country from the United States culturally, I think we really saw it during this pandemic, that Australians as a whole were really happy to stay home and close the borders. If America could take one thing from Australia about how we handled the coronavirus response, what would it be?
Norman Swan: What really made it work in Victoria in the end was the community involvement, and you had those very different communities in that northwest corridor, also moving southeast, where they weren’t of English origin. , different cultures, different religions, different opinion leaders in many ways, of people who would have believed and followed, and so you have to have a very sophisticated community engagement program, and that’s what Victoria ultimately put in place, and that’s what they don’t in the United States, apart from some states. I think New York has succeeded to some extent, but not many others.
Tegan Taylor: Well, I would vote for you, President Swan. But let’s talk a little bit about Australia, and Victoria in particular because we are seeing more donut days than ever, which is really fantastic, and now we are seeing a lifting of restrictions starting to occur in Victoria, the Ring of Steel is coming around Melbourne Metro. But the obligatory masks remain in place and Mary asks; when will masks no longer be mandatory in Victoria? He is saying that it is inconsistent with comparable states like New South Wales in terms of the number of cases.
Norman Swan: Well I suspect if I were to speak to some of the medical authorities in New South Wales, they would envy Victoria where they went to wear the mandatory mask because you are still getting cases popping up in New South Wales and you are still getting alerts for certain trips by train at certain times of the day.
New South Wales desperately needs to open up public transport and lose social distances on public transport, which they could do if they had the mandatory mask. They are simply not prepared to burn political capital.
So Victoria would be crazy to revoke the mandatory mask. They ran out of political capital to enforce it, and you could probably raise the need in the outer areas, it’s actually of little use now in the outer areas, but they still make it mandatory; if you want to get on a tram or train or want to enter a shop, you must wear a mask. Obviously the easiest way to do this is to put on a mask before leaving the house so that you don’t have to fiddle with it before and after. But it only gives that extra level of protection when you don’t know how many viruses are out there.
So the moment it looks like there are no viruses around in Victoria, you just don’t know what’s going to happen and you’ll have people starting to return from overseas. If you were a commanding officer in both New South Wales and Victoria, I’d say masks mandatory for public transport, and you could probably miss a lot of the social distances and get on with public transport.
But there will come a time in Victoria where it will seem pretty pointless if they’re gone for a long, long time without … I don’t know what a long, long time is, but probably two or three cycles of the virus with absolutely no spread, so you’d think , well, the mandatory masks could probably be relaxed.
Tegan Taylor: So you mentioned New South Wales Norman, and Jack has a question about that saying; why doesn’t New South Wales do some mass testing in these areas of concern, wouldn’t that help track down cases?
Norman Swan: Well it’s good that you used the word ‘rinsed’ there, Jack, because sewage is creating problems, for example through the western suburbs and even down southwest of Sydney, Moss Vale, there was a cluster there, and the wastewater was a very useful way to detect the possible presence of COVID-19 in the community.
Remember, it depends on how they do the wastewater tests and we will ask an expert to explain it, but my understanding is that the wastewater samples are aggregated of a few days of wastewater, so it’s not necessarily that day, it’s kind of a average sampling of the previous days, and hold it and then test it.
And it’s not that well defined, at least at the moment, in terms of the exact periphery it might be coming from, although some people suggest, and I don’t really know if it’s happening, where you get very close to the source test where you have areas in the sewer system where you can actually go in and really test a very localized area, maybe a set of buildings and that sort of thing. But at the moment I’m not sure we’re doing this.
And just to finish Jack’s question very quickly, while they’re not doing mass testing in those areas, they’re coming in and asking people to come forward in large numbers. And the test numbers actually in New South Wales and Victoria are pretty good, as there is very little virus around, so congratulations to people in both states. Big numbers.
Tegan Taylor: Absolutely. And that’s all we have time for Coronacast today.
Norman Swan: Keep submitting your questions, go to abc.net.au/coronacast, click “Ask your question”, then mention Coronacast so we can collect it.
Tegan Taylor: And see you tomorrow.
Source link
