The number of active cases have stabilised and flatten off. Even NSW has gone from 275 to 279.
Still a lot of cases, 7671 active cases in Victoria. But don’t flush those hopes and dreams down the toilet just yet.
662 people in hospitals in Victoria still. That’s a lot of people! 40 in ICU, and 29 on ventilators. There was a death of a man in his 20s in Victoria last week. It’s unclear if he died of COVID or with COVID (as in he wasn’t hit by a car and subsequently found to be positive, because they have been counting that in the death toll in the US) or if COVID accelerated an existing condition that resulted in his death, so do you consider that a death because of COVID? The distinction makes all the difference to working out if the virus is evolving.
Did you notice that it’s normal procedure to walk around with a take away coffee in your hand so that you can have an excuse to wear your mask at the chin? Also there’s more people at the beach than ever considering it’s a winters day. Also another observation I’ve made is there’s a large number of cases in the health professionals in the Royal Melbourne hospital (149 cases). Those people have face masks, gloves, gowns, faceshield, every single protection possible short of the holy water, but they still get infected.
St Kilda festival is probably postponed or cancelled in 2021. If you have never been, it’s like one big giant street party.
The world is at 6,584,801 active cases and 772,002 deceased. Two Chinese cities have found coronavirus on packaging of frozen chicken wings from Brazil.
Applying some critical thinking tells me 2 things, 1. China relies on food imported externally. 2. Further investigation is required before you panic.
Russia has approved a vaccine for use. The thing to note is they haven’t done phase 3 trials. Sure, Vladimir Putin has inoculated his daughter, but they didn’t tell you if that was the favourite daughter or the least favourite daughter. Without all the proper testing and trails, we don’t know what the long term effects are, or if it makes you more vulnerable to COVID. If you see news that a vaccine will be available soon, take that with a grain of salt. There’s a reason it takes time. Here’s a list from the CDC in the US of all the times vaccines have gone wrong. And it’s a pretty scary list. China’s also making progress, but I think it’s important that we do our own trials. Maybe it’s now trendy to be anti-vaxxer?
NZ is back on the scoreboard with active 69 cases, and goes to show how hard it is to control. People are playing this like it’s a 1 round game, but it turns out that this is a multi round game, and the strategy for each is very different
Leaving the country now requires that you own a yacht. Here’s one family who recently went to fiji. 3 out of 4 applications to leave the country via plane are denied, it’s official that we’re down there with North Korea right now. If you did get away, Singapore also has bracelet tracking for new arrivals now.
Atlassian, one of the biggest tech companies in Australia is not going to need their staff to come back to the office even after the pandemic is over. Each employee will decide if they work from home, the office or both. It’s called TEAM Anywhere (TEAM is their ticker code on NASDAQ). And this is after they announced they are building a new 40 storey building in Sydney, as a base for 4000 employees.
The permitted 1 hour of daylight reduces the risk of skin cancer and tradespeople on your roof look like burglars. Some people who bring tape measures to measure the distance between people probably don’t deserve sunlight. Also this lady thinks you need social distance when you are in separate cars!!!
If you find bugs in your pandemic stash of food, don’t panic, according to regulations, every 100 grams of flour is allowed to have up to 150 insect parts! Orange juice is allowed up to 5 fly eggs by Australian standards. If you don’t want to see it wiggle around, just throw in in the freezer for a day or two when you buy flour and stuff. That’s a tip from my own battles with pantry moths. Moth: 0, Henny: 1
Pubs in Prague are open again.
Markets and Economics
Australians have been stockpiling cash. We store it right next to the toilet paper. It’s not the number on the note that’s important, it’s about the purchasing power and how much that 50 dollars can buy.
I enjoy the Raoul Pal Friday conversations, I didn’t get anything new out of it, but you might. More informative was the Pomp solo episode on how the financial system works.
Christine Legarde (President of the European Central Bank) made a video engaging young people to participate in the policy debate… and I have never seen so many troll comments, and comments of “buy bitcoin”, even Buffet is basically saying buy bitcoin if you don’t want to get REKT.
Once upon a time the message was you should save money, now the message is that you should consume and spend spend spend.
BTC
Trading at 11,879 USD.
State of the world.
So many people in Belarus protesting against the dictatorship.
This is an interesting article on Rolling Stone magazine on the unravelling of the US.
Coal is on a decline around the world, except in Australia. Really we should be moving to a cleaner power source like nuclear. Currently there’s a few countries working on Thorium based nuclear power, which are safer and make it harder to produce weapons grade material. It would also make sense for Australia to be researching this since we have the largest supply of Thorium in the world. Here’s a basic understanding of Thorium based reactors.
If you are wondering why natural gas prices are high in Australia, it’s because we export the cheap stuff, but damage the environment to sell ourselves the expensive version.
Enjoy your week. I’ll leave you with theoretical physicist Richard Feynman – on the question “Why“.