1.4 million jobs may be lost by the end of the year!
Australia’s COVID-19 hotspot partially eases lockdown
Coronavirus: Balancing the economic and health impacts!
By Lidia Kelly
About twice the population of Pennsylvania With 25.36 million (2019).
The Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of
the Australian continent, also including the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands.
It is the largest country in Oceania and the world’s sixth-largest country by total area.
The population is highly urbanized and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard.
Australia’s capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney.
The country’s other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
They have 25,098 recovered cases, 1388 active cases and 904 deaths.
Whereas, Pennsylvania had 177,135 and had 8,535 deaths.
MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Australia’s state of Victoria, the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus outbreak: Will see more freedom of movement as of Monday after months-long restrictions, but retailers and restaurants must wait longer, making some of the owners unhappy. After more than 100 days in a strict lockdown that allowed only for two hours of outdoor activity a day, the 5 million people living in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, will be able to spend as much time exercising outdoors as they wish.
However, people must stay within 25 kilometres (15 miles) of their homes, Premier Daniel Andrews said.
Public gatherings will remain tightly limited, and retailers and restaurants must operate only on take-away or delivery orders, with the state government eyeing their reopening by Nov. 1.
“I know and understand that not everything everybody wanted is in the announcement
I have made today,” Andrews told a news conference. “I have announced today what is safe.”
The head of Melbourne’s Chapel Street Precinct Association, a local marketing body representing around 2,200 commercial entities, said there was a “cloud of anger” from their businesses on Sunday. “The fact retail and hospitality is still left waiting ‘til potentially November is an unjust joke,” Chrissie Maus, general manager of the Chapel Street Precinct, said in a statement. Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state, is home to a quarter of its 25 million people and accounts for 25% of economic output, but because of the prolonged lockdown, it makes up now 40% of Australia’s effectively unemployed, according to government data.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison expressed sympathy for the “frustrations” of businesses.
Andrews’ Labor Party government in Victoria is in opposition to Morrison’s Liberals.
Morrison said in a statement with the treasurer and health minister that the low number of new cases make a “strong case for the retail and hospitality sectors to reopen before the next review date in November”. “Everyday Victoria remains under restrictions … comes at a heavy cost,” the statement said. On Sunday,
Victoria recorded two new cases of COVID-19, keeping infections below double digits for a fifth day, down from more than 700 cases a day in early August. With 816 deaths, Victoria accounts for more than 90% of all lives lost to the COVID-19 in Australia this year.
Australia has recorded just over 27,300 infections, according to health ministry data,
a fraction of what has been seen in some other countries. I have heard it from all angles and all views.
Some world leaders feel (get 60% of the population infected with herd immunity) it will be the end all. While other countries like Australia and New Zealand are using every precaution. Sweden and some States in the United States are allowing people to have a normal life. With the reasoning “why” prolong the numbers of cases into a longer time frame. It’s not going away, those that will get it….will get it regardless. It is what it is.
But we have to keep on living and not risk everybody going broke.
In Summarizing: Possible coronavirus drug identified by Australian scientists:
MONASH UNIVERSITY in Melbourne, Australia.
A head lice treatment could be the cure for the coronavirus as Australian scientists
have found a single dose of the drug killed COVID-19 cells in the laboratory.
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– Australian Scientists have shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available
around the world can kill the virus within 48 hours.
– Scientists from Monash University in Melbourne showed that a single dose of the drug,
Ivermectin, could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture effectively eradicating
all genetic material of the virus within 48 hours.
– The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage – ensuring the doses shown
to effectively treat the virus in the test tube are safe levels for humans.
– The use of Ivermectin to combat COVID-19 depends on pre-clinical testing and clinical trials,
with funding urgently required to progress the work.
– Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective
in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus.
The findings of the study were published today in Antiviral Research.
Read the full paper in Antiviral Research.
Doctors in France are supporting the testing of the anti-malarial drug ivermectin
as a more effective alternative to chloroquine, the controversial drug being touted
as a miracle cure by provocative French professor Didier Raoult.
A collaborative study led by the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI)
with the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute),
a joint venture of the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital,
has shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world
kills the virus within 48 hours.
The study, published in Antiviral Research, showed that the drug, Ivermectin,
stopped the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture within 48 hours.
Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective
in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus.
Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Dr. Leon Caly, a Senior Medical Scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) at the Doherty Institute where the experiments with live coronavirus were conducted, is the study’s first author. “As the virologist who was part of the team who were first to isolate and share SARS-COV2 outside of China in January 2020, I am excited about the prospect of Ivermectin
being used as a potential drug against COVID-19,” Dr. Caly said.
The Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute’s Dr. Kylie Wagstaff, who led the study,
said the scientists showed that the drug, Ivermectin, stopped the SARS-CoV-2 virus
growing in cell culture within 48 hours. “We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it,” Dr. Wagstaff said. Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus. Dr. Wagstaff cautioned that the tests conducted in the study were in vitro and that trials needed to be carried out in people. “Ivermectin is very widely used and seen as a safe drug. We need to figure out now whether the dosage you can use at
in humans will be effective—that’s the next step,” Dr. Wagstaff said.
Melbourne’s Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute has been studying Ivermectin in a controlled test tube environment, and the research says that after 48 hours, the drug lowered the viral load of the coronavirus from 5,000 units down to just one. This represents a 99.98% reduction.
Though the results are hugely encouraging, the lead doctor on the study,
Dr. Kylie Wagstaff, cautioned that the tests have only been carried out in vitro and
will need further testing to ascertain the correct doses in human patients.
“Ivermectin is very widely used and seen as a safe drug. We need to figure out now whether the dosage you can use in humans will be effective – that’s the next step,” Dr. Wagstaff said on the Monash University website.
“In times when we’re having a global pandemic and there isn’t an approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available around the world then that might help people sooner.
Realistically it’s going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available.”
Though it is not entirely clear how the drug works, it is likely, based on its behavior against other viruses,
that it stops the virus from “dampening down the host cells’ ability to clear it.”
Despite being early days and risks unknown, it has emerged that preliminary human trials are currently taking place in Maryland, USA and London. The group in Maryland disclosed that they were conducting the same trials on animals in early March, but were not ready to publish findings when the Australian report came out.
“In times when we’re having a global pandemic and there isn’t an approved treatment,
if we had a compound that was already available around the world then that might help people sooner. Realistically it’s going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available.
Although the mechanism by which Ivermectin works on the virus is not known, it is likely,
based on its action in other viruses, that it works to stop the virus ‘dampening down’ the host cells’ ability
to clear it, Dr. Wagstaff said. “In times when we’re having a global pandemic and there isn’t an approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available around the world then that might help people sooner. Realistically it’s going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available. The use of Ivermectin to combat COVID-19 would depend on the results of further pre-clinical testing and ultimately clinical trials,
with funding urgently required to keep progressing the work,” Dr. Wagstaff said.
Coronavirus: Victoria lockdown restrictions to ease from midnight