Category: COVID-19
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The CODE Update – 11 August
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet here Well the milestone that the press completely ignored this week was the world passing the 200 million COVID case mark, which did quite surprise me as passing the 100 million case milestone was a big deal at the time. Overall though it…
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‘Invest in public health – it pays extraordinary dividends’, PHAA tells NSW COVID-19 inquiry
Terry Slevin – PHAA CEO I’ll be the first to admit I agreed to participate in yesterday’s inquiry into the NSW Government’s response with some hesitancy. Parliamentary inquiries can be useful exercises in exploring what’s happened; what’s worked; what hasn’t; and what could – and should – have been…
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Study shows restrictions on the unvaccinated won’t necessarily deliver COVID-19 vaccination success
Jeremy Lasek – PHAA Today marks Day 171 of Australia’s vaccination rollout. It hasn’t been plain sailing, but as a nation we’re certainly headed in the right direction with a record number of vaccinations week on week, largely thanks to an increase of vaccine supply. More than 13 million…
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The CODE Update – 04 August
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet here Welcome to August CODE update #1 everybody. First, a reminder that this main spreadsheet summarises about 88% of the world’s cases and 76% of fatalities, a generally consistent pattern over the past 18 months. On the whole things are roughly the same –…
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The role of community pharmacies in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines
Jeremy Lasek – PHAA Australia’s vaccination numbers are rapidly on the rise and the latest official numbers show 11,593,766 doses administered since the rollout began. Importantly, more than a third of the eligible population (38.9%) have now received their first dose while 17.2% have received two doses of vaccine.…
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The CODE Update – 28 July
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet here Hello again, and here is the global COVID news, and mostly it’s a bit different to the other stories you have been hearing. This week the big increases in cases, of about 50% in the past seven days, have been in VietNam…
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Is Delta defeating us? Here’s why the variant makes contact tracing so much harder
C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW The Greater Sydney lockdown began on June 26 and almost a month later, New South Wales is recording around 100 new COVID cases a day. We are also seeing the virus spread…
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A day in the life of a Contact Tracer
(This post is contributed by a PHAA member working in the NSW health contact tracing team) The phrase ‘contact tracer’ much like ‘epidemiologist’ or ‘Public Health Order’ is a term that previously was rarely used outside of Public Health circles. Now a year and a half into a worldwide pandemic…
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Emergency COVID response mentoring program in Victoria judged a success
Malcolm Baalman – Public Health Association Australia An evaluation released in the past week highlights the success of last year’s emergency mentoring program for Victoria’s hard-pressed COVID response workforce, established at short notice by PHAA and the Australasian Epidemiological Association (AEA). The program was rushed into action to assist the Victorian Department of…
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UK trial shows ‘mix and match’ COVID vaccine combinations deliver outstanding results
Jeremy Lasek, PHAA Background While the eyes of the world have been on England this week as it became the first nation to lift most of its COVID-19 restrictions, health experts are also keenly watching the results of clinical trials, effectively ‘mixing and matching’ vaccine schedules. Given the current…
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The CODE Update – 21 July
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet here Well here we are again, lockdown #5 for us in Victoria, but release for folks in the UK after a mega-10-months of restrictions. People in New South Wales are only just finding out what it is like to not be able to do…
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Stan Grant nails his COVID message, why now need not be the winter of our discontent
Terry Slevin, PHAA CEO So much has been written and said about the COVID-19 pandemic, much of it bordering on hysteria. Just occasionally you find an article that resonates. Maybe it was the headline ‘COVID lockdown highlights the best of our society, not the worst’ that caught my eye. Yes,…
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The CODE Update – 15 July
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet here There is not a lot of good world news this week, including what’s happening with COVID. A few countries clearly are slowing down, presumably due to vaccination programmes, and in most countries in Europe fatalities have really fallen. Which has contributed, at last,…
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The CODE Update – 8 July
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet here Worldwide, there are still in the region of 300,000 people identified as having COVID EVERY DAY, and about 10,000 fatalities. So, it’s not going anywhere just yet. First off, there has been something of a big upswing in Africa, especially South Africa, which…
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Mapping the road to Australia’s pandemic freedom: building confidence in the vaccination process crucial
Public Health Association of Australia It’s now 75 weeks since Australia reported its first case of COVID-19. It’s fair to say the last week – with half our population in lockdown at some point of time – was really tough. Australians, despite our relatively lucky position compared to other countries…
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Setting Australia’s COVID immunisation target, our next big challenge
Jeremy Lasek The PHAA’s National Immunisation Conference wrapped up last night with perhaps the most-timely presentation imaginable, when University of Melbourne epidemiologist, Professor Tony Blakely, spoke to the issue on everyone’s lips: ‘when will Australia get back to normal?’ Timely, because that was also one of the hot agenda items…
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Immunisation conference learns valuable lessons from the UK’s COVID-19 experience
Public Health Association of Australia The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world on its head. No two countries have managed this public health crisis in exactly the same way, and that’s providing valuable insights for epidemiologists trying to assess what’s worked, what’s not, and how the world can most quickly…
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The CODE Update – 1 July
Priscilla Robinson View the latest spreadsheet This week, worldwide there are fewer infections compared with the week before, with the notable exception of the Africa region where infections have risen by 20%-50% week on week for a month now; and that is without any information from Tanzania. Otherwise (as usual)…
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Experts tell conference lack of vaccine remains our major issue
Jeremy Lasek, PHAA Just when you thought our COVID-ravaged world couldn’t get more crazy, we get a week like this week. With new coronavirus cases springing up across the country in the past week, every state and territory has introduced a mix of strict new lockdown rules, border closures and…
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Immunisation in the COVID pandemic era – conference to dissect our biggest global challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic – the worst global public health emergency in a century – has changed the way we live. Many lives have been lost, economies brought to their knees, and it is fair to say that nothing is as it was just 18 month ago. Today marks the beginning…
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The CODE Update – 24 June
Priscilla Robinson Read the latest spreadsheet here This week in COVID-land there have been various ‘surges’, which by now you will all recognise as part of a usual pattern. With notable upticks in Africa (Uganda for example has had a 15%-or so increase in the last week) and in some…
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Australia Talks survey shows impact of COVID-19 on our physical, mental health and current national priorities
Jeremy Lasek All avid ABC watchers and listeners will know the results of one of this nation’s biggest surveys – Australia Talks – are now in. In many ways, the survey of 60,000 Australians is a broad-ranging check on the collective health and attitude of our nation. While it doesn’t…
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The CODE Update – 17 June
Priscilla Robinson View the most recent spreadsheet An interesting week for us in rural Victoria. A week ago today our power went off in a major storm, and we have yet to have it back on. The power company is doing its best – there are helicopters up assessing line…
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The CODE update – 10 June
Priscilla Robinson Click here to view the latest spreadsheet Well, things seem to be a bit more predictable in COVID-land this week. Worldwide, new infections continue to accrue at about 200,000 a day (a bit over a million a week – remember when there was a worldwide panic about reaching…
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“Gain of Function”: a poorly understood element of the Anthropocene
Colin D Butler When I proposed a short essay on “gain of function” (GoF) and its relevance to the Anthropocene (the human-dominated geological era) the theory that COVID-19 could have originated from a laboratory accident (or, less likely, was deliberately released) was still largely dismissed as a “conspiracy”. In recent weeks that…
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The CODE update – 3 June
Priscilla Robinson Click here to view the latest spreadsheet This is one of those ‘nothing to see here’ weeks. Globally, both cases and fatalities have fallen. Africa seems still to be dealing with a problem, and I cannot see an explanation for the doubling in Europe compared with the week…
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COVID-19 vaccine campaigns: the art of health communication
Terry Slevin When it comes to COVID19 vaccine hesitancy, the discussion, debate and media reporting over the past fortnight or so is worrying, particularly for those in the public health community who have been monitoring the pandemic closely from the start. One of Australia’s leading experts in this area, PHAA…
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The CODE Update – 27 May
Priscilla Robinson Click here to view the latest spreadsheet This has been a mostly much slower week in COVID-19 land, and many places have seen a reduction in new cases this week from last week. The fatality numbers are mostly also reduced although not by as much – presumably a…
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Public Health invisible in the Victorian Budget
Terry Slevin and Anna Nicholson As Victorians return to restrictions tonight to manage another COVID19 outbreak, now is the very best time to, as a matter of urgency, take a longer term view on the state’s capacity to respond to public health emergencies into the future. The public health workforce…
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Chief Health Officers Forum – Preventive Health Conference 2021
Chief Health Officers back calls for a more sustainable public health workforce Before the arrival of COVID-19, Australia’s Chief Health Officers (CHOs were relatively unknown, going about their business quietly, efficiently, and effectively to keep our communities healthy and safe. Each state and territory has a CHO, and the Commonwealth…