Front line not ready for #covid. The curves don’t lie. We either have tight social controls & interstate flight limits now, or much worse – overload & lock down later. Warning : contains graphs that ruin Easter.

WA is missing out on the natural isolation advantage we have, by allowing open air travel from interstate and being slow to implement other measures to reduce the viral spread. It is fallacious to believe that economic pain will be less if we adopt softer measures now. 

Because the growth in cases will be exponential we are on track now to overwhelm our under prepared front line health systems around Easter. It is becoming increasingly likely that later on we will need the sort of total shut downs we now see in Italy and Wuhan, which would ultimately of course be worse economically than harsh action now. They do not have the situation in hospitals under any sort of convincing control.

Growth as between countries to date :

Case projections from here:

Australian #COVIDー19 case projections to Easter – 16/3/2020 update. Assuming current trajectory, on track for ~19,000 confirmed cases (95% prediction interval, 13K to 26K) by Easter Sunday (12 Apr 2020). See and access methods and data here: facebook.com/vitualis/posts…

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Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have demonstrated better solutions for this – Australia & WA have not, so far, but there is still time as at 16/3/2020.