^^ As to that particularlv deranged suggestion, Kerry Chant just said the following in NSW's presser this morning:
Dr Chant says "clearly the advice is that within six weeks of an infection you're unlikely to be re-infected with Delta".
She says however, that "natural immunity to Delta or any virus is less effective than a vaccine in terms of long-term immunity".
This isn't one of those diseases like, say, chicken pox that you get once (in theory). It's a kind of very virulent "cold" virus - people routinely get up to half a dozen colds a year (it varies with their work and their exposure), despite having normal immune systems. Putting vaccinated people together to spread COVID is possibly one of the more insane suggestions I've read on the pages of Nick's over the last decade.
Turning back to the data from my previous post, this has all the hallmarks of a public health disaster, at least in NSW and Victoria. If Victoria follows the NSW pattern, we can expect to see in excess of 1,000 cases a day, here, within a month.
To get a handle on the public health system load, it is worth observing that NSW presently has over 20,000 active cases. At the height of the "old variant" outbreak in Victoria last year, it never reached 8,000 active cases. Last year, with lower total active case load, Victoria never had to manage 700 COVID hospitalisations on the one day or even 50 people in ICU. Victoria never had more than 32 people on a ventilator at one time last year. Even with the relatively low number of active cases at the moment, a third of Victoria's hospitalised cases are in ICU and 20% of the hospitalised cases (that is, of the total number) are on ventilation, already.
This has serious potential to get appallingly bad, extremely quickly.
