The failure to cancel RIMPAC or the slowness in doing so – whichever turns out to be the case – demands a reordering of our priorities to place healthcare before warfare. A call from the Australian government to our troops to “#StayAtHome” is long overdue. (more…)
Part of Australia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was a severe reduction in elective surgery, and so private hospitals have stood almost empty for a month now. (more…)
COVID decisions at the cross roads; which path will Australia take? (more…)
In Part 1 I explored seven myths about coronavirus that are being used to obscure the truth, shift responsibility and perpetuate existing power and privilege. In Part 2 I examine the failure over the last twenty years of governments and corporations to fulfil their risk management responsibilities to prevent and prepare for a viral pandemic. We need a new breed of managers if we want the post-COVID world to tackle the serious problems besetting humanity in the 21st century.
Australia doesn’t have a health system. We have a maze of poorly connected health services which barely manage to work together to provide health care of extremely variable quality depending on many competing variables such as income, geography, ethnicity, culture, and type of illness. (more…)
Myths about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, who is to blame and characteristics of the global response abound. In Part 1 I explore seven myths, the most significant being that the pandemic could not have been predicted. These myths are being used to obscure the truth, shift responsibility and perpetuate existing power and privilege.
The numbers behind the spread of coronavirus in Australia are promising, but we should wait some time before considering any relaxation of social distancing and other restrictions. (more…)
New Zealand is giving us a crisis management masterclass. Prime Minister Ardern has demonstrated skilful and empathetic management of the Covid-19 crisis. (more…)
What people in other forums are saying about public policy (more…)
Health professionals form professional associations to facilitate collective action and advocacy on relevant and pertinent issues. What should the guiding values and principles be behind these organisations and what should their role be in our society in the 21st Century? (more…)
As we settle into the longest winter of our lives, strict containment strategies are provoking controversy fuelled by misinformation or insufficient knowledge of COVID realities. (more…)
Australia needs to start mass testing for Coronavirus if we want to truly get a grip on this epidemic. Otherwise, those reluctant to present to medical authorities may continue to unwittingly spread the virus. (more…)
The outbreak of the COVID-19 has created some problematic dilemmas, at least for some of us. We hear from people of all walks of life asking whether it could be that the cure is worse than the disease. (more…)
Why are people emptying supermarket shelves? They grab not only toilet paper, milk, Panadol, paper towels, rice and spaghetti but also hand sanitisers, cans of all descriptions and more recently alcohol. (more…)
Coronavirus threatens to overwhelm the health and economies of many developing countries where a billion people subsist in a Hobbesian state of nature and life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. (more…)
The Commonwealth has announced that it is partnering with the private hospital sector to provide additional resources for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. (more…)
The Covid-19 crisis poses an unprecedented challenge for mass communications in Australia, and has posed new challenges for campaigns to persuade the population to change behaviour to reduce health risk (more…)
As deaths from the coronavirus pandemic climb relentlessly, it is already becoming clear that the official toll is an under-estimate and that significant numbers of deaths caused directly and indirectly by the virus are not being recorded as such.
In Vietnam up until April 3rd 2020 there have been 233 cases of COVID-19, with no deaths. Complete recovery has been observed in 85 cases. (more…)
The Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918-1920 bears a strong resemblance to the current pandemic. Although the actual virus causing the disease is different, the result of the infection is similar. It causes pneumonia, and people die in large numbers. It’s a health emergency and we need to act. If we don’t survive this, the economy is irrelevant.
Doomsayers are society’s detestables yet needed as truth-tellers. So here goes: The omens are awful. Thousands of Indonesians are threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic through denial and indecision. Responses have been too few, too late and too uncoordinated.
The growth in COVID-19 cases in Australia appears to have slowed across all states, through a combination of tighter border control and spatial distancing.
The losses in this time of COVID19 crisis are very real. Loss of life is worst beyond comparison. (more…)
The irony is that a pandemic has been brought into India by people who can afford plane tickets, but while they will buy private health services, the virus will devastate the poor who they infect and who have little access to health care. (more…)
Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, about London’s “Great Plague” of 1665, makes us resign to the fact that we learn nothing from history. (more…)
Are we about to face the era of a ‘new eugenics’ movement or is it simply a return to the ‘old eugenics’ which we thought had disappeared shortly after the end of World War II? The health crisis may force us to decide who to prioritise and on what basis. (more…)
In sharper focus than ever this week is the danger health professionals experience in caring for seriously ill patients infected with COVID-19. (more…)
In the US, the first formal clinical trial of a drug to treat coronavirus and of a vaccine give us a good moment to reflect on the immunology of this illness. (more…)
In the eleven days since we first tried to make sense of the Federal Government’s approach to the current health crisis, little has changed in its approach. (more…)