Essential Research continues to disappoint on the voting intention front, but its latest fortnightly poll does include its monthly leadership ratings, which record a recovery in Scott Morrison’s personal standing after the battering it copped during the bsuhfires. Morrison now leads Anthony Albanese 40-35 as preferred prime minister after being tied 36-36 in the last poll, which his first lead out of the six sets of results published so far this year (three apiece from Essential and Newspoll). His approval rating is up two to 41% and disapproval down three to 49%, while Albanese is respectively steady on 41% and up two to 33%.
As related by The Guardian, the poll also finds 71% want investigations into sports rorts to continue, but I suspect that should actually say 51%, as 43% favoured the alternative option that the resignation of Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie should be the end of the matter. The poll also has the unsurprising finding that concern about coronavirus is growing, although we will have to wait for the publication of the full report later today to see by how much.
Other questions produce familiar findings on energy sources (71% favour further taxpayer research into renewables, compared with 57% for hydrogen, 50% for “clean coal” and 38% for nuclear energy) and economic management (the Coalition was rated better overall, but was also seen to favour big business whereas Labor was better at managing the economy to benefit workers). The poll was conducted from 1096 respondents from an online panel, no doubt from Thursday to Sunday.
UPDATE: Full report here. It turns out the poll doesn’t really find an increase in concern about coronavirus over the past month: there’s a two point increase in “very concerned” to 27%, but a five point drop in “quite concerned” to 36%, a two point rise in “not all that concerned” to 28% and a three point increase in “not at all concerned” to 9%. I’d have been interested to see breakdowns by party support on this – Democrats in the US are far more concerned than Republicans – but no such luck.
I really think it’s time for you to pack up the caravan and head to Warburton.
With such wise counsel, you will no doubt be chosen as the public health supremo in the post-apocalyptic society
Torchbearer @ #3357 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 5:45 pm
Could the paperwork etc be streamlined the point it would serve as a fast preliminary check on a possible covid19 infection?
Albo does an interview and shines!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1239095453007974401
Another one bites the dust:
nath says:
Sunday, March 15, 2020 at 6:37 pm
C’mon Briefly. You wan’t to blame the Greens for the virus. Can you find a link? Think Man! Think!
Moonlighting from Libkin, Libnat and Clone….
Oakeshott Country says:
Sunday, March 15, 2020 at 6:52 pm
I really think….
Oh I doubt that you do think much at all, seeing that you’re a dilapidated quack who no longer subscribes to the idea of diagnosis.
What a contrast between Morriscum’s address and Albo’s!
The country needs his leadership NOW!
Still not sure what the regimen of random swabbing should be – daily? Twice a week? 2 times per month?
The TV is on and I’m hearing an ABC news item with words like “in the middle of the corona virus crisis”. I don’t think it has dawned on many people yet that we are still at the beginning of this.
All of this COVID-19 talk makes a refreshing change from the usual Labor Right vs Greens wars.
Albo is not only intelligent. He’s intelligent enough to know that there are more intelligent people.
One of the first and most important things to shut down is Scotty from Marketings great fat and foul gas emitting mouth!
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/parts-of-australia-could-be-shut-down-chief-medical-officer-20200315-p54a5v.html
Albanese joining in with the straya spirit stuff
like this …? https://twitter.com/SamFarfoud/status/1239049166925352961
Mr Newbie
Has Larissa re-modelled her ear rings to Stop Corona ones ?
About as effective
🙂
Speaking of medical investigation in outback WA, I did have a pleasure of meeting Dr Jim McNulty who used to travel up at Wittenoom to tell CSR what a toxic industry they were involved in
Oakeshott Country
Every hour on the hour. You can never be too careful.
Tony Abbott as Member for Warringah promised a tunnel to the Northern beaches for the 25 years he had his lazy arse on the green benches, including an embarrassing 18 months as PM
I would support raising the Spit Bridge permanently, with a sign to commemorate Tony Abbott’s indolence
OC
Thanks for your feedback on the PM and PL addresses. I trust you to be objective, and so your input is appreciated.
Am working tonight to try to be ready for an imminent shutdown (Wed is my guess), so have not been able to listen to either.
Rex
As Alan Bond said when he was contesting his bankruptcy
“I’m no quitter – did the ANZACs give up when things got tough?”
Dotard delusional after talking to Jared Kushner about a concept…
WASHINGTON — It started as a series of conversations this past week between officials working with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and the chief executive of Verily, a life sciences subsidiary of Google’s parent company, about how it might help the Trump administration in the fight against the coronavirus.
Verily was developing a website that could let people evaluate their symptoms and direct them to nearby “drive through” locations for testing. Desperate to tap the private sector to satisfy the public’s demands for a more robust response to the rapidly spreading virus, Mr. Kushner was quickly sold on the idea.
But on Friday, President Trump inflated the concept far beyond reality. At a news conference in the Rose Garden, he said that the company was helping to develop a website that would sharply expand testing for the virus, falsely claiming that “Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now” and adding that “they’ve made tremendous progress.”
In truth, the project at Verily — which has a total of about 1,000 employees — is in its infancy. A pilot program is planned for the San Francisco area, but a website has yet to be unveiled. Testing locations have not been identified, and the coronavirus tests themselves are not yet widely available.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/us/politics/trump-google-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Check your temperature?
We rely too much on expensive high tech. It allows us to be lazy and arrogant and ignorant. We forget how to do stuff. It makes us fragile because when the “big stick” fails we’ve got nothing else. Until yesterday I thought those precious scarce swabs were the only way to test for covid19. It hadn’t occurred to me there might be a layered process of screening and prioritising and managing potential infections that would leverage the scarce swabs. I looked at the IR temperature checking that I saw on the news as a desperate something you had to do if you didn’t have anything better. I was ignorant and arrogant with it. And this is despite having two such thermometers in the kitchen. (My forehead is at 35.0C.)
poroti @ #3378 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 6:13 pm
Oakeshott Country @ #3501 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 6:52 pm
Your attitude is patronising at least and offensive at best. I’m really glad you’re not my doctor. RI is quite correct. We should not be in the situation where we don’t have enough testing kits.
The government has fucked up big-time leaving everything too little, too late yet you seem to think this is ok, mocking those such as RI and Bushfire Bill who have made sensible and indeed prophetic comments almost from the beginning.
People are frightened, ignorant of what they can do thanks to government ineptitude and worrying for themselves and their families. A little less condescension might help.
I worry about things in this brave “neo-liberal” world.
Because they don’t believe in public services at all and a leery of science, they are the worse idiots to have in charge in a crisis. i bet the worse three western countries for dealing with this will be the UK, the US and Australia.
I just went to the local Coles. I needed a packet of rice and a can of tomatoes for dinner.
Well, a lot of the shelves were almost empty! No tomatoes, beans, rice, pasta etc etc.
I walked past a young woman with a trolly full of cartons of rice milk. She seems to have bought up the whole stock!
I think this is a combination of internet madness and the fact the population no longer trusts the Government.
Blobbit..
How much would it cost to test the entire population? Billions? Done deal.
Money is not the issue. Physical availability is. But that just begs the question of what the government has been doing in preparing and sourcing.
Rakali @ #3523 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 7:30 pm
There’s a whole lot of onselling going on.
Think Milk Powder!
What I know is that if we had followed Briefly’s advice we would now be in a state of being unprepared for THIS stage of the pandemic and the state of panic would be uncontrolled.
As I have suggested several times, rather than saying we have no plan, he should actually look at the plan on the internet and get some understanding of how the response will evolve.
He feels his gut feeling is more valid than the facts
+1
Rakali
Yep, this is what I have been thinking. I know less about the UK, but I note that the Australian Government never announces any action / policy until after the US Trump administration does so. This says to me that Morrison and Trump are in lock-step, beholden to the same ne0-liberal masters.
And, as far as I can tell, Bojo is saying, “let er rip”. I three years we will have herd immunity, and we can get back to business as usual. Almost certainly Bojo is in thrall to the same masters mentioned above.
Well spotted.
I am actually very concerned for our local population here in South Sydney. They do not have the resources to buy ahead or hold, and when they do get to the shops, what they need will be sold out.
I am also concerned that I will not be able to help with my community, because my workload, from home, will be about double my normal workload face-to-face.
Things are moving in NSW the pickup rate for testing is now up to a total 0.5% with about 2000 tests per day under current criteria and today’s pickup at 1%
Westmead as the test referral lab has now a greatly expanded capacity.
I suspect the criteria for testing will be expanded during this week
Oakeshott Country @ #3526 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 7:35 pm
So, a climate change is upon us.
Just looking again at that article with the Chinese epidemic figures, showing true numbers of cases versus diagnosed cases. The true cases were at one stage 25 times the number of officially diagnosed cases.
Apply this correction to the Australian figures and we have over 6,000 actual cases, today. That’s 1 in 4,000 people. That, is serious.
Oakeshott Country @ #3519 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 6:21 pm
From a 10 pound pom.
OC
Expanding the criteria will have the effect of illuminating a little further back into the pool of undiagnosed cases that are already out there.
But..
We should be doing a mass, random sample (it would require 20-30 thousand tests) that would then give us an accurate handle on the real number of infections.
Rakali says:
Sunday, March 15, 2020 at 7:30 pm
I worry about things in this brave “neo-liberal” world.
Because they don’t believe in public services at all and a leery of science, they are the worse idiots to have in charge in a crisis. i bet the worse three western countries for dealing with this will be the UK, the US and Australia.
———————————-
Disagree that people don’t believe in public services, more likely they don’t believe in waste and mismanagement of those services.
Albo’s speech was good.
D&M
That tells me Morrison needs Trump to lead because he is unable or unwilling to lead and for many reactionaries Trump is their leader.
So CC you are saying the true rate of infection in China is 2000000!
In that case the mortality rate is 0.15% – less than influenza.
Btw I drove from Terrigal to where you want to put the station at Tuggerah at 10am on a Sunday (today). It took 30 minutes using the Tumbi Umbi shortcut and 10kph above the limit. In peak hour using the CC Hwy, not speeding and with say 10 bus stops it would take a minimum of on hour. Not going to work for a commuter.
Cud Chewer
But…
https://www.smh.com.au/national/gps-urged-to-reduce-coronavirus-test-referrals-to-save-equipment-20200315-p54a7d.html
“Cud Chewersays:
Sunday, March 15, 2020 at 7:32 pm
Blobbit..
How much would it cost to test the entire population? Billions? Done deal.
Money is not the issue. Physical availability is. But that just begs the question of what the government has been doing in preparing and sourcing.”
Indeed. My basic point was though that it’s be impossible for any country to have unlimited test kits – so there’s always going to be some form of rationing. It’s a question of degree.
The apparent inability of Australia though to produce them locally, if I understand correctly, seems a lot more problematic to me. It means we’re always going to be dependent on others.
No OC I am not saying this.
Refer to this article
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
And this graph
Witness how before effective measures were taken, then cumulative number of official cases lags the cumulative number of true cases.
We are on the same point in the curve in Australia
Blobbit
Its impossible for any country to have unlimited test kits.
But is it impossible for Australia to have hundreds of thousands. Enough that we can do do randomised samples as well as deal with the high risk cases and also some cases with no traceable exposure but obvious symptoms (as we are not doing now)?
CT scan is not a practical screening test for covid as all the staff and patient and machine would have to be decontaminated after each scan so you couldn’t get through many in a day. The test itself is very good as someone pointed out earlier.
Just to cheer everyone up.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1238793637628125184
CC
When I was a medical student I was taught to never do a test that won’t change the patient’s treatment.
As community spread rises, and a large number are only mildly symptomatic, isolation rather than testing will become more important. Somewhere in the plan (WHICH IS ON THE INTERNET) you will find the stage where anyone with symptoms will be required to self isolate whether they have positive pathology or not. Testing may be reserved for those who have significant symptoms – we are partly there already anyone with URTI who requires admission is treated.
We have experience of this, during the last great flu epidemic 3 years ago, testing was abandoned and anyone with symptoms was treated as if they had flu
Time for a beer…
“But is it impossible for Australia to have hundreds of thousands. ”
No idea.
Any idea who’s producing them?
Diogenes @ #3541 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 8:00 pm
Diogs,
What are you doing to help everyone deal with this situation from a professional POV?
Oakeshott Country @ #3535 Sunday, March 15th, 2020 – 6:53 pm
Only if the influenza mortality rate is also calculated off the “true” infection rate rather than the reported one? The two won’t be the same for the flu any more than they are for coronavirus.
And it is also a question of leveraging what you have with other things that you have. Of not relying on one technique for any solution. That’s where the plans and processes come in. It isn’t black and white. What has been missing so far is clear unambiguous communication from authorities and an apparent reluctance to move quickly.
Dio
It is good at picking up pneumonic changes but presumably those patients are significantly symptomatic
The argument here was pointing to use it as a more general screening tool
Britain is taking a tremendous risk with their “herd immunity” strategy.
In any case, it requires widespread exposure to the virus, which is what I understand vaccination does.
But there’s no vaccine.