The fortnightly Essential Research poll focuses, naturally enough, on coronavirus, with 45% rating the federal government’s response good or very good, and 29% poor or very poor. According to The Guardian’s report, it would seem the latter tend to be those most worried about the virus, as measured by a question on whether respondents felt the situation was being overblown, with which “one third” agreed while 28% thought the opposite.
Over the course of three fortnightly polls, the proportion rating themselves very concerned has escalated from 25% to 27% to 39%, while the results for quite concerned have gone from 43% to 36% and back again. The Guardian’s report does not relate the latest results for “not that concerned” and “not at all concerned”, which were actually up in the last poll, from 26% to 28% and 6% to 9% respectively. Further questions relate to trust in various sources of information, notably the government and the media, but we will have to wait for the publication of the full report later today to get a clear handle on them. Suffice to say that Essential still has nothing to tell us on voting intention.
In other findings, 49% said they wanted the opposition to fall in behind the government’s decisions while 33% preferred that it review and challenge them, and 42% now consider themselves likely to catch the virus, up from 31% on a fortnight ago. Seventy-two per cent reported washing their hands more often, 60% said they were avoiding social gatherings, and 33% reported stocking up on groceries.
We also have a Roy Morgan SMS survey of 723 respondents, which was both conducted and published yesterday, showing 79% support for the government’s decision to allow those in financial difficulty to access $20,000 of their superannuation. As noted in the previous post, an earlier such poll of 974 respondents from Wednesday and Thursday recorded levels of trust in various Australian politicians (plus Jacinda Ardern, who fared best of all); a further set of results from the same poll finds Dick Smith, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Andrew Forrest and Alan Joyce rating best out of designated list of business leaders, with Rupert Murdoch, Clive Palmer, Gina Rinehart and Gerry Harvey performed worst. We are yet to receive hard numbers from either set of questions, but they are apparently forthcoming.
UPDATE: Full report from Essential Research here.
A-E
Ah. Thank you.
Forked lightning, thunder and heavy rain, ATM.
#WeatheronPB.
Steve 777
You may be thinking of his brother who lingered for a little over a day.
JFK was as good as dead by the time they got to Parkland. The Zapruda film shows his head exploding with the second (or was it the third!) bullet
A_E
I believe it was the same scene in which Maturin failed to choose the lesser of two weevils… much to the delight of Jack and the table at large.
Rex Douglas says:
Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 8:17 pm
Cud Chewer @ #4945 Sunday, March 29th, 2020 – 8:05 pm
RI
You need to train people to the level of a census checker.
These rapid tests for the most part can be self administered. You just need a checker to take it to your door (with PPE), hand you the kit, witness it being used, wait, record the info and move on.
This may be brieflys calling !
Luckily Rexology is neither fatal nor particularly infectious though it is persistent. Kind of reminds me of fungal toenails.
Boerwar: “Morrison is desperate for it to be six months. Since we know that the Australian population will not be vaccinated by September he must believe that something will have happened to the trajectory of the Virus by then.
Will there have been a lock down followed by a collapse in infections such that test, track and trace becomes workable?
Is he merely clutching at straws?
Who knows?”
Most epidemiologists are continuing to suggest that most, if not all, nations are going to struggle to eradicate the virus completely: due to the likelihood that the virus will continue to spread among asymptomatic or near-asymptomatic people.
So we are looking at an ongoing containment strategy until a vaccine comes along.
I sometimes wonder if they aren’t being a bit too pessimistic here. We will eventually work through all the infections from people who have come back from overseas. That leaves us with community transmissions, on which we need to come down very hard in terms of tracing and testing and then, where necessary, quarantining.
When I hear about governments wanting to impose fines or prison terms on people who breach quarantine, I’m in two minds. I strongly suspect that, in many of the cases for which the health authorities are reporting that they can’t work out what happened, the infected people are not being entirely forthcoming about what they’ve been up to: eg, they have a relative or friend who has been overseas and is supposed to be in quarantine, but hasn’t been obeying the rules.
So the risk here is that people won’t tell the truth in order to protect their relative or friend from a heavy fine or jail time. I think the approach from the police should be: if we run into you on the street or come round to your house and you’re not there, we’re going to arrest you. But, if you suspect you have infected someone and you come forward and make a full disclosure, then there’ll be an amnesty.
Some of this stuff is going to be difficult. But, if we can really make it work, perhaps we can loosen some of the restrictions well before the six months are up.
I also remember that my father woke me with the news of JFK’s death. I also remember how his presidency was described in terms of the return of “Camelot”.
If only we could experience Camelot in 2020!
Morrison and his CMO are clueless. If they weren’t, they’d already be talking about their exit strategy. They’d already be talking about mass testing. They aren’t. They aren’t because they are basically too fucking stupid.
What little hope we have revolves around the government finally, maybe after being badgered by the media, maybe by paying attention to other countries, figures out that mass testing is the only real exit strategy.
My thoughts on the issues with negatively geared rental properties. If I understand it properly the owner pays more in payments to his bank than they receive in rent. If as has been proposed the bank is going to suspend the mortgage payment for six months the owner might be forgoing the rent but has an uptick in that he is not personally having to fund the gap between rent received and mortgage paid.
Image if we had forward thinking governments who were willing to splash some of the stimulus money on the property owners who have decided that negative gearing is no longer a good idea. If the government paid fair prices and let the current tenants stay paying either market rental or the current social housing amount till the crisis is passed it would reduce a large amount of stress without disrupting people’s lives.
At the end of this crisis there would be a decent stock of social housing that I expect will be required well into the future.
Don
You sound all good.
Fantastic to hear from you.
The smoke and lack of rain did me this last summer and was not prepared for this monster thrust upon us all.
Black tea and damper will do me if it comes to that!
Your local member …… its got me buggered!
Simon Katich says:
Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 8:40 pm
Perth private hospitals have been handed a “political s–t sandwich” and made to eat it after being left to care for COVID-19 patients from the Artania cruise ship.
A hospital caring for sick people. What is the world coming to.
They have been drafted. A member of my family is among the health care workers who have been assigned to this. We don’t know when we’ll see them next. It’s not a small thing, particularly for his wife and their 2 very small children, who have to move out of their house so he can be alone/isolated when he’s not on duty.
Boer, for your amusement:
https://youtu.be/440l8poSQiA
Except of course in China. Where a full lockdown actually worked and now they are simply dealing with leakage from overseas.
Or until we figure out that a combination of severe restriction of movement, further closure of non essential workplaces (such as building sites) and mass testing can bring us close to the situation in China. And do so within a couple of months.
There are already thousands of untraced and undiagnosed infections within the community. Something less than a mass testing (a sample of 50,000 or so) might discover some clusters, but at the very least the testing regime has to be expanded to include everyone with even the mildest symptoms. And frankly I’m not even sure that will bring us down to linear as opposed to some form of exponential growth.
There probably is a rate of testing that is short of immediate, blanket testing of the entire population which will, if implemented with rigour, and repeated as needed, result in containment. Certainly 10% coverage (2.5 million tests) would together with contact tracing be pretty effective.
A-E
Thanks. That scene is always good for a laugh. If the Siege of the Virus lasts long enough I may have to revisit the series.
Government fails to set date to test all NHS staff for Covid-19
Following his round of broadcast interviews, it is now clear that Michael Gove did not provide any assurance as to when all health and social care staff – who number well over a million – would be tested.
If 25,000 are tested a day – which is the government’s intention after it succeeded in testing 10,000 per day during a trial over the weekend – then that would take 40 days for the first million workers.
The Cabinet Office minister simply told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “I hope that we will be able to test as many frontline workers at the earliest possible stage.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/mar/29/uk-coronavirus-live-mass-testing-lockdown-boris-johnson-covid-19-latest
R
‘…then that would take 40 days for the first million workers.’
After which they could start all over again.
So possibly no rent for 6 months, fair enough, but no assistance for landlords who are affected.
The UK NHS has lost control of its staff – they do not know who is infective, convalescent or clean. A Big problem for the UK
There is no debt and deficit disaster.
Deficit spending by the currency issuer is a surplus for the non-government sector. A non-government sector surplus means that in a defined period the non-government sector (domestic and foreign combined) has collectively spent less than it earned. This is not a problem.
What we called the public debt or the national debt is the savings of the non-government sector, held in the form of tradeable bonds called Commonwealth Government Securities. This is not a problem. It is in fact a good thing for the non-government sector to have savings. The government doesn’t have to issue bonds – it could, if it wanted, provide a different savings vehicle (such as term deposits at the central bank). But it isn’t a problem that the savings are in the form of bonds. The federal government services those bonds in the same way that it makes all of its payments: by having the central bank keystroke numbers into accounts. The public debt is not a burden on the government or on taxpayers.
It’s just so easy for Morrison to say the person called Somebody Else will actually do the heavy lifting.
All Canberrans in these groups should call Senator Zed Seselja’s office demanding grocery and medicine deliveries post haste.
CC
To give you an idea what’s possible, Germany is currently performing 500 000 tests/week.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/27/germany-increases-its-covid-19-tests-to-500-000-per-week
At that rate it’ll take a year to get through everyone, 6 months for all the households. But if that’s what can be achieved at this stage of the virus, then what would be possible in a few months from now?
Cud
I can understand why there is a level of anxiety in the community as we are being bombarded with shocking images and figures from around the world.
Italy and the USA did not implement measures to test and control sick travelers so they now have a high number of community transmissions. Australia has done much better – except for the Rubella Princess.
As a result Australia is not seeing large numbers of admissions to EDs of patients with respiratory distress as is the case in USA/Italy. In fact there are very few and they are being tested. If there were a large number of positives wandering the suburbs then we would know by now.
We don’t have 2.5 million test kits, swabs or PPE in Australia. We need to preserve PPE for staff managing sick patients
As Fulvio wondered earlier, I suspect the devil re rental tenancies will be in the detail. What constitutes financial hardship for eg.
I was thinking that the govt is downplaying expectations by continually emphasising 6 months for the restrictions to be in place. I certainly hope that’s the case and we can start to return to normal life in a couple of months.
Boerwar @ #5014 Sunday, March 29th, 2020 – 9:21 pm
The audio books read by Johnathan Tull are like gold. Such enthusiasm in the narration.
It took some time for Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey–Maturin Books to become popular and in that process a reviewer wrote wtte – how he envied people who hadn’t yet read the books – because of the delights that awaited them.
He was right….
DM
Two things.
Firstly there are already thousands of undetected infections in the community.
Secondly this is not a case of we have limited tests. Its a case of how we source/manufacture millions of tests pronto.
NathanA
That’s encouraging news from Germany.
What I want to know is what is the practicalities, mechanics, logistics of scaling test kit production here in Australia, into the millions.
Have there been negotations with test kit makers? Have we been talking about licensing? Have we done estimates of what factory floor space, plant and machinery we need?
I want details.
NathanA:
Most things the Germans do, they do better than most others – look no further than Benz, BMW.
Does anyone understand these new restrictions?
You cannot go out in more than groups of 2, unless it is to go to the hairdressers or to buy a jigsaw puzzle. If you are over 70 you cannot go out at all, even to buy jigsaw puzzles. Or over 50, if you are indigenous. But if you are a school teacher, you can teach a class of up to 10 kids, provided they are all inside and not indigenous. Boot camps are still ok, but you are only allowed one boot each. Unless you arrived on a cruise ship, in which case you are apparently allowed to do anything you flaming well like.
What a shambles 🙁
My searches turn up stuff like this..
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2020/03/27/south-korean-test-kit-makers-swamped-as-coronavirus-cases-explode-in-us-europe
Cud
Australia has 3,980 positive cases with 16 deaths = 0.40%
If we have thousands more positives then the death rate is < 0.2% which is about the same as the normal flu
The article NathanA linked states that Germany is testing 500,000 per week and this is keeping the mortality rate down. Their No of deaths is 198/36,508 positives = 0.54% which is a higher rate than Australia.
cheers
“What a shambles ”
Are people completely bereft of any ability to think? It seems pretty clear – stay home unless you need something. Don’t screw around getting it.
If your want a jigsaw to stop from going crazy, then that’s not a totally unreasonable thing to do.
Schools are selectively now closed except for people who can’t look after them.
Nicholas says:
Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 9:27 pm
It is too soon to talk about the coalition’s debt and deficit disaster.
There is no debt and deficit disaster.
No, but you can print more money than there are goods and services to buy. Modern money theory is not helpful. We are printing money and closing down the economy. There is not alternative but that is not what modern money theory is about.
Because of their ideological blinkers and piecemeal approach, the government is producing a complicated mess of policies which are not only difficult to understand, but difficult to implement.
They lack the capability to implement even simple policy, so the result will be an absolute clusterfuck.
Even if they were to fluke the implementation, there will be so many unintended consequences and policy overlaps that the whole thing is likely to just fall in a heap.
And this article from earlier today – about six weeks too late.
Blobbit @ #5031 Sunday, March 29th, 2020 – 9:47 pm
It seems the government is.
What is becoming plain is that Morrisson will never, ever acknowledge he has made a mistake. A good example is the hairdresser fiasco. No-one in their right minds would regard hairdressing as an “essential” service. Even the hairdressers themselves want to be shut down. But Morrison cocked up, and so the poor bloody hairdressers now have to bear the brunt. Same for “boot camps”. What a shocker. What is a boot camp with one person?
What an intransigent moron we have been saddled with. Just when we really needed leadership, we instead get this gibbering Trumpian idiocy.
DM
There are thousands of undetected infections in the community. Its a long pipeline that goes from infection, to symptoms (if any) to a gradually progressing illness, to serious illness. This can take weeks.
Don’t be lulled into false security by the relatively few deaths we’ve seen so far.
DM
Part of the reason why Germany is doing a reasonable job with regard to mortality rate (the true figure won’t be known until more cases progress) is that earlier detection equals earlier treatment equals better outcomes.
We are simply not testing enough people in Australia. Our testing rules exclude people with covid19 symptoms who do not know who they got infected from. I now know of two people in this category. If one of them dies (she’s not looking good) she won’t even add to the stats – or may do so posthumously.
dave
I agree about Tull. Simply the best.
I have tried to start listening to audio books of the series by other readers but, dammee, it won’t wash.
Mavis @ #5031 Sunday, March 29th, 2020 – 9:41 pm
Those are probably the two worst value cars in the world. Ridiculously overpriced, over complex, hugely expensive to service and repair, and less reliable than Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Honda and many others, as found by objective measurement in many countries. Very good at marketing bullshit, though.
Dandy
LR
The semi-log graphs have been promoted to the top of the page. They are useful for comparisons but misleading for looking at single serieses in isolation.
Looks like even Singapore is still speeding up…
The blitzen have stopped but the rain is now very heavy.
#WeatheronPB.
Oh and DM
The best analysis I’ve currently seen suggests an overall mortality of 0.5-0.8 percent in the general population, rising to 4-5 percent where the health care system collapses and people are left to fend for themselves. Of course, this is distributed towards older people. So someone in my age group is facing roughly a 1 percent chance of dying – if the health care system doesn’t get over-run.
Throwing myself out of a plane with what seemed like a perfectly good parachute is 100-1000 times safer.
And so to bed.
I wish everyone sweet dreams.
Player One:
[‘Does anyone understand these new restrictions?’
I guess they’ll arrest and charge anyone who transgresses. Not that prisons are a vector?
Ha! Oh no, our policies are not “cut and paste” of anyone else …
https://www.brusselstimes.com/all-news/business/101148/hairdressers-angry-at-being-allowed-to-stay-open-social-distancing-health-compensation/
We don’t have 2.5 million test kits, swabs or PPE in Australia…
Why not?
In the absence of testing, the only method available to arrest spread is to implement lockdown. Lockdown is an economic cataclysm. Because the authorities decided they could dispense with testing we will have an economic, social, humanitarian and quite possibly a medical disaster.
The authorities are trying to excuse themselves for the failure to commit to and implement testing. We are all paying the price for this incompetence.
Germany now has 59,000 cases and 481 deaths. On the face of it, that’s a 0.8 percent death rate.
But that’s rubbish analysis. As I said, there is a long pipeline. People get infected. It can take days to get symptoms. Those symptoms might be mild at first. It may take days to progress to what we might consider a “bad flu” and perhaps seek medical attention. Then it takes more time to progress to severe symptoms. And so on. From infection to death it can be several weeks. Not always, but there’s a long tail. Even people who seem to be doing well at first, suddenly go downhill.
Also, even I remarked on how well Germnay has done. A few days ago the deaths were in the tens. Its started to build – just as you would expect given the pipeline involed.
Re DM @10:03.
It normally takes a couple of weeks at least from infection to death. Mortality stats would follow infection rates by about 14 days. The denominator for calculating the mortality rate would be closer to the number of infections a couple of weeks ago.
Modern Monetary Theory is always helpful when considering economic policy because we have a monetary economy and MMT is an accurate description of how monetary systems work.
What you have named as a problem – inflation risk caused by reduced supply – is an important issue that can be evaluated using an MMT framework.
My point is that deficit spending is not inherently inflationary – whether it is inflationary depends on what is happening to the productive capacity of the economy. The government should always evaluate inflation risks. There are intelligent ways to do that, and then there are dumb statements like “debt and deficit disaster”, which is an economically illiterate thing to say and never relevant.
Public debt is not a debt in the ordinary sense of the word. It is really misleading to even use the term public debt or national debt to refer to Commonwealth Government Securities. Ordinarily a debt is a burden – it requires the person who owes the debt to earn income to service the debt. That is obviously not the case with Commonwealth Government Securities because the federal government services those obligations in precisely the same way that it makes all of its payments: by keystroking Australian dollars into existence. The government cannot run out of keystrokes. Therefore CGSs are not a burden on the federal government. There will never be a solvency problem for the federal government in terms of financial commitments that are denominated in its own currency.
Oh dear, Dr Anthony Fauci, a target of the far right
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/technology/coronavirus-fauci-trump-conspiracy-target.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage