Ozgrade3

Your comments are the first bit of sense I have read on this topic for weeks. If only our fearless leaders would stop reading any form of media hype and apply a little commonsense and logic to the situation!

Check out what’s happening in Italy. My partner and I are most likely going to get stood down without pay, but there are bigger things going on in the world right now.

Ozgrade3 as you don't appear to be getting it, I have done the maths for you 3% of 25m people is 750,000 people in Australia

I think a few posters need to look outside of Australia and see what's happening globally. As the previous poster said, look what's happening in Italy.

Not the same thing.

Coronavirus has a 4% mortality rate. Very contagious, hidden, and spreading exponentially at an alarming phenomenal rate.

Sure only a small proportion of the population actually have the virus, but soon it could be many more of us. Do we just let it spread so that most of us get the virus?

Are road deaths increasing at such an exponential rate as the coronavirus?

Being on the road....no doubt less than 0.1%, mortality counting every vehicle, bicycle, pedestrian, motorcycle or even people on the footpath.

Road deaths can be controlled most of the time as long as you follow the rules.

These 25 road deaths, many might be due to speeding, wreckless driving, stupidity or driving under the influence and can easily be avoided.

Death from the coronavirus is not as easy to avoid.

Sure there might only 6 deaths now but soon it could be hundreds if not thousands and well exceed the road toll.

Just take a look at Italy.

Oh look, the "im not a management troll" has returned to nobly defend the companys pathetic management strategy, just in time too.

"either way the cash leaves the company" - Which is the very problem being pointed out. It isn't mandatory that this money leaves the company. Apple has AUD$300 billion dollars in pure cash reserves. They have saved for a rainy day. But you idiots, with your insatiable desire to boost your vested share options, have engaged in every dodgy strategy and tactic to artificially inflate the share price so as to bring about a financial windfall for yourselves. $100 million dollars for one single person for the love of God. Indefensible.

I worry for my fellow front line workers, but I certainly don't worry about you lot. Hopefully a knife cuts deeply through the executive management at mainline and they too can apply at Woolies.

You sit there and demand the employees bail you out of yet another crisis that could have been if not averted, then significantly mitigated, and like the payfreeze, when the employees have done their bit, you'll have your beak back in the trough in no time, paying yourselves stupid amounts of money and spending your spare time sitting on pprune lecturing us all that we should be doing the job for minimum wage whilst as always, avoiding anything you can't answer as is your now well established MO.

I could deal with your bull**** when it was situation normal, but in this time of great stress and hardship for friends and colleagues, nobody here has any time for your Angel tripe.

Piss off.

nicely put -)

, ,

"Flu season is hitting its stride right now in the US. So far, the CDC has estimated (based on weekly influenza surveillance data) that at least 12,000 people have died from influenza between Oct. 1, 2019 through Feb. 1, 2020, and the number of deaths may be as high as 30,000. " Apparently this happens every year, in all countries, thousands upon thousands of people die from common flu. So why didn't we have travel bans, border closures and mass panic with these numbers in 2019,2018,2017................etc etc etc.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-...lated/11406980

https://www.health.com/condition/col...flu-every-year

^ What he said.

Regular flu seasons have a death rate of about 0.1%. Coronavirus is currently sitting at 4%, and is expected to average about 3.4%.

The last pandemic that had a comparable death rate was the Spanish Flu in 1918, which is estimated to have killed between 17m and 100m people, when the world's population was a fraction of what it is now. That's what governments are trying to prevent.

I'm not loving sitting on my hands at the moment, and am worried about my family's financial position once my leave runs out, and my job if this drags on. But the amount of completely counterfactual denialism in this thread, and the thought that I might be counting on some of you to process information and make decisions in the cockpit with me, actually worries me more.

What he said !

Don’t you know pilots are experts in every aspect of life and every profession.

Yeah, normally I'd say that's a fair point.

But pretty much every article and news story on the pandemic has this kind of information in it. You really have to go out of your way to miss it - and it's pretty clear that some people here are actively tracking down articles and sources to validate their opinions about the flu or car deaths being worse than coronavirus.

I'm not worried about people just voicing an opinion about things they're not expert in, I'm worried about people actively ignoring authoritative information they disagree with and hunting down obscure sources that validate their factually incorrect views. In a profession like ours, where data and authoritative information is so important, that worries me.

What a stupid, stupid comment.

‘Stand-down’ is LWOP.
An employee who takes their leave as assigned/awarded each year will have near zero leave balance, they will be advanced 4 weeks leave and after that they are un-paid. They have told us it is a minimum stand-down of 8 weeks and likely much longer. So from week 4 that employee is on LWOP indefinitely.

If a company makes you redundant then they have to pay you for your notice period and then pay out all your leave entitlements. Qantas are providing us NO notice period, drip feeding us our entitlements and when exhausted you are paid nothing. Not much different from being made redundant except a better chance of being re-hired at the end of it.

My leave has value. Long haul pilots have a contract provision (in ordinary times) to sell leave back to the company and it is worth a considerable amount of money. Now that leave and its value is being used to prop-up the company. Shareholders are not contributing one cent to the company’s survival, the government assistance package is equivalent to about 1-2 weeks of employee wages. If Qantas survives this crisis it is entirely on the back of its stood down work force.

Sadly I expect that when we get through this and return to boom times there will be no reward for the employees who saved the airline but there will be dividends, buy-backs and executive bonuses to make your eyes water.

i don’t know where to start so mindlessly imbecilic is the comment.

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=aGLDt_1584669664

Good points. Humans are irrational so applying logic won’t help.

In fact it’s the same irrational behavior that has built this economic house of cards that will also bring it down. The virus is simply the first card in the deck to fall. The house will collapse because it was unsustainable anyway. The current irrational reaction is driven by the same impulses that drove many businesses and individuals to their current unsustainable debt levels.

Unfortunately logic has never been a big factor in some of the directions society takes.

Problem is SecretAngel, there is limited factual verifiable information. We just don't have the information to do the gold standard "Double Blinded Crossover Randomised Controlled Trials" Most of it is aggregated anecdotal evidence and case studies. We only really have the SARS data, even then, most of it is animal studies as SARS was totally eradicated from the human population. We are dealing with an enormous amount of uncertainty, and unfortunately, we all have to wait for more incoming information. In many ways, we actually dodged a very large bullet with SARS. The one positive was the lack of asymptomatic transmission.

There is a good book by the WHO providing excellent background information, SARS: How a Global Epidemic Was Stopped (direct link to WHO download). It doesn't take long into the book to see the timeline of events unfolding almost identically to that of COVID-19, substitute Wuhan for Guangdong). The one advantage we have now from SARS is the knowledge to use of PPE and quarantine by healthcare workers up front. A large number of transmissions (the book documents 250 infections from a single case alone in a Hong Kong hospital).

This disease, COVID-19 will probably have half the CFR compared to SARS, however, its transmission is both symptomatic & asymptomatic, and we therefore we will have many more cases. The final number of fatalities globally will likely be many orders of magnitude higher than SARS for this reason. In a perfect world, with access to a modern fully functioning health care system, the CFR is likely to be about 10x the flu. If there is a breakdown in the system (case study Italy) that number could be 30 to 50x the flu. The fatalities are likely to be in all age categories >20+, although skewed to the higher brackets and those with major underlying health conditions.

Because the entire global population is naive to this disease, there are no natural firebreaks to slow the transmission, unlike the flu. There are no other control options with the exception of essentially stopping all human to human contact until a vaccine or other treatment agent is discovered. The Washington post has done a nice visual simulation of the various strategies: Why Outbreaks Like Coronavirus Spread Exponentially and How to Flatten the Curve.

Twitcher/paragraph

Spot on, the dollar is toast.

“So we have wiped put our airline industry, decimated our economy......for 6 deaths.”

No, this is largely an economic collapse that was going to happen anyway. The virus is just the pin that pricked the massive economic bubble.

The blame lies with a massively over leveraged and corrupt banking and finance sector along with ponzi style fractional reserve banking (now zero here in the USA) and central bankers willing to sweep the problems under the carpet all in the name of fake growth that assist the political class.

Oh, and an ignorant electorate that paid no attention as we got lots of cheap goodies.

“Should we not close our borders permanently to keep hiv/aids out?”

According to Andrew Grulich, head of the HIV Epidemiology and Prevention Program at the Kirby Institute, the number of HIV deaths in Australia is so low that “ it was not even recorded.”

Conversely, C19 will kill possibly up to 200,000 Australians. There is a significant difference.

Same can be said for:

“….why didn't we have travel bans, border closures and mass panic with these numbers….”

12,000 is not the same as 1,500,000.

I am astonished that people still think this is a media beat up.

Please do not under estimate covid-19, it is not a flu, and certainly don't be confusing recovered with cured, they are very different things. The truth is there is just so much we don't know about this virus "yet". If it comes to pass that it is only dormant not dead then this will make the spanish flu 100 years ago look insignificant.

Most of that is sensible but people should take note of the fact that Italy, even with it's borders closed has a contiguous border with Switzerland, France, Slovenia and Austria, i.e. it is directly connected to Europe. With borders closed, we are not connected to anything... we have thousands of miles of ocean between us and the next populated land mass.

In addition, the mortality rate is 4% of the KNOWN infections. It is admitted by quite a few experts that there may be many people infected that will show little or no symptoms so we will never know and that might reduce the mortality rate to 1% or lower. Yes, that's still high but there's every chance that this is not going to be as monumental as everyone thinks. Enough measures have been put in place to limit its spread, it is hard not to look at the current situation without thinking there might just be a tiny modicum of hysteria involved here.

Qantas won't go broke, Virgin won't go broke because the government will either bail them out or provide support and in the case of Qantas, may even purchase equity so they can realise a return when things return to normal. They've already given 100bn to the banks, does anyone seriously think that even an LNP government would balk at a few billion to purchase 51% of Qantas... in fact, there's an argument that now is a perfect time to buy 75% as when things recover, which they will, they could (if they wanted to), retain 51% and sell 24% for more than what they would pay right now for the whole 75%. Virgin is a little more challenging as it has the overwhelming amount of its issued stock tied up with big investors (only about 10% being available so the government might have to offer some sort of tax concessions to it's cornerstone investors to contribute capital.

Let's hope it doesn't get to that.