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Vaccinated people are less likely to be infected, less likely to pass it on, less likely to end up in hospital, less likely to die. Same logic: What is the point of changing my oil, if engines can still fail? In fact, statistics show that most engines that fail had had their oil changed.

True... but for other diseases we get to 95% so we can expect to go a lot further yet. The important number is the percentage of people unvaccinated, so the gains go up quickly as more people are vaccinated. Going from 70 to 85 percent vaccination halves the number of unvaccinated people, from 30% to 15%. That is a big difference. From 85% to 95% would cut the number again by 2/3, to 1/6 of the 70% rate.

The FOI emails stuff that have been revealed in the last few days have been damning. The government delayed meeting with Pfizer for months while Victoria was in lockdown. Morrison is calling the people saying that they should have met with them "hindsight hereos" but seriously, how hard is it to figure out that it would be a good idea to stay up to date with information from the vaccine manufacturers in the middle of a global pandemic?

That's what happens when you vaccinate the most at risk people first. The vaccines are not a guarantee, they just make it far less likely you will die. Last year Vic peaked at 700 cases/day. Deaths were averaging about 20/day. NSW now has far more cases, with a sustained rate of over 1400 cases/day yet the number of deaths is far lower. That is the effect of vaccinations, particularly in the vulnerable populations (elderly etc.)

Only 1 reason for that: not enough people vaccinated in Australia. And 2 things are holding back vaccination: 1) People avoiding or delaying vaccination 2) The federal government delayed ordering Pfizer vaccines and didn't order enough. We are probably 6-8 months behind other countries as a result.

Sorry to disappoint the people on this site, but I don't see that at all.

Do you think there might be a link between people with this attitude, and the thousands of pilots not flying because interstate travel between Melbourne/Sydney/other states is shut down? Or the pilots employed in the tourist industry that is shut down? Did pilots have it better earlier this year when things were open, or now? Maybe you need to think about who you are talking to when you say you don't give a f* about other people.

Do you think so? What training do pilots get in critical thinking? I would have said pilots are trained NOT to think. To follow procedures without question, and question those who don't follow procedures. It makes for safer aviation (when you think, sometimes you get things wrong, which can be fatal in aviation) but it doesn't result in a high level of critical thinking. The exception seems to be e.g. test pilots, who are trained to analyze situations, and pilots with outside interests that broaden their thinking.

It's rubbish because it assumes vaccines work 100%, and there is no penalty as a society when someone gets sick. Vaccines have benefits at an individual and at a population level. At an individual level: - They provide 90+% protection against severe disease and death At a population level - If enough people are vaccinated they reduce the probability of infection across the whole population. This means less infection overall, and less likelihood of new variants which might be more transmissible or vaccine resistant. - Vaccines are not equally good for everyone. Many people are immune deficient for one reason or another (disease, or even just getting old) so rely on other people getting vaccinated so they are less likely to be infected. Many of these people have been living almost as hermits for 20 months now, they know if they catch this disease they are likely to die. If too many people do not get vaccinated: - More people get infected, which means new variants which might evade the vaccination are more likely. - More people get seriously ill, which puts more strain on the health care workers. In NSW government predictions are that the health care system will be overwhelmed in October. - COVID patients in ICU take places needed for other people. Heart attacks, strokes, accidents, cancer - all need ICU places that will be occupied by COVID patients. I know a guy who ended up in ICU last year and almost died after a dental procedure. If the places were occupied by COVID patients maybe he would be dead. So you can claim that not being vaccinated only affects yourself, but that is rubbish.

How would you know?

I'm double vaccinated so not too worried about myself. It's not fear, it's consideration for other people in society who will be affected: doctors and nurses who will be slammed by the case load, many ending up with PTSD children who can't get vaccinated yet people who need the ICU in normal times - heart attacks, stroke, cancer patients, accident victims, surgery patients These are the reasons I do whatever I can to avoid being part of the spread. Maybe you don't give a f* about any of these people, but that's not bravery, and doing what you can to help the situation is not fear.

Don't worry, I have read plenty of studies. But what is also useful is hearing interpretations by experts, I recommend: Andy Slavitt - Former Biden White House Sr Advisor for COVID Response Dena Grayson - Ebola expert, has been commenting on COVID since the beginning. Said that COVID was scarier than Ebola back before we had even heard of it, which proved prescient to say the least. Peter Doherty - Australian Nobel Prize winning Immunologist Peter Collignon - Infectious Diseases Physician at the ANU. Often wrong in his opinions (seems a little too keen to have more cases), but posts useful links. You can hear from them all directly on Twitter. Very up to date information, and reliable sources.

In which case you will have no problem getting permission. But PPR means you must get permission. Maybe the strip is soft and unserviceable, maybe it has a fence across it at the moment, maybe there are agreements with the neighbors about the type of aircraft that will use it, maybe visitors are just not welcome today. Talk to a few people with private strips. You will hear of people annoying the neighbors by making multiple low passes practicing a precautionary search, people landing on soft grass strips and making enormous furrows or tearing up newly seeded crops or grass - enough to understand why people make their strip PPR, or more commonly refuse to mark the strip at all.

It's important to note that the study is on effectiveness against symptomatic disease. The vaccines are much better at protecting against severe disease and death.

Why do pilots get so upset over the concept that you can't land on private property without permission? Is this an attitude that appears when you get your license, or is it the type of people who are drawn to flying?

You sure did! A search turns up that document on various anti-vax websites. At best it seems to be quoting from very early studies on the vaccine, before the large scale trials. You can look at the vaxed vs unvaxed results in many different countries to see that the vaccines make an amazing difference. Even in Australia, you can compare NSW this year to Victoria last year. Last year we had hundreds of elderly people dying. This year, most elderly are vaccinated and the number of deaths is greatly reduced compared to last year. A larger percentage of people being hospitalized and dying are young, simply because the vaccinated elderly are not. The vaccination seems to reduce your risk approximately equivalent to being 30 years younger, i.e. a vaccinated 80 year old has about the same risk as an unvaccinated 50 year old, a vaccinated 50 year old has about the same risk as an unvaccinated 20 year old. The risk goes up very steeply with age. If you are older and unvaccinated you are still at great risk - probably greater than ever due to the infectiousness of Delta.

If it's an emergency you can land wherever you need to, including Sydney Airport. If it's the type of emergency where you wouldn't land at Sydney if that was the closest airport, maybe it's not really an emergency?

2 & 3 are the hardest. Maybe you live without contact with other people (no shops, doctor visits, deliveries etc.) although I doubt it. We have seen all through the pandemic, it is the people you don't expect to have the disease that spread it. It spreads more easily than the common cold. If you have ever had a cold, you can expect to catch COVID-19. I have been working pretty hard on 2 and 3 since March 2020. I still managed to catch a cold last year (and had the COVID test). No idea who I got it from. But it proves that despite my vigilance, I could have caught COVID. In contrast, vaccines are easy.

What does personal responsibility look like: Get vaccinated as soon as a vaccine is available to you Don't catch the disease If you catch it, don't spread it 2 and 3 means stay home and don't have contact with people outside your household. If contact is unavoidable e.g. shopping, wear a mask, properly - well fitting and covering from above your nose to below your chin. If all that sounds too hard, maybe we need to do more at the collective level. That was the point of getting to zero - we can all get away with not doing these things if there is no COVID circulating.

PPR is pretty explicitly saying that permission is denied unless it has been specifically granted. But why do pilots think they should be able to land at a private airfield without permission? Would you walk down a random person's driveway into their backyard? It's the same thing. It's not the right thing to do - even if you are just looking for somewhere to go.

More antibodies... but they don't know whether it makes any difference to protection. What they do know is none of the vaccines give any protection until you receive them. The important thing is to get any of the available vaccines.

What would you do? Say F U to all the health care workers, who are already overstretched?

QLD and WA are shutting their borders because it keeps their economy going. People don't appreciate how normal things have been in Australia compared to other countries that haven't controlled COVID as well. Shutting borders has allowed hospitality, sports, mining, retail, manufacturing, even tourism within the states to continue relatively normally. All the people complaining about shutdowns in Vic and NSW are about to get a reality check when they discover how much worse things are with the virus circulating. Businesses shut down with no end in sight, instead of for a few weeks at a time. I am in Vic, and now the virus seems to have gotten away I expect we will be under restrictions for 3-4 months. We don't realize how fortunate we have been. Last year, I was wondering how many friends and family would end up dying from this disease. So far (touch wood) it is no-one. Talk to people with friends and family overseas to get a picture of what it has been like there. I know someone in New York who through their friends and acquaintances knows of 20 people who died. The dead don't complain, and the thousands of people whose lives have been saved rarely know who they are, so they don't appreciate it either. But it could be you or any member of your family. If you want to blame someone for the current problems, blame the federal government who were offered 40 million doses of Pfizer for delivery last January, but rejected it as too expensive. Things would be very different if we had higher levels of vaccination.

Seems unlikely to happen because a) health care workers don't work like that and b) vaccinated people are much less likely to require ventilation. They are not going to leave ventilators unused while unvaccinated people die, just in case someone who has been vaccinated needs one.

I'm still interested to see who is saying that, because it doesn't seem to correspond with reality. It seems most likely to come from the NSW or federal government, who are frantically spinning trying to convince people that this is all OK - but that's not what the experts are saying, or what you can figure out for yourself if you compare the situation here to overseas. Gladys said a week or 2 back "We thought Australia was different." Not if you had any sense. We are not different, but Libs in NSW still seem to be operating on the assumption that we are.