One of Australia's most senior military leaders has been put in charge of a taskforce set up to tackle fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.

• The taskforce has been created to manage the military's response to the coronavirus 
• Its spread could cast doubt on Australia's participation in large-scale international military exercises 
• Australian troops are due to take place in the world's biggest naval warfare exercise in Hawaii in July

Lieutenant-general John Frewen has been selected to head up the new taskforce, which has been created by Defence to manage the military's response to the virus.

General Frewen is also the deputy director of the Australian Signals Directorate — the arm of Australia's intelligence community that deals with cyber warfare and foreign signals intelligence.

He previously commanded Australia's forces in the Middle East, heading up Australia's operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2017.

The decision to put a three-star general in charge of the new taskforce is a step up from the usual practice of appointing two-star generals to lead disaster or recovery taskforces, such as after the 2011 Queensland floods or in the recent Operation Bushfire Assist.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-13/coronavirus-military-taskforce/12...

Meanwhile the F1 petrol-head contest has been cancelled, we hope... actually no. The petrol-burning and the rubber smelly doughnuts will go ahead WITHOUT SPECTATORS...

Update: the F1 Grand Prix has been cancelled...

It seems really odd and inconsistent, in these scary days of the coronavirus pandemic, that Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has not stepped in and cancelled the Australian Formula One Grand Prix.

And I say that, living within the sound of the revving practice engines at Albert Park.

It prompted this tweet: ‘Look at the crisis in Italy with all sport banned. If coronavirus is so serious and Premier Andrews is talking about closing schools, why doesn’t he cancel the Grand Prix?’

The Premier has publicly warned that “extreme measures” will be needed but he seems reluctant to take them.

Hasn’t he heard the words ‘horse’ and ‘bolted’?

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/coronavirus/2020/03/13/extreme-measures-...

I believe that the thingster has been cancelled... It looks that Hinch is not a fanatic of Andrews, though... And oh... by magic, I had the face of Hinch plastered on a Mad magazine in my collection of useless stuff...

by Pall Thordarson, professor of chemistry at the University of New South Wales, Sydney

When I shared the information above using Twitter, it went viral. I think I have worked out why. Health authorities have been giving us two messages: once you have the virus there are no drugs that can kill it or help you get rid of it. But also, wash your hands to stop the virus spreading. This seems odd. You can’t, even for a million dollars, get a drug for the coronavirus – but your grandmother’s bar of soap kills the virus.

So why does soap work so well on the Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? The short story: because the virus is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. Soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and dies – or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t really alive.

The slightly longer story is that most viruses consist of three key building blocks: ribonucleic acid (RNA), proteins and lipids. A virus-infected cell makes lots of these building blocks, which then spontaneously self-assemble to form the virus. Critically, there are no strong covalent bonds holding these units together, which means you do not necessarily need harsh chemicals to split those units apart. When an infected cell dies, all these new viruses escape and go on to infect other cells. Some end up also in the airways of lungs.

When you cough, or especially when you sneeze, tiny droplets from the airways can fly up to 10 metres. The larger ones are thought to be the main coronavirus carriers and they can go at least two metres.

These tiny droplets end on surfaces and often dry out quickly. But the viruses remain active. Human skin is an ideal surface for a virus. It is “organic” and the proteins and fatty acids in the dead cells on the surface interact with the virus.

When you touch, say, a steel surface with a virus particle on it, it will stick to your skin and hence get transferred on to your hands. If you then touch your face, especially your eyes, nostrils or mouth, you can get infected. And it turns out that most people touch their face once every two to five minutes.

Washing the virus off with water alone might work. But water is not good at competing with the strong, glue-like interactions between the skin and the virus. Water isn’t enough.

Soapy water is totally different. Soap contains fat-like substances known as amphiphiles, some of which are structurally very similar to the lipids in the virus membrane. The soap molecules “compete” with the lipids in the virus membrane. This is more or less how soap also removes normal dirt from the skin.

The soap not only loosens the “glue” between the virus and the skin but also the Velcro-like interactions that hold the proteins, lipids and RNA in the virus together.

Alcohol-based products, which pretty much includes all “disinfectant” products, contain a high-percentage alcohol solution (typically 60-80% ethanol) and kill viruses in a similar fashion. But soap is better because you only need a fairly small amount of soapy water, which, with rubbing, covers your entire hand easily. Whereas you need to literally soak the virus in ethanol for a brief moment, and wipes or rubbing a gel on the hands does not guarantee that you soak every corner of the skin on your hands effectively enough.

So, soap is the best, but do please use alcohol-based sanitiser when soap is not handy or practical.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/12/science-soap-kills...

Does red-ned count?

The Leonisky household spent their $750 in advance, to buy booze... As we're advise to stock up by the Corbett Report... No need to panic though... Six months supply is enough. Toilet paper is a bit harder to find but some of the local shops have not been discovered by the fighting Westies yet...

As I’ve noted in my recent work, many globalist agenda items are up for grabs as the world continues to freak out about the novel coronavirus and Covid-19. So is this the main event? Is the disease much worse than it’s being portrayed? Are reinfections after “recovery” common? And what should we do to prepare. James tackles these questions in depth in this edition of Questions For Corbett.

https://www.corbettreport.com/is-this-the-big-event-questions-for-corbett-056/

“The last 24 hours has been one of the biggest corona news cycles we have been a part of yet,” said Trevor Noah on Thursday night, as New York late-night shows announced an end to studio audiences or a suspension of filming entirely. “And part of that is because it went from a disease affecting anonymous people to affecting the world’s most famous face,” Tom Hanks, who announced on Wednesday that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had tested positive for coronavirus in Australia (they are in isolation and, as of last night, feeling fine).

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, corona got to Tom Hanks, and this man’s already been through so much,” said Noah, riffing on some classic Hanks movies. “After the war he’s been through [Saving Private Ryan] and that time his plane crashed [Sully] and he already had to deal with his dog dying [Turner & Hooch].

“I feel bad for him! I mean, at the same time, he shouldn’t have been letting everyone touch his chocolates – that’s probably how he got it,” Noah said, alluding to one of Hanks’s most famous lines in Forrest Gump.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/mar/13/trevor-noah-tom-hanks-da...

See? We're not the only ones making fun of these tiny beasties... 

By Michael Pascoe

As the Lindt Cafe siege was unfolding in Sydney on December 14, 2014, political leaders were quick to tell the public we had the best police and security agencies to deal with it.

“We have police and security organisations of the utmost professionalism that are ready and able to respond to a whole range of situations and contingencies including this situation that we are now seeing in Sydney,” said Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

New South Wales Premier Mike Baird and federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten chimed in with similar statements.

“I have full confidence in the skill and professionalism of our police and security agencies,” Mr Shorten said.

Mr Baird said: “NSW police are trained to deal with these events.”

And I remember thinking, no, our security agencies are largely untested. NSW police have rarely if ever dealt with anything like this, there’s little reason to think they should be particularly good at it.

Tragically, that proved to be the case.

There’s been a sense of déjà vu with both the COVID-19 health and economic crisis as the current Prime Minister has rushed to tell us there was a plan, that we were ahead of the crisis, that we had the best experts, that we just had to remain Australians, that no country could do better.

It’s that confidence and trust thing. Again.

Such statements further undermine trust when the government is making it up as it goes along.

The reality on the health front is that, like the bushfire crisis, we were not prepared for the pandemic that every expert knew would turn up one of these years.

Oh, there was a plan in a drawer that was taken out and dusted off, but we weren’t prepared.

We don’t have enough respirators.

We don’t have the temperature-screening equipment commonplace in other airports. We’re not capable of large-scale rapid screening. We’re still working on developing a public information program.

The messages have been mixed and at times confusing, not helped by politicians wanting to get in front of the experts who are supposed to be calling the shots.

The political history is that pollies can get a lift in the opinion polls by displaying “leadership” in a crisis.

But when they are muddying (footy/no footy) and inane (“keep being Australians”) and merely sloganeering (“get ahead, stay ahead, keep our heads”), already damaged confidence ebbs.

The reality at this stage is that we would be better off being Taiwanese, Singaporean or Hong Kongers rather than Australians as they are the three places that were prepared and are best dealing with the crisis.

That’s the payoff from having a corporate memory of SARS.

As knowledge of COVID-19 is still evolving, it is understandable that our medical authorities seem to be making it up as they go along to a degree.

Full and frank honesty about our shortcomings though would help.

And then there’s the economic crisis.

Again, we were unprepared.

Policies that should have already been in place had been ignored and consequently the Reserve Bank’s interest rate firepower had been largely used up.

The Prime Minister told us it would be fine, there was “a plan”.

But as time went on, it looked more like there was a plan to develop a plan, a process that took weeks.

Treasury had a 14-year-old study on the economic impact of such a pandemic, a study that indicated very substantial monetary and fiscal stimulus would be required to stave off a severe recession.

But when the ideologically-tinkered-with plan was unveiled last week, it was already inadequate – a plan mainly aimed at the June quarter and politically inspired to deliver three-quarters of the $17.6 billion directly to businesses rather than indirectly to them via consumption.

Consequently, it is taken for granted that last week’s grand plan will only be a first instalment, that the government is continuing to make it up as it goes along, that it has underestimated the size of the task, that it’s started behind and is determined to stay there.

The tourism industry in this country has been smashed, the international side killed, the domestic deeply wounded.

Large parts of the hospitality industry are already sinking, some sunk.

There’s an element of understanding that halting sporting events will hurt but unnoticed so far is that the business events industry, estimated to generate some $30 billion a year in economic activity, has been frozen.

The arts and live music industries are similarly imploding.

As more companies advise staff to work from home, watch the pain for city coffee shops and cafes trying to make the rent with fewer customers.

Hospitality and entertainment, in all their forms, are major employers of workers easily let go.

And still to really land is the supply side of the crisis.

An unimportant example: Phone companies have been hit by an iPhone shortage.

Not so unimportant: Construction materials not landing in our ports will hurt a building industry that is already down.

Yes, Blind Freddy can see the federal government will be dragged, belatedly, into offering more support if we are to avoid unemployment hitting recessionary levels.

But when specifically asked on the weekend if there would need to be more stimulus spending in the May budget, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg predictably went into a talking points trance about last week’s effort, ending up with only: “We will obviously watch how it is implemented and the effect that it has throughout the community.”

Hardly confidence building while the RBA not only announced it was doing what it had to do to maintain liquidity but also foreshadowed there would be much more coming.

“The bank will announce further policy measures to support the Australian economy on Thursday,” Governor Lowe said.

There’s the RBA doing what the government won’t, trying to instil confidence that it is on the job and will continue to do what needs to be done.

The central bankers are making it up as they go along, too.

Like our health authorities and federal government, they haven’t faced a crisis like this pandemic before, but they are signalling they’re aware of just how serious it is and how uncompromised the effort will have to be.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/03/16/michael-pascoe-confi...

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