Getting there

After watching me put on my shoes Jan suggested I avoid sitting on the hard , cold and wet concrete kerbing by making a small box to sit on.  It’s lovely to acknowledge she is interesting in my health and wants me to avoid another bout of hemorrhoids!  She then went on to state the box could also be used to store all her gardening equipment

The gardening box has been completed

 

I’m just waiting for the paint to dry.

If you hate painting then it’s best to do all of it at the same time.  My new fishing tackle box has also been painted.

Don’t query the colour of paint.  It’s the colour of “what was left over in the garage”

The more challenging job has been the fishing line jig.  I’m using a variation on Ken’s jig.  This involved gluing six buttons back to back in pairs.  I used Araldite and let it set overnight.

The tricky part was drilling a large hole through the middle of the paired buttons.  First I drilled a pilot hole and then used a larger bit taking it very slowly to avoid splitting or cracking the buttons.

Finally I used more Araldite to secure the buttons to the tops of the knitting needles.

Once the adhesive has set the needles will be mounted on the board.

I’ll need to tie a few test knots in the fishing line in order to calculate the required length of the knitting needles as this will determine the tension in the fishing line during the knot construction process.

Melbourne, Victoria has gone into 7 day COVID-19 lockdown.  A COVID-19 infected returnee from India (where they had gone to attend a wedding) went into hotel isolation in Adelaide, South Australia.  Cross contamination occurred inside the hotel infecting another guest who then went to Melbourne.  This has become something of a “super-spreader” incident resulting in the lockdown.  Other States have or are, closing their borders to Victoria.

This has resulted in long queues of people attempting to get vaccinated.  A reversal of the vaccine hesitancy to peak demand.  One person left the following comment under the media photo of the queues.

“Look at all the dumb people waiting for their kill shot”

There is something amusing about the comments or antics of a dumb person trying to be clever.

Then there was the case of the english actor Sean Ward who posted on several social media sites

“Morning guys, this is just your daily reminder that COVID-19 has an effective survival rate of 99.96% if you are aged 0 to 60 with or without an underlying health condition,” Ward says in the clip. “The vaccine has 95. The Johnson & Johnson has 81. So you’re taking the medicine that is putting you more at risk from dying to COVID and you don’t see the problem here.” <link>

Which just goes to show Sean may be good at acting, but is a D- when it comes to logic or maths.

It’s hard to establish the mortality rate of contracting COVID-19 because much of the world doesn’t have a good public health system where deaths go undiagnosed or unreported.  However available data suggests the mortality rate is between 0.4 and 19.7% <John Hopkins University>. 

Before deciding whether to have the AZ vaccine I did some number crunching

In Fortress Australia there have been 30480 recorded cases of COVID in Australia and 910 fatalities

That is a current mortality rate of 2.99% of those infected

It also represents a mortality rate of 0.00359% of the total population.

AZ will protect 80% of those vaccinated.  If everyone was vaccinated the mortality rate would be 0.0007177%.

Contrast that with the annual road toll percentile of 0.004657%

To state it more simply

30480 Australians caught COVID and 910 died

If the 30480 had been vaccinated then statistically 6096 would have contracted COVID and only 182 died.

During the same period 710 people died of the flu and there were 1181 road fatalities.

Of course the above statistics are calculated during “Fortress Australia”  when the borders open the figures will exponentially increase. 

I’m getting in early and went and had my AZ injection five weeks ago.