No Vaccine or anti-viral yet, but ... by Lee Vandervis

 Medical science has come a long way in the 100 years since the Spanish flu, as many have said.
In my view better hygiene, control of symptoms and understanding how to slow viral spread will ensure that relatively few will die from Covid-19 in NZ because the Arden Government have wisely followed the best Taiwanese containment model.

Not so Africa and many other countries. There is no cure or vaccine yet, and a vaccine lead-time will be long.
The price of containment in NZ is stalling our economy, which will have severe personal limiting effects, unemployment misery, and long-term economic contraction.

I apologise to those offended by the scary view of my previous post which I wrote in reaction to people claiming that Covid-19 is just another flu and that it will be business as usual after the 4 week lock-down.

I believe that we are in for years of economic contraction because major industries like Tourism have stopped, and because the printing of even more money as in the 2008 bail-out spree is unsustainable. Locally, we need to alter our spending priorities now, focusing on what is really necessary.

I am using lock-down time to reassess my personal priorities and to rethink how we might optimise social positives in a contracted economy. We now have lots of technology to build our individual social capital - to share info, skills and support.

A major world positive is the current greening of the planet, allowing much more food to be grown. Happy gardening if you have that option...

It's not Flu. Experience of having coronavirus, by Shiraz Maher

This was posted in a series of tweets on twitter.

Shiraz Maher  @ShirazMaher

Mar 28th 2020,

I've been debating about whether to 'go public' on having coronavirus - which I kind of did inadvertently this morning. So, now I may as well share my experience(s) with you in order to help those who are worried about it or who are thinking they might have it. Here goes...  

 

I was taking this thing pretty seriously from an early stage because of advice from my good friend @amhitchens, who rightly identified the coming crisis. So I put my house in lockdown, I closed @ICSR_Centre early, and I started taking precautions  

 

But you need to be constantly vigilant with coronavirus. All it takes is one careless moment, one unthinking touch of your face, accidentally touching a contaminated surface once and suddenly, boom, you've got it.  

 

I'm 38 and have no underlying health conditions. I figured if I got it, I'd shake it. Here's how things have played out. Firstly, it's not the flu. Whoever originally said that, did everyone a great disservice. This thing is not the flu. It's a nasty, horrible, illness.  

 

I started having symptoms about two weeks ago. The fever was mild and went very quickly. Is it Covid-19? Who knows, but I've shaken it quickly. Great. Then my lungs started packing up and my chest got very tight. This happened around 15-16 March. 

 

The cough was dry and unlike anything I've ever had before. It was much more extreme and pronounced than a dry cough you might have during a bout of the flu. It feels like there's something deeply lodged within your lungs, that they're (violently) trying to eject.  

 

Of course, there's nothing to actually eject. The resulting cough is dusty, dry and painful. Much more scary is that you're unsure of when you'll stop coughing. You have no control over it. There were times I was worried I'd start vomiting because the coughing was so severe  

 

When you finally stop, it's a relief - but now you're in a new phase altogether. You're fighting to draw air into your lungs but your chest is tight and, frankly, your lungs are in distress. They're not functioning the way they should.  

 

Your head is also pounding because of the violent coughing. I suffered terrible headaches after these coughing fits. The evening of Wednesday 18th was the worst day for me. I fought for breath for about 3-4 hours. It was horrific.  

 

I recorded my symptoms and sent it to doctors (my friends). "Classic Covid" came the reply. I kept monitoring it and, frankly, staying awake was a struggle. I went to bed. My breathing remained severely impaired for another 2 days, but I was managing it all from home.  

 

By Friday, I thought I'd got through the worst of it and things were looking good. Coronavirus is particularly cruel. Recovery is not linear. On Saturday night I started to feel distinctly unwell again. I decided to take my blood pressure because I have a home monitor...  

 

Anything over 180/120 is classified as 'hypertensive crisis' (basically, heart attack/stroke territory). Without revealing what mine was, lets just say I was well, well in excess of this (again, I don't have an underlying issue). This was easily the most terrifying moment.  

 

I called my doctor friends and told them. "Time to call 999" they said - so I did. It took more than 15 minutes to speak with a representative; that's how overwhelmed the emergency services are. I told them my BP and that I have coronavirus.  

 

Ultimately they decided they couldn't respond to my call. I am not criticising the London ambulance service. They are doing superb work under incredible, unprecedented circumstances. I'm telling you this part of the story to underscore two things...  

 

The first is that you should only call them in an absolute emergency. It's not a diagnostic service. The more unnecessary calls, the longer the delay in them answering becomes. Secondly, be prepared to take decisive action for yourself because they might not be able to help  

 

So I called my doctor friends again and started to take actions to lower my blood pressure naturally, at home. I spent the next 48 hours in bed and, only after this time, did my blood pressure return to anything vaguely resembling 'normal' (it was still high, but acceptable).  

 

Now we're into the start of this week. Symptoms have slowly evolved into a less severe cough and my chest being less tight (although these get worse in the evenings). But I have lots of new symptoms: crazy abdominal pains and headaches. The lethargy has persisted throughout.  

Today we're approaching the end of 2+ weeks since I first developed symptoms and about 11-12 days since they became particularly acute. For the first time, I feel like I'm starting to beat it but I'm nowhere near feeling 100%.  

 

Coronavirus appears to have a completely different trajectory in different people. I can't spot a pattern. Although I'm only speaking publicly about it now, I've been whatsapping with lots of friends/colleagues who've also had it.  

 

Some are shaking it off relatively easily. Others are suffering very badly. The most difficult part of this is the extent to which it takes hold within your lungs. There's just no way to tell what will happen at the start. You need to watch this symptom if it develops. 

 

So that's my coronavirus story. It's a completely mad, crazy illness. It had made me feel more intensely ill than I've ever been in my life. On the Wednesday & Saturday of last week, I was genuinely fearful of what could happen if those symptoms continued to escalate. 

 

I didn't want to tweet about my experience until I was more comfortable in my own assessment that I'm through the worst of it. And I'm sharing this with you now so that you can really think about the way this thing is hitting people.  

 

Do you really need to go out right now? Is social distancing really that hard? Is it too much of an effort to wash your hands repeatedly, and to wash them properly, with soap?  

 

I've lost several days of my life to this illness. Many, many other people will lose their lives to it. This virus continues to spread everywhere and you - literally, you - can help stop it with the most basic of efforts. Wash your hands. Stay at home. Do it now. 

 

Possible rates freeze - who's for, who's against

Monday, 30 March 2020

Decisions loom on possible rates freeze, deferrals

By Daisy Hudson

A rates freeze may be on the cards to ease the financial burden on Dunedin ratepayers, as the economic impacts of Covid-19 continue to bite. But while some Dunedin city councillors appear relatively united on that front, decisions on whether to borrow millions of dollars to continue with capital projects, or defer the big-ticket items, appear more contentious.

Councillor Lee Vandervis prepared three motions for the latest council meeting, including one calling for a proposed 6.5% rates increase to be scrapped.... He also wanted to suspend penalties on the non-payment of rates for a year, and allow people to defer rates for a year.

Non-essential council projects should be deferred for 12 months, but infrastructure projects, especially drainage, should continue to keep local contracting businesses going, he said.

He criticised Mayor Aaron Hawkins for being set on continuing with the "ideological, extraordinarily wasteful" pedestrianisation of George St.

Yesterday, Mr Hawkins said he, too, wanted a rates freeze.
Rather than deferring projects, he wanted to borrow the money instead. ... 
"This way, we can do both."

He had asked council staff to prepare information for councillors about that option for deliberations in May.
He was against the idea of deferring major capital projects, such as the centre city and tertiary precinct projects.
Big projects were funded over several years, so deferring by one year would not make a huge difference, he said. ... The council had taken measures to reduce spending in some areas, such as voluntary salary cuts for senior managers and deferring staffing appointments.


For Cr Andrew Whiley, the key was for councillors to have good information in front of them before making any decisions. ...

"I would support the debt being increased," he said.
"We have to invest in the community, and probably the one thing I’ve learned in the past six-and-a-half years in council is residents are very frustrated that not enough money has been invested in their communities."

 


Cr Rachel Elder said a rates freeze should be looked at, and she wanted councillors to consider the annual plan and individual projects again.
That was because the context under which it was drafted had completely changed, she said.
"I believe we need to have a good, long look at it, and consider a freeze, and figure out what’s important and what’s not so important."

Vandervis : The 4-week lock-down is just the first stage.

 

Don’t hold any hope that Covid-19 will be over in a short period of time.

by Lee Vandervis

The 4-week lock-down is just the first stage.

Ex Wikipedia -

“The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic,^[2] was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. Lasting from January 1918 to December 1920, it infected 500 million people—about a quarter of the world's population at the time.^[1] The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million^[3] to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest epidemics in human history.”

Two years is also the Covid–19 estimate from the prestigious Rupert Koch institute. Yesterday’s Economist reports that “the Robert Koch Institute, a German government health agency, in saying that, in extremis, tough restrictions may need to remain in place until a vaccine can be made, tested and put into use—a period it sees as lasting up to two years.”

Today’s STAR front page highlights economic impacts but only scratches the surface of immediate recession effects and suggests people must prioritise spending on accommodation, food and power.

I suggest talking to any old people or grandparents who have had direct experience of privation in WW2, to get an idea of how to build your own supportive social network, because both local and central governments will be unable to help much other than printing money and imposing martial law. Slowing the spread of Covid-19 will help Health Support services cope, but there is no stopping Covid-19, even if a super-vaccine is invented tomorrow.

The label ‘tulip muncher’ stems from widespread starvation in Holland in WW2 and the eating of stored tulip bulbs to stay alive. “The war bulbs were old and dry and did not taste like fresh tulips. A fresh tulip bulb has a sweet, milky flavour that is actually not very bad. The tulip bulbs that were eaten during the war had a very bitter and dry taste instead.”

What got my forbearers through WW2 was a good network of friends and acquaintances that they could trust to do certain things and barter a range of skills and resources.

My advice is to look beyond what money may currently buy, since current currency values will change, and look to building your social capital, your connections with people that you can trust and barter with. Decide what you really need, and how you can help those around you with their needs at the same time. It is never too late to build social capital.

Do this on-line, on the phone, or over the fence, keeping the 2 meter distance at all times.
The economic ‘reset’ that was delayed by printing money in 2008 can no longer be delayed, and those responsible can now blame collapse on the virus.

The negativity of this post reflects the negativity of our current world, but suggests positive changes everyone can make to lessen the impacts. Gardening, reading to increase your gardening and other skills, and getting to know your neighbours and friends better to learn how we can all help each other.

Lee Vandervis | 27th Mar 2020 at 5:55 pm |

Cr Vandervis advocating ways to ease COVID-19 side-effects in Dunedin

Sidelined and silenced by Dave Cull then by Cull's handpicked Mayoral successor Aaron Hawkins, Cr Vandervis - who had by far the largest number of first-choice votes for mayor, by the way - uses social media.

Voters are able to see despite the silencing machine he is not dozing in a comfy Council chair. From comments I have seen online they draw their own conclusions, such as who in City Hall is a marshmallow chainsaw and who isn't.

From: Lee Vandervis
Date: Friday, 20 March 2020 at 9:39 AM
To: Sue Bidrose
Subject: 3 x Notices of motion 

Dear Sue, 

To help reassure our Dunedin citizens I believe we need to move with urgency to confirm the following recommendations to help stem the tide of personal fears, business failures, unemployment, and financial defaults that are now inevitable.

To help ease Coved-19 effects, please include the following 3 Notices of motion in the full Council agenda of 31/03/2020: 

1 – that Council cancel Rates Non-payment Penalties [currently 10%] for the next 12 months to give our citizens an opportunity to defer rates expenses if hardship is claimed.

2 – that Council defer non-essential DCC projects for 12 months but continue with infrastructure projects, especially drainage, to keep local contracting businesses going.

3 – That Council reprioritise the Annual Plan budget: change to ‘Zero Rates Increase’ this year and to ‘Cover Rates Deferment for struggling families and businesses’, to be afforded by deferring non-essential projects including: George st surface treatments, University precinct surface treatments, and Waterfront development.

 Regards,

Cr. Lee Vandervis

[Electronic scanned signature attached]

CBD wreckage is suburb's opportunity

Assault by urban planning and the outbreak of viral car-phobia in city hall is bad news for CBD business owners. Further out, hopefully out of planner range, local businesses are seeing opportunities.

 https://www.facebook.com/caversham

Andy Langford shared a post.

March 4 at 6:22 PM

Beat the #Octagon woes

Dunedin water quality - deferred spending has shocking cost now

Retired engineer Murray Petrie knows a thing or 2. 

This article appeared before the last local body elections. One way and another, largely by dumping experienced permanent employees as a cost-saving measure then hiring consultants who naturally lack knowledge of what happened in the past the city developed institutional amnesia. 

Every now and then an "old timer" pops up with reminders. 
 

*What worked, what didn't, 

any perverse incentives that worked against best decisions, 

any unintended consequences.

Whisky has returned to the Speight’s Brewery

Saturday, 7 March 2020

Brewers and distillers rekindle their history in Dunedin

By Jacob McSweeny

The New Zealand Whisky Co expects to produce some of its product out of the Speight’s Brewery in Dunedin from about June this year. PHOTO: PETER MCINTOSH

 

Whisky has returned to the Speight’s Brewery. The New Zealand Whisky Collection and Lion NZ have come to an agreement to allow the Oamaru distillers to produce some of its whisky out of the Speight’s Brewery in Dunedin.
NZ Whisky Collection founder Greg Ramsey said the company had been planning to increase production since buying whisky stocks from the old Seagram’s distillery in 2010.
"It’s always been our intention to relaunch and redistribute those whiskies and then start that production again........
https://www.odt.co.nz/business/local-business/brewers-and-distillers-rekindle-their-history-dunedin


A Facebook comment:

Lindsay Dow In an earlier life I had to spend about 3 months measuring up that brick building from foundations to roof then draw up the plans. Previous plans had been lost.
I also got a trip to DB bottling plant in Auckland so that the Speight bottling plant could be built across Rattray Street.
I drew up the engineers plans for the firm of architects I worked for at that time - Fraser Oakley and Pinfold.

"Underpants Gnomes" Political Economy

Art Carden

 It's fair bet that a lot of the policy proposals that come into your field of vision are based on a view of the world more appropriate to the Underpants Gnomes from South Park than serious and reasoned discussion.


A bit of background is in order. The boys from South Park are due to give a presentation to voters in which they explain why the town should prevent a giant corporation ("Harbucks") from opening next to Tweek's Coffee, a local establishment. They encounter a group of gnomes who have been stealing underpants as part of a big plan, broken down into three phases:

 

Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit

When the gnomes are pressed on the question mark and asked how, exactly, they get from underpants to profits, they don't have a good answer.
It works the same way with a lot of policy discussions.  Consider virtually any problem that professional hand-wringers in the media and the academy worry about. The argument usually proceeds as follows:

Phase 1: Pass a law.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: virtue and/or prosperity.

Economics is the art of seeing what happens in Phase 2 and determining whether the proposed intervention will lead to the desired outcome. As Henry Hazlitt wrote in his book Economics in One Lesson (which I discuss here), "(t)he art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

Or, as Thomas Sowell subtitled his book Applied Economics, economics involves “thinking beyond stage one” (or Phase 1, in this case).  In other words, the art of economics is the art of seeing what happens in Phase 2 and whether this actually leads to Phase 3......

.......Or consider a hobby horse of my friends on the left: universal health care. The very phrase is misleading because it assumes that passing a “make it so” mandate will lead to “universal health care.” Or, to modify the way Steven Horwitz and I put it last year, the implicit model borrows from the Underpants Gnomes:

Phase 1: Pass a law decreeing that everyone gets free health care.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Everyone has all the health care they need.

This certainly isn’t to say that American health care isn’t really, really messed up or that it doesn't need fixing. It is and it does. However, we have to be very careful to understand first what happens in Phase 2 and second whether this will lead to everyone having all the health care they need...........

https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2011/07/14/underpants-gnomes-political-economy/#32fa89ab4e2e

Urban planners welcome tumbleweeds onto deserted streets

Tuesday, 3 March 2020

DCC vision for inner city: fewer residential car parks

By Brent Melville

Parking rules have been adapted for the needs of Dunedin heritage developers. PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON 

 

Dunedin city planners envisage a future with fewer cars in the inner city.

Under the Dunedin City Council’s reviewed second generation district plan (2GP), residential developers across the CBD and other parts of the city are under no obligation to provide parking for tenants or apartment owners, as long as the building offers five residential units or fewer.

The more lenient parking and other building requirements were part of the rezoning of the city’s inner city and warehouse precinct area, aimed at converting warehouse and other space into mixed-use residential and commercial developments, council planning and environment committee chairman David Benson-Pope said.....

........Under the 2GP, developers converting or upgrading older buildings in the city centre, harbourside, the southern part of Princes St, and Smith St and York Pl zones also had the right to remove existing parking spaces in favour of ensuring a positive streetscape.

Comments on ODT site following this article: 

 

Timmy Tue, 03/03/2020 - 9:53am #

Like most people I'm more than happy to shop on-line instead of wasting my time and money on parking in CBD. Way to go DCC! Great job stimulating economic growth in the city!
 

Since Left Tue, 03/03/2020 - 9:54am #

In tandem with this DCC where is the plan for light rail, servicing the shops in the city, unless you have that you are totally wrong. It needs to stop

RAY Tue, 03/03/2020 - 10:02am #

We are very aware the DCC has taken this attitude. But it does not remove the love of our cars and we will continue to use them.

Vandervis: Dunedin doesn’t have a Democracy, we have a Bureaucracy.

Dunedin doesn’t have

 

 a Democracy,

 

we have a

 

 Bureaucracy. 

 

There is much more

 to the 6.5%

budgeted rates rise:

 

by Lee Vandervis

In our 'Democracy' local government staff are supposed to provide balanced information on which elected DCC representatives then make decisions. DCC Staff agendas and reports can run to several centimeters of fine print, but the relevant information is too often missing.

This year's rates debate was preceded by a special non-public 'Rates Workshop', a meeting in which staff report on and explain the rating system and answer Councillors' questions.

I asked our presenting staff expert to justify the DCC Commercial Rating Differential, the multiplier by which we charge local businesses many times more rates that we charge to our residents for similar services. Our paperwork showed that the residential differential was 1 [the standard rates charge] and that we charge Dunedin businesses a commercial differential of 2.45 times the residential rate, more than twice as much.

I asked why we charged Businesses so heavily and was told that it was because we always had in the past [even more in past years] and that the 2.45 differential was similar to other New Zealand cities. I suggested that the real reason we charged businesses so heavily was the bad reason that we don't have many business owners and that they are a minority voting block we can safely ignore.

I asked what the Commercial Rating Differentials were for our nearest business competitors Invercargill and Christchurch, but the senior number-cruncher who had just said our Commercial Differential was 'similar to other NZ cities' claimed not to know about Invercargill or Christchurch.  I asked the number-cruncher to forward these competing differentials to us before the following Annual Plan Rates debate meeting, which he promised to do, but then didn't.

In the following public Annual Plan rates debate I again had to ask what the rates differentials of our competitors was and the number-cruncher admitted that Christchurch's differential was only 1.66 times the residential standard, and that Invercargill's Commercial multiplier was 1 - the same as for residential!

But too late, the rubber stamps were out and the Mayor/Cr. Benson-Pope were claiming that poor Dunedin house-owners whose property values had increased by 10s of thousands this year would be hit hardest [by our unjustifiable 6.5% to maintain existing services] and further rates rorting by way of reducing fixed rates charges was needed, further increasing the disproportional burden on those Commercial rate payers that still persist in Dunedin.

So that is how it was done: with Mayoral approval staff write themselves an increase in staff costs of 7.4% on top of last year's 8% staff increase [4xthe rate of inflation] and then claim that rates have to go up 6.5% to 'maintain existing services'. The Mayor gets an unprecedented new 1.5 staff members to help him strategize, and staff blame reduced Landfill profits and 'higher expectations' for having to again gouge the ratepayer, especially our commercial ratepayers. The ODT accurately reported the unanswered questions...

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/dcc/framing-spending-criticised?fbclid=IwAR340HCTW5vZIvHFKMa6B9Ul2ao8zDgb1fjkV5_TjHSS20G0WDBQvWhZH_4

Lee Vandervis | 2nd Mar 2020 at 10:32 pm

Hey big spender / DCC big money woes / "Only"

I'd have thought of major belt-tightening in the circs. Just as well I never went into local body politics eh. The Octagon has managed just fine all these years (let's not think about the large black penis, temporary thank goodness, that was there for some important rugby-related thing, I've forgotten what) so postponing wouldn't hurt. Sure, they'll say "Only $..." because DCC's wanna-haves are always Only, but if you put all the Onlies together you get Sum Of Significance.

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/four-selected-octagon-public-artwork

Monday, 2 March 2020

1.32 pm

DCC companies lose $882k and debt climbs

 Debt across DCC has climbed from $647 million at the end of 2018 to $739 million at the end of last year.

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/dcc-companies-lose-882k-and-debt-climbs 

Harbour dishrack, possibly real inspiration for design

I've always thought "cockle shells" was a retrofit explanation designed to impress councillors eager to spend up large on Visions - infrastructure can wait, eh.

Maggie McCormick that moment i thought they were bench of dishes

• 
  

  Mike Cooper Kinda like this
  
   
  
  According to the sales pitch its design is relevant to Dunedin's Harbour because it references cockles.
  Cockles?
  Really?
  Mussels possibly, old bleached shells. That's the best fit for the shapes in the design. Or tuatua, toheroa, pipi. But cockles - pfooey! Pull the other one.
  
  
  
  

  

Fake flowers, real money - "vibrant and unique"

 

Friday, 28 February 2020

Blossoming project

By Molly Houseman

Giant flowers sprang up in Municipal Lane this week, brightening the walkway to the Octagon Experience in Dunedin. DCC city services general manager Sandy Graham said the flowers in the heritage lane would help showcase the importance of city lanes as vital pedestrian links......

....."Rather than using normal wayfinder signage, it was agreed that something vibrant and unique would be ideal."
The artist behind the colourful display was Theme Productions and feedback from the public had been positive.
The installation had cost $34,000 and would be returned to the artist in April.

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/blossoming-project