This serves as an example of a reflective journal.
ARTICLE#1
Experts confident Australia will have enough ventilators to meet
coronavirus demand
Author: Christopher Knaus
Website title: The Guardian
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/mar/31/expertsconfident-australia-will-have-enough-ventilators-to-meet-coronavirus-demand
Summary:
COVID19 is currently taking over the world and it seems like there is no slowing
down. This article states that Australia will have enough ventilators to meet the
current coronavirus demand. The manufacturing Growth Centre has mentioned
that their company is currently working with the government to boost ventilator
numbers ahead the pandemic’s peak. The article talks about on how the
government has been working aggressively to prevent any shortfall of ventilator
numbers, ramping up domestic production, obtaining resources from other
countries and converting existing equipment in preparation. It was mentioned
that Australia’s strategy on ventilators had four elements; activate the reserves,
purchase from overseas, purchase existing domestic manufacturers, activate
additional manufacturers. However, the AMGC mentioned that the number of
available ventilators will be higher than the necessity. It was also mentioned that
the only challenge would be ensuring that the ventilators would be used to
support the population especially in the rural areas.
Reflection
This article is a beautiful example of supply and demand. Supply and demand is
an economic model of price determination in a market. This ties up with the
lectures we have discussed in the past week. We discussed about consumer
behaviour and the demand curve. The epitome of this article shows that there
was a change in demand. Due to the rapid increase of people being affected by
the COVID19, the demand for ventilators increased, therefore the supply of
ventilators increased.
This article, however, does not talk about the price of the ventilators. As we
have discussed, the law of demand is the quantity of the goods is inversely
related to the price. The main argument in this article is in regards to the
number of ventilators available in Australia. The reason why I found this article
interesting is that they mentioned that the supply meets or exceed the demand
of ventilators. However, I think that we can never really tell if the number of
ventilators is enough. Another topic from class can be discussed. If Australia
runs out of ventilators, will they be willing to pay any amount for the resources?
In this case, Australia can be considered to be the consumer of ventilators to
countries who produce ventilators. We can also confirm from the article that the
competition for ventilators is currently booming.
As per below curve, this roughly shows the shift for the demand and supply for
ventilators are.