VACCINES - A SLOW-ACTING CURE FOR LOCKDOWNS
Well my state of Victoria, Australia, is back into a fourth
lockdown as some little-understood Indian variant of the virus
infected a bloke in hotel quarantine in South Australia before they
left and headed over to Melbourne where it has spread to at least
44 people at the current count (though none less than a few hundred
kilometers away from me), after eighty-something days of no
locally-acquired cases.
Unusually it did actually disrupt a plan for me because I was going
to be helping some family with a garage sale. Though I'm quite
relieved actually because the whole thing was driving me nuts, I
don't know why I let myself get caught up in these things. Well
actually I do, because I've got a whole pile of things to sort out
that I picked for myself last weekend while helping prepare for it,
but still dealing with all the other people involved is a high
price to pay. It's funny really that things can go from last
weekend when hosting a garage sale seemed perfectly reasonable, you
didn't need to wear a mask except on public transport or at the
doctors, and the little bottles of hand sanitiser at the door of
shops were empty and ignored, to at least seven days of not leaving
home except for essential reasons, and wearing a mask everywhere if
you do. Although the idea's hardly new at this point I suppose.
But this snap lockdown idea seemed to be much better executed last
time where they brought it in just as the first few cases were
detected. Going from the media reports, the plan this time seemed
to be that they'd just stick with the contact tracing route because
from the second infection onwards the people infected after that
were all "close contacts". Except they didn't know how that second
person got infected from the one who caught the virus in
quarantine, so on that basis alone the whole concept seemed flawed
to me.
But it's really this quarantine situation that pisses me off. It
must be getting close to a year since experts started saying that
using high-rise inner-city hotels as quarantine facilities for
arrived overseas travellers just wasn't workable. I was already
adding at that point that having the workers there go home or
wherever they want in the city once their shift ends was
ridiculous. The politicians would insist that you just couldn't
expect workers to stay locked up in the same hotel, yet they're
happy to tell EVERYONE IN THE STATE to stay at home because their
weak management of the quarantine has gone wrong again. Actually
the only reason they can't expect the workers to stay locked up is
because, at least a year ago, they were being paid peanuts because
the security company that the government employed to do the job
subcontracted another company that subcontracted another company,
or something like that, so you can imagine they must have been
robbing the government blind just charging them money for nothing.
Then these "gig economy" workers got employed to actually do the
work in the quarantine hotels, between their meal delivery shifts,
which is about the worst arrangement you could possibly imagine.
As for the idea of setting up dedicated quarantine facilities? Oh,
too expensive, and it would take ages by which time we'll have the
vaccine anyway. Gah, for one thing all they needed to do was haul
in a bunch of construction site offices and kit them up with some
basic amenities - they've been getting estimates of between
$150,000 and $200,000 for each of these these little "cabins",
you'd think they were making them out of solid silver or something!
So as a result, even now the state government still can't secure
enough federal funding to go ahead with building a proper
quarantine facility.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/howard-springs-builders-could-get-victorian-village-up-in-four-months-20210217-p573cq.html
What I think this all demonstrates is how completely ineffective
the government really is. Oh they can spell out 22 pages of
restrictions on everyone easy peasy, leaving us to immediately
adapt our lives and businesses to suit. Somehow us Aussies seem to
do a much better job of that than many other countries in world
given that we keep working back to "COVID ZERO" (which, I'll add,
many in the government originally claimed wasn't even going to be
possible after the first big outbreak) for a few months at a time.
But when it comes to things like quarantine that the government
actually has to implement themselves, they're absolutely hopeless.
Also, as hopeless at the state government's been, this latest case
coming over from hotel quarantine in another state must be a clear
demonstration of why quarantine is officially a duty of the federal
government rather than the states and territories. But of course a
large part of all this trouble really just boils down to gutless
politicians passing responsibility at the first opportunity.
And that's all without going into the vaccine rollout, which is
actually the key point of criticism in the media at the moment. For
my purposes it wouldn't really matter if that was a bit slow so
long as they could manage the quarantine, and I've said enough
already without going into it. Nevertheless, I'm eligable as a
volunteer firefighter even though I'm well below the minimum limit
for the general public, so early this month I booked in at the
local doctor's. 3:45PM on the 21st of June, and they don't know
whether they'll have the Pfizer vaccine or the Astra* one that
clots younger people up. To be fair I could drive into the nearest
big city to get to one of their "vaccine hubs". But it's on the
other side of the nearest such city, that I hate driving in, and
apparantly the parking around there is always full (also the only
car park that I actually remember seeing vaguely near there had one
car where all its wheels had been stolen last time I was there). By
the way, current(ish) stats here are 12% of the population with a
first dose of something (mostly Astra-what'sit, which is the only
one being made locally), 2% with a second dose.
So that's my lockdown whinge. I know that compared to the rest of
the world Australia has really been exceptionally lucky with how
this virus keeps failing to get a permanent hold even without a
vaccine. Still, it's that same fact that makes these constant
repeats of quarantine leaks and corresponding lockdowns so
frustrating.
- The Free Thinker
