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